3 ms·

Dinosaurs and Google. 'nuff said.

nostrademons 17y ago
I thought of Google when I read the article, when I got to the line about large animals being made possible by the development of the circulatory system. It seems like there has to be a qualitative change to deal with scale. Moore's Law has multiplied computing power by a factor of roughly a million over 30 years. In most of the industry, that capacity has been eaten up by productivity enhancements. We have CPU cycles to burn, so we burn them in interpreted languages like Python and Ruby and IDEs like Eclipse, for some marginal increase in productivity. Google chose to burn them by processing larger and larger data sets, instead. And there're certain emergent phenomena that occur as the data set gets bigger. Almost nothing in search or ads would work with the data available at desktop-scale. The interesting thing is that by pushing on data size instead of productivity, Google's had to find other ways to scale productivity and the number of engineers in the organization. I've mentioned some of the public ones in a previous comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101443); there're some others that I don't think I can talk about. But I find this whole notion of where you allocate resources fascinating. There's this conventional wisdom of always putting them into developer productivity, but Google's succeeded because they sometimes (judiciously) choose to move them into processing more data and find other ways to work around the productivity hit that entails.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I've continued to be perplexed by the lack of other companies copying Google's revolutionary style of data center operations. It makes such a huge difference in Google's capabilities (and their bottom line), yet data center operations outside of Google haven't changed much in a decade.
  - mtw 17y ago
    it's because Google's data center are geared for one single purpose: crunching massive amounts of data. They can get away with just one hardware platform, fine-tweak it, then design the racks. Most other companies (99% of the web companies) other there have different needs. For instance, Facebook needs one hardware platform fine-tweaked for the cache, another one for pics and video storage, another one for chat, plus mysql etc. It's the same for your regular web2.0 company, they want different kinds of servers, so they will ask data centers specific hardware and different server formats. It's therefore very hard, if not impossible, for a data center to copy Google's design, since they have to host so many kind of hardware.
    - InclinedPlane 17y ago
      Even so there are many companies that own their own data centers outright. It's intriguing to me that in an industry where a successful company can't exist for longer than a week without being cloned 8-ways from Sunday Google has managed to maintain its uniqueness over the course of a decade. In some ways that's a testament to Google's excellence, but in other ways it's a testament to the very dysfunctional nature of the state of the industry. It's interesting how potent, and how rare, cross-domain expertise is in this industry. Google deftly coordinates data center operations (including server hardware) and software mastery, giving it a unique and enormous edge over its competitors. Apple weaves together expertise in device hardware, software development, usability, and aesthetics beyond anything its competitors can achieve, giving them significant market dominance and enormous brand prestige. Amazon combines competent large scale web-application hosting and development with highly efficient warehouse and fulfillment operations. It seems as though in this industry melding together expertise in related but seemingly far separated areas is a good recipe for attaining a near unassailable advantage over your competition.
      - mtw 17y ago
        good point. I think it has more to do with the company's core values than the company's expertise. Most data centers have expertise in data centers operations, but they don't know where to focus. Google is a master in optimization, so they took it to the next level, even in data centers. Apple values design and user experience that it sets the focus on future product development etc.
    - zaphar 17y ago
      Google stores video and pics as well. They also use caching. I think your analogy is incorrect in this case.
      - mtw 17y ago
        Google does massively distributed computing, whereas Facebook doesn't have the same priorities. But I agree, the analogy is not the best
roc 17y ago
While that bit may seem flippant, I also wonder about dinosaurs and scaling. They don't seem to have half the supposed skeletal size that they 'should' according to simple scaling.
- Mz 17y ago
  My understanding is that the earth's atmosphere used to be far denser and the oxygen concentration far higher. This is what allowed giant roaches and the like to exist at one time. Dinosaurs evolved in a different world than we live in. I'm not real up on this information -- it's my sons who are really interested in it, not me -- but this detail sticks with me because I used to really be bothered by giant spiders in movies. One day, while watching something on TV that talked about dinosaurs and other historical critters, they showed a very large spider and said "If this spider were alive today...(it would the size of a house cat or hunting house cats or something)" and I said "If it were alive today, it would be on life support." My sons cracked up. And I no longer get freaked by giant movie spiders. They can't exist in earth's current atmosphere, which is why they don't exist on earth today.

