
How Google’s Jeff Dean became the Chuck Norris of the Internet - luu
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/doers/2013/01/jeff_dean_facts_how_a_google_programmer_became_the_chuck_norris_of_the_internet.html
======
jandrewrogers
Google (and by extension Jeff Dean) have made their greatest contribution in
that they successfully popularized niche computer science with decent
implementations.

I think a point that is often lost is that Google invents very little computer
science; they take obscure computer science that in most cases has already
been implemented somewhere and do a very good, high visibility implementation
of that computer science. They may apply it to a somewhat different problem
domain but the solution already existed for the taking. Core high-scale
computer science domains like HPC traditionally don't publish shiny geek-
friendly know-how but there are very deep existing pools of expertise out
there.

Google has excelled at branding concepts like MapReduce, Spanner, etc that
already existed in real systems for many years. Google has made people aware
of these technologies but it is a stretch to say they "invented" them in any
material sense beyond publicizing their own implementations. I think they
receive a little too much credit in many cases for invention when their
primary contribution has been popularization.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
This is a wonderfully-executed middlebrow dismissal. I hope pg adds it to his
detection corpus
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217))

~~~
Wilya
Yeah. Let's teach the algorithm to hellban people who disagree that Google is
awesome.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I have lots of issues with Google,
but dismissing what they've done because it is insufficiently new is just
silly.

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karterk
The work that Jeff Dean and colleagues at Google are doing is pretty mind
blowing [1]. Sometimes, I feel that you need Google's scale of problems to be
forced to push technology that way.

The joke at my company is that everytime Google publishes about one of their
technology on a paper, they already have a next-gen version of it running
internally.

[1]: [http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/08/learning-
meani...](http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/08/learning-meaning-
behind-words.html)

~~~
igrigorik
That's not a joke - it's true... The joke part of it is in: there are two
types of systems at Google, the ones that are deprecated, and the ones that
are not yet ready for production.

~~~
btilly
That's not a joke either. Inside of Google you can ask anyone whether a
particular API is the version that's deprecated or not ready yet, and they
will always know which one it is.

Try it.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Occasionally there're ones that're both; The worst case is when they're both,
and also key parts of production infrastructure.

~~~
jamesaguilar
On the plus side, when the next thing fails to materialize for long enough, we
do occasionally undeprecate the last thing.

------
kentonv
<Troy McClure>Hi, I'm Kenton Varda. You may remember me as the creator of
Cap'n Proto and the LAN-party-optimized house.

Back in 2007, I created "Jeff Dean Facts" as a Google-internal April Fool's
joke. I wasn't funny enough to write any of the jokes myself, but I created
the app that let people submit "facts", and was blown away by the results.

If you like primary sources, check out my write-up from when I first talked
publicly about it in January 2012:

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/118187272963262049674/posts/TSDh...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/118187272963262049674/posts/TSDhe5CvaFe)

Don't miss the second comment, which has a long list of top-rated "facts".

------
swah
I never found out if Yegge was talking about Jeff Dean here, or maybe Urs
Holze:

 _At first it 's entirely non-obvious who's responsible for Google's culture
of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design
reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit
testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know.
The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations
use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-
shoddy work.

But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google's engineering
staff, over time a pattern emerges: there's one superheroic dude who's keeping
us all in line._

And why couldn't it be that way? Those people exist when companies start, you
probably met a couple of them.

~~~
nostrademons
I don't know who Yegge meant, but my read on that passage (as a Googler) is
that he was talking about Craig Silverstein. Several of those items are
definitely attributable to Craig.

~~~
dnr
Agreed. Craig never exerted much technical influence (beyond the early years,
I assume), but was always a strong cultural force in the areas of engineering
quality, code reviews, readability, consistency, etc.

------
realrocker
What! I thought Chuck Norris was the Chuck Norris of the Internet. Did Chuck
Norris Facts existed before they were on the Internet? I think not. At most
Chuck Norris is the Jeff Dean of the Internet.

