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The Jeff Dean Facts

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558 pointsravenical184 comments

Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them.

It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was coming up.

At the time, there was a team working on an experimental web app hosting platform code named Prometheus -- it was later released as App Engine. Using an early, internal build I put together a web site where people could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate each other's facts on a five-star scale, and see the top-rated facts. Everything was anonymous. I had a few coworkers who are funnier than me populate some initial facts.

I found a few bugs in Prometheus in the process, which the team rapidly fixed to meet my "launch date" of April 1st. :)

On the day, which I think was a Sunday, early in the morning, I sent an email to the company-wide "misc" mailing list (or maybe it was eng-misc?) from a fake email address (a google group alias with private membership), and got the mailing list moderator to approve it.

It only took Jeff an hour or two to hack his way through the back-end servers (using various internal-facing status pages, Borg logs, etc.) to figure out my identity.

But everyone enjoyed it!

My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Back then, Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, and were responsible for inventing a huge number of core technologies at Google (I have no idea to what extent they still work together today). The site was a joke, but I think it had the side effect of elevating Jeff above Sanjay, which is not what I intended. Really the only reason I targeted Jeff is because he's a bit easier to make fun of personality-wise, and because "Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" -- but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(

My personal favorite joke is: Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you'd see his approach is actually O(log n).

What makes it feel a little racist?

>"Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts"

The reason it rolls off the tongue easier is because of the familiarity with names of that form. It is making a choice to favour a personal cultural similarity. It clearly wasn't done with malice, but being reflective about it and noticing that it happened is a good thing.

When people talk about privilege, this is a large part of what people mean. There's no intended bias, it is just an honest choice, but all of our choices are based upon our opinions that will inherently have biases of some sort. One factor of privilege is when those choices disproportionately fall your way because decisions end up being made by people who you share a cultural upbringing with. Their intuitive decisions value what you value.

Sometimes the only way you can deal with that is by acknowledging your intuitions contain that implicit bias and dispassionately try and balance them as best you can.

It’s to do with the length of the name. My own name is polysyllabic and also wouldn’t work as a “Fact”, and I’m as white as they come.

That's kind of the point. In a culture where names commonly have a lot of syllables, the length of the name is much less of an issue. That tiny discomfort of the extra effort to process more syllables disappears when it's not considered 'extra'

I’m not sure I agree. I expect that an Indian would similarly be more likely to coin the term “Krish Singh Facts” than they would “Sanjay Ghemawat Facts”, in exactly the same way we do.

I’d be interested to hear from someone from a different culture to verify whether this is true or not.

I don't know how such things are considered in India either (and would also be interested to hear from someone). The salient point is that you do value fewer syllables in a comedy context. All it takes for someone to feel that it might be racist is to recognise that fewer syllables in comedy names may not be universal across cultures, and that taking an action that elevated one person and not another may have inadvertently selected someone of one race because of that preference.

It's not an absolute claim being made here. It's just a consideration that what we intuitively feel may not be an expression of a universally held value.

I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases.

But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases.

I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. But if you try to calculate every second and third order consequence of everything that you do, let alone any moments of humor you might have.. Well, you might as well lock yourself in a cell now.

> I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular

I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture and easier for them to engage with… that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism.

I'm not at all saying this to demonize Kenton. We can make mistakes and reflect on them later, and that's laudable. But it is important to recognize these systems for what they are, so that we can notice them when they happen all around us every day.

I see. I hadn't thought of it from a perspective of dominant culture. Looking at it that way, it can appear racist.

I looked at it from the perspective of syllable count. Jeff Dean is easier to say by that measure. If Jeff were instead named Alexander Chesterton, would he still be the obvious choice to head the facts? My takeaway from this is that a single-syllable name is perhaps a great boon.

Sanjay is/was well known enough that you could have just used “Sanjay facts”

I find the assumption that Jeff Dean sounded better with these jokes because it sounds American to be a bigger issue than immediately acknowledging that it’s probably because it’s less syllables. These type of jokes are rapid fire and a lengthy name just fits better whether it’s ‘Jeff Dean’ or ‘Neel Patel’.

Seeing this reminds me Sanjay is two syllables

Thanks, you explained this better than I could.