I thought of Google when I read the article, when I got to the line about large animals being made possible by the development of the circulatory system. It seems like there has to be a qualitative change to deal with scale. Moore's Law has multiplied computing power by a factor of roughly a million over 30 years. In most of the industry, that capacity has been eaten up by productivity enhancements. We have CPU cycles to burn, so we burn them in interpreted languages like Python and Ruby and IDEs like Eclipse, for some marginal increase in productivity. Google chose to burn them by processing larger and larger data sets, instead. And there're certain emergent phenomena that occur as the data set gets bigger. Almost nothing in search or ads would work with the data available at desktop-scale. The interesting thing is that by pushing on data size instead of productivity, Google's had to find other ways to scale productivity and the number of engineers in the organization. I've mentioned some of the public ones in a previous comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101443); there're some others that I don't think I can talk about. But I find this whole notion of where you allocate resources fascinating. There's this conventional wisdom of always putting them into developer productivity, but Google's succeeded because they sometimes (judiciously) choose to move them into processing more data and find other ways to work around the productivity hit that entails.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
I've continued to be perplexed by the lack of other companies copying Google's revolutionary style of data center operations. It makes such a huge difference in Google's capabilities (and their bottom line), yet data center operations outside of Google haven't changed much in a decade.
- mtw 17y ago
  it's because Google's data center are geared for one single purpose: crunching massive amounts of data. They can get away with just one hardware platform, fine-tweak it, then design the racks. Most other companies (99% of the web companies) other there have different needs. For instance, Facebook needs one hardware platform fine-tweaked for the cache, another one for pics and video storage, another one for chat, plus mysql etc. It's the same for your regular web2.0 company, they want different kinds of servers, so they will ask data centers specific hardware and different server formats. It's therefore very hard, if not impossible, for a data center to copy Google's design, since they have to host so many kind of hardware.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    Even so there are many companies that own their own data centers outright. It's intriguing to me that in an industry where a successful company can't exist for longer than a week without being cloned 8-ways from Sunday Google has managed to maintain its uniqueness over the course of a decade. In some ways that's a testament to Google's excellence, but in other ways it's a testament to the very dysfunctional nature of the state of the industry. It's interesting how potent, and how rare, cross-domain expertise is in this industry. Google deftly coordinates data center operations (including server hardware) and software mastery, giving it a unique and enormous edge over its competitors. Apple weaves together expertise in device hardware, software development, usability, and aesthetics beyond anything its competitors can achieve, giving them significant market dominance and enormous brand prestige. Amazon combines competent large scale web-application hosting and development with highly efficient warehouse and fulfillment operations. It seems as though in this industry melding together expertise in related but seemingly far separated areas is a good recipe for attaining a near unassailable advantage over your competition.
    - mtw 17y ago
      good point. I think it has more to do with the company's core values than the company's expertise. Most data centers have expertise in data centers operations, but they don't know where to focus. Google is a master in optimization, so they took it to the next level, even in data centers. Apple values design and user experience that it sets the focus on future product development etc.
  - zaphar 17y ago
    Google stores video and pics as well. They also use caching. I think your analogy is incorrect in this case.
    - mtw 17y ago
      Google does massively distributed computing, whereas Facebook doesn't have the same priorities. But I agree, the analogy is not the best

roc 17y ago

While that bit may seem flippant, I also wonder about dinosaurs and scaling. They don't seem to have half the supposed skeletal size that they 'should' according to simple scaling.

Mz 17y ago
My understanding is that the earth's atmosphere used to be far denser and the oxygen concentration far higher. This is what allowed giant roaches and the like to exist at one time. Dinosaurs evolved in a different world than we live in. I'm not real up on this information -- it's my sons who are really interested in it, not me -- but this detail sticks with me because I used to really be bothered by giant spiders in movies. One day, while watching something on TV that talked about dinosaurs and other historical critters, they showed a very large spider and said "If this spider were alive today...(it would the size of a house cat or hunting house cats or something)" and I said "If it were alive today, it would be on life support." My sons cracked up. And I no longer get freaked by giant movie spiders. They can't exist in earth's current atmosphere, which is why they don't exist on earth today.