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phaus
The original Chuck Norris jokes were sarcastic. No one thought he was much of
a bad-ass, but 90% of the people who stumble across Internet memes are too
stupid to understand them.

That being said, Chuck Norris is a hell of a nice guy and I wish him the best,
even if he isn't a bad-ass.

~~~
FrankBooth
> That being said, Chuck Norris is a hell of a nice guy and I wish him the
> best, even if he isn't a bad-ass.

You must be joking.

[http://www.wnd.com/author/cnorris/](http://www.wnd.com/author/cnorris/)

~~~
phaus
What has he done that you don't like? I'm not going to read through a dozen or
so articles and try to guess which one you have a problem with. Going from the
titles I see a lot of stuff about cancer charities, and a few articles about
religion in public schools.

If its the latter, he lost that battle, just like all the other Christians.

I'm just going off of his personality. He makes a lot of USO appearances, and
my best friend actually got to hang out with him and his family a few times as
a teenager when Chuck rented out the bed and breakfast he worked at.

He seems pretty down to earth and nice, that doesn't mean that he doesn't hold
ideas that I disagree with.

~~~
SwellJoe
He promotes hatred of and inequality for homosexuals, for a start.

[http://www.williamkwolfrum.com/2009/07/12/behind-chuck-
norri...](http://www.williamkwolfrum.com/2009/07/12/behind-chuck-norris-beard-
is-another-fist-and-behind-that-fist-is-a-homophobic-prick/)

[http://www.queerty.com/chuck-norris-wants-to-keep-the-boy-
sc...](http://www.queerty.com/chuck-norris-wants-to-keep-the-boy-scouts-ban-
on-gay-people-20120627/)

We've reached a point in history where homophobia is at roughly the same point
as racism was in the 50s and 60s. Plenty of people still espouse those hateful
views...but, it's long past time for society at large to stop accepting that
kind of thing as merely a "difference of opinion". Hatred of black folks is
not viewed as a "difference of opinion"...it is viewed as what it is: Hatred
and bigotry.

~~~
phaus
Thanks for the links. Specific complaints are much easier to digest than
trying to read his entire website.

I agree that homophobia is rapidly reaching the same status as racism. It's a
shame that Chuck doesn't.

------
JimmyL
Also Bruce Schneier -
[http://www.schneierfacts.com/](http://www.schneierfacts.com/)

~~~
fbe
Also, Jon Skeet (specific to Stack Overflow) -
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-
facts](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts)

~~~
dtjohnnymonkey
Also, Doug McIlroy:
[http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sinclair/doug/](http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sinclair/doug/)

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ravich2_7183
_If Dean has a superhuman power, then, it’s not the ability to do things
perfectly in an instant. It’s the power to prioritize and optimize and deal in
orders of magnitude. Put another way, it’s the power to recognize an
opportunity to do something pretty well in far less time than it would take to
do it perfectly._

The take away message is that __Worse is Better __!

------
austinz
I'm quite surprised we don't have Elon Musk facts yet.

~~~
revelation
Theres [http://shitelonsays.com/](http://shitelonsays.com/)

~~~
jbellis
Also, [https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk](https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk)

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bitskits
For other folks who are annoyed the story is on 2 pages, here's the single
page link:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/doers/2013/01/jeff_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/doers/2013/01/jeff_dean_facts_how_a_google_programmer_became_the_chuck_norris_of_the_internet.single.html)

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devx
They should hire him in the Android team.

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Foxboron
"But if his fake accomplishments are hard to understand without a real
computer-science background..." I got no formal education, i still understood
most of the puns.

Woop, feeling a little proud atm :D

~~~
coreyja
There is a very big difference between having no formal education and having a
background in something. Especially in computer science where so many people
are self taught.

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13hours
Forget Chuck Norris; he's Miles Dyson!