I'm not calling myself Hitler here, I think it was a mild offense. But in retrospect the site could have been about both of them, with competing facts, and that could have been really cool. Oh well.

I don't think it's really fair to call it racism. That is such a loaded accusation to levy today that it should only be used if someone really wronged another person.

We all have cultural biases and familiarities, is that wrong? By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, but I don't know if throwing around the r-word is helpful.

> By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point.

Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we made an effort to observe these biases more closely, to study there effects, and to better understand the way they effect our own behaviour? Then, what if we made an effort to counteract these biases, first in our own behaviour and then in our communities?

> After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls.

Are we not?

The free will debate aside, I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and comes across as empathetic, and you didn't need to use that word. I just think it's too loaded, aggressive, and broad to be very useful as a shorthand for the more complex thought you expressed.

I understand where you're coming from. It doesn't feel like such a heavy word to me because I know it's ubiquitous. It's like germs. I don't like germs, but I know they're everywhere, so I'm not scandalized at the implication that germs might be on my hands or food. At the same time, I am repulsed by reckless disregard for sanitation.

> that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism.

It’s not “racism.” There’s plenty of Indians with names that are easy for English speakers. Conversely, the same situations would’ve presented itself if the other person was any sort of white Eastern European.

In fact, calling this “racist” is itself racist. I have close friends with family names from Poland or Croatia where we don’t even try to pronounce their names correctly. Nobody feels bad about that. But for some reason if it’s a “brown person” we’re suddenly super sensitive about it. That is differential treatment based on race.

People get awkward about how to pronounce my name because I’m brown. But it’s hard to pronounce because it’s misspelled Germanic! They wouldn’t act that way if I was a white guy with the same name.

Are we... arguing about what happened in my head?

As the world's foremost expert about what happened in my head, do I get to, like, pick a winner here?

If so I pick tczMUFlmoNk, I think their description is accurate. (I think you might want to re-read it as it feels like you are responding to something else.)

If I don't get to pick, this is quite weird! "People on Hacker News tell me I'm wrong about my own thoughts." was not on my -- actually wait, that doesn't sound unexpected at all now that I write it out! OK, carry on.

You wrote what your thoughts were. I’m just weighing in on whether your thoughts are “racist.” To the extent you feel sensitive about the issue because someone has darker skin, where you probably wouldn’t have written that part of the post if the other guy were Polish, that’s racist. It’s racist to treat people differently based on skin color, even if you’re well intentioned about it.

You're conflating two different things:

1. The original choice: Kenton picked "Jeff Dean" because the name was more familiar/rhythmic in English. This wasn't about skin color, it was about name patterns. You're right that a Polish surname could have the same issue, and in that, you're demonstrating complete understanding of the issue at hand.

2. The reflection afterward: Recognizing that name-familiarity advantages systematically correlate with certain cultural backgrounds more than others isn't "differential treatment based on skin color", it is observing a statistical pattern in outcomes.

And here's the key point: given Kenton's explanation, they are indicating they would reflect the same way if Sanjay had been Polish with an unfamiliar surname. You're arguing with Kenton about what Kenton thinks and could think... while Kenton is right here. At some point you have to engage with what he's actually saying rather than insisting you understand his mind better than he does.

Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it.

(Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)

What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.”

Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on.

If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards?

I feel like most of us understand roughly what 'kentonv means. He unconsciously put Sanjay in an out-group and feels bad about it. I for one comment Kenton for owning up to it. It's a hard thing to do.

For what it's worth, I personally regard Sanjay in just as much awe as Jeff and understand that the meme is just an Internet meme and nothing more.

That's the ironic thing too... honestly, while I couldn't say that one or the other is a better engineer... I would say I personally identified more with Sanjay's approach and style.

> I feel like most of us understand roughly what 'kentonv means. He unconsciously put Sanjay in an out-group and feels bad about it.

But do you feel bad about it because he's brown and you wouldn't think twice about it if he were white? Frankly, the heightened sensitivity feels worse to me than actual racism.

> Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it.

You need to take a breath, read what people write, and stop trying to win the argument.

> stop trying to win the argument

Mr Rayiner is a lawyer by profession ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340543

If I said I'd done something rude and people then argued with as much fervor about whether I'd actually been rude as they are arguing here, I would actually find it pretty weird.

It's not remotely racist. OP is being self critical for no good reason.

Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

EDIT: And HN at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697

That meme started in early 2007 I believe. I started in 2006 and was in ZRH by 2008 and it was around long before I made that move.

> My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat.

Later version of the site was generalized so that people can submit facts for any user. I think Jeff Dean still has all the funniest fact though.

> but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(

It’s not racist. It’s just to do with name length.

Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :)

This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...

I handed it off again before I left Google but I have no memory of who that was to unfortunately :(.

I just searched Moma, and your note about it going down is the most recent update on this front. Interestingly though, it looks like Moma itself has a custom SERP renderer for Jeff Dean facts that came up when I searched. The example fact that came up was hilarious, but I guess I shouldn't share it on public HN.

Hi Ari,

Thanks so much for falling for my trick and taking it over, I was getting pretty sick of dealing with the same issues you describe. :)

One of the reasons Cloudflare Workers has a policy that we absolutely never break deployed code, ever. (Well... at least not intentionally...)

> Jeff & Sanjay did everything together,

my nonexpert impression is jeff keeps much more of a public profile. hence the natural celebrity goes to him. was this not true way back in the day?

I feel like Jeff's public profile has grown quite a bit since then. Note that in 2008 he wasn't doing anything related to AI yet -- none of that had even started. That has since given him somewhat of a more public role, whereas Sanjay has stayed on infrastructure which is more internal-facing. I do think Jeff Dean Facts in itself has played some part in enhancing his celebrity status, too.

With that said, I suppose it's hard for me to say what the public perception of the two was in 2008 as I only knew of either of them from working there.

Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts.

It was Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer

Should have checked, thanks for the correction. I stand by my liking of how they talked to each-other

The one thing I noticed when I worked near Jeff and Sanjay and talked to them over coffee is that Jeff is the smart one, but Sanjay is the wise one.

Jeff always had an idea how to make something a bit faster using a clever trick, but Sanjay would respond by coming up with how to express the abstraction in a way that other mortals could comprehend, or just telling Jeff it wasn't a good idea because it would make things more difficult to maintain.

Jeff was also prone to dad jokes, Sanjay's humor was far more subtle. Both were awesome to talk to and one of my proudest moments was when Jeff read a document proposal I wrote ("Google should get involved in Genomics Research and Drug Discovery") and took it seriously.

Should google have involved though? Calico, Verily, isomorphic etc seem like theyre destined to not succeed.

At the time I first got involved, Google Health was still a thing but it was clear it was not going to be successful. I felt that Google's ML (even early on, they had tons of ML, just most of it wasn't known externally) was going to be very useful for genomics and drug discovery.

Verily was its own thing that was unrelated to my push in Research. I think Larry Page knew Andy Conrad and told him he could do what he wanted (which led to Verily focusing on medical devices, which is a terrible industry to be in). They've pivoted a few times without much real success. My hope is that Alphabet sheds Verily (they've been trying) or just admit it's a failure and shut it down. It was just never run with the right philosophy.

Calico... that came out of Larry and Art Levinson- I guess Larry thought Art knew the secret to living forever and by giving him billions Art would come up with the solution to immortality and Larry would have first access to it. But they were ultra-secretive and tried to have the best of both worlds- full access to Google3 and borg, but without Googlers having any access to calico. That, combined with a number of other things, have led Calico to just be a quiet and not very interesting research group. I expect it to disband at some point.

Isomorphic is more recent than any of the stuff I was involved in, and is DeepMind (specifically Demis's) attempt to commercialize their work with AlphaFold. However, everybody in the field knows the strategy of 1. solve protein structure prediction 2. ??? 3. design profitable drugs and get them approved... is not a great strategy because protein structure determine has not ever been the rate limiting step to identifying targets and developing leads. I agree I don't really see a future for it but Demis has at least 10-20 years of runway before he has to take off or bail.

All of my suggestions were just for Google to do research with the community and publish it (especially the model code and weights, but also pipelines to prep data for learning) and turn a few of the ideas into products in Google Cloud(that's how Google Genomics was born... I was talking to Jeff, and he said "if we compress the genome enough, we can store it all on Flash, which would make search fast but cheap, and we'd have a useful product for genomics analysis companies"). IMHO