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Steve Yegge, "What Would You Do With Your Own Google?" - OSCON Data 2011

O'Reilly

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Steve Yegge, software engineer at Google
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

66K views15 years ago1 recommendation

Careers and interviewsDistributed systemsThe tech industryScaling and large-scale architectureData engineering and warehouses

Steve Yegge challenges developers to use massive data and computing power to solve hard real-world problems like biology instead of building simple apps.

It's 2021. You have a petabyte drive on your keychain, your startup company leases bulk cloud storage by the exabyte, and you have a million cores for data crunching. You even can have your own copy of the entire world's public semantic data. What do you do with it? If you're not sure yet, I've got plenty of ideas for you. About Steve Yegge (Google): Steve Yegge is a software engineer with over twenty years of industry experience. He has worked on everything from embedded systems to distributed systems to e-commerce, online games and much more. Steve has been at Google for the past six years, where he has worked on Ads and Music systems, and most recently on a project to organize and serve all the world's compiler output. Prior to joining Google, Steve was a Senior Engineering Manager at Amazon.com, where he spent nearly seven years leading teams in Developer Tools and Customer Service systems. Steve graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. in Computer Science. Don't miss an upload! Subscribe! goo.gl/szEauh Stay Connected to O'Reilly Media by Email - goo.gl/YZSWbO Follow O'Reilly Media: plus.google.com/+oreillymedia facebook.com/OReilly twitter.com/OReillyMedia

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Shared for its inspiring call to tackle hard scientific problems and for the dramatic moment where Yegge seemingly quits his project.

shoelesson Hacker News • Recommends

On “BioCurious, a hackerspace for bio now open to public”

I recommend watching Steve Yegge's excellent presentation at O'Reilly's OSCON Data. He points out a number of books in the video, but in general this is an excellent talk about preparing to solve hard problems in bio. link to this video
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conorhon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech [OSCON Data 2011]”

At around 14:10 in the speech - link to this video Also I'm not sure if he quit Google, or if he just quit the project he was working on.
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espeedon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Steve's Google Platform rant”

Is Steve Yegge Google's new secret recruiter agent? :) A few weeks ago he publicly quit his "cat pictures" project ( link to this video ) to pursue more noble a quest in data mining. I loved what he said, and at first glance this seemed like a jab at the newly released Google+. But it's actually a bigger knock on Facebook since the "cat pictures" app is Facebook's primary gig, and so far it's only a side gig at Google. I wonder how many FB peeps started to wonder if there really is any meaning in cat pictures. Now it's Amazon -- "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right", except for 3 things, one being "platforms." But his Amazon jabs are not as subtle as the cat pictures one -- "…
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readmeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Machine Learning for Hackers”

I think these books are not really meant to be a PhD education but more of a tutorial introduction to the field. What O'Reilly is doing right now is really important. As Steve Yegge said, they are "trying to provoke a culture change." Would-be brogrammers will find these books, read them, and graduate from cat-picture projects into more sophisticated applications that can solve real computer science problems. It matters less whether the readers of these books actually get a comprehensive understanding of the theoretical knowledge behind them, then it does that they enrich readers and spread the desire to learn and attain true understanding of the field. Steve Yegge reference: link to this video
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cletuson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Instagram”

Congratulations on the investment. The return is nothing short of spectacular. It's a truly excellent example of execution and timing . But the point that keeps resurfacing in my mind is SpaceX. SpaceX, from nothing, created a low-earth orbit delivery system that is revolutionizing satellite launches and (soon) the cost of getting men into space... for less than the price that a bunch of people can send photos to each other with cheesy filters 1. It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on humanity (and no this isn't hyperbole) through SpaceX (and maybe even Tesla). And it didn't even require, relate to or is connected with some bullshit soci…
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cletuson Hacker News • Mentions

On “All the oxygen trapped in a bubble”

I've called the kneejerk "bubble" reactions "boring" 1 and I stand by that. That doesn't mean I disagree (or agree for that matter). It just means that banal perjoratives with nothing to back them up are boring . To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble. A bubble in my mind is a period of rapid growth in valuations followed by a massive devaluation on such a scale that it hinders investment and innovation. The subprime collapse was a bubble. Many people were left underwater on their mortgages. Building in many places stopped for years. This has a knock-on effect on jobs, related industries and so on. That's a bubble. The dotcom collapse was also a bubble. B…
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eshvkon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Instagram Effect: Causing Silicon Valley to fund the wrong companies?”

I think there is this (from my limited experience rather naive) belief that if a bunch of smart computer people get together, they can solve problems that have flummoxed biologists for long. This is something pervasive which afflicts even the smartest ones (See Steve Yegge's talk link to this video on how The Data Mining needs to be used more to solve problems in biology). Having spent some time in grad school foolishly believing that all biology needed was a sprinkle of math and a generous dollop of python skills, I think the problem is that in Computer Science we have problems that are sometimes insanely hard but due to the several layers of abstraction, are inherently rather deterministic and much l…
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jsolsonon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What happened to Steve Yegge after 'quitting'”

That may have been some people's expectation, but as his public G+ page says0, he still works at Google. Sergey called his piece a 'night-time aid'1. Also Steve's take on it 2. That said, the OP was talking about his OSCON talk (check out from ~minute 13 onward): link to this video 0: link 1: link 2: link
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zipfleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “How a Relationship Dies on Facebook”

I closed my fb account two or three years ago, at a point when I was really virulently anti-fb. I still haven't re-opened it, but I've mellowed a bit--not that I approve of it, really--it's a disgusting panopticon at best--but it's at least sufficiently obvious that it's hard for me to feel like anyone hangs out there without understanding what the basic dynamic is. Now, articles like this don't make me feel bad for the kids who 'have to' use facebook (not that they don't; it sucks being ostracized, we all know). Really, they make me remember this talk by Steve Yegge1 about how stupid it is that so many smart people spend their time working on cat pictures. 1 link to this video
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jared314on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Where Have All the Geniuses Gone? ”

> But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems. I remember this opinion also surfacing with the Steve Yegge OSCON 2011 presentation1. In which he complained about Google, and all the hard working people there, focusing on social media instead of hard problems. There was a good discussion as to why these problems are not in the forefront. 1 link to this video Subsequent discussion: link link link
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jrs235on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)”

Like cat picture projects. Interesting how people think the OP story is real and many people mistakeningly think Steve Yegge quit Google (he just quit the project). link link to this video
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betolinkon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The alarming threat of Zika virus”

This is getting serious here in southern Mexico, we just had a chikungunya outbreak a year ago and now this. These situations remind me of a talk given at Oscon Data by Steve Yegge about working on the things that matter0. Virus are complex and modelling molecular biology requires CS expertise, it's kind of sad that we're normally discussing the new JS frameworks instead of working on the hard(and important)problems. 0 link to this video
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u/Puddy1in r/compsci • Mentions

On “Mathematics for Computer Science PDF Book”

Reminds me of a recent talk I saw literally just an hour ago, Steve Yegge at OSCON. One of Yegge's points is that in order to solve "hard problems" - that is problems that are huge gamechangers for society like mapping the human genome, we, as developers need to understand mathematics, statistics and domain knowledge. This PDF doesn't look like it covers it all, but it's definitely a good start in the right direction.
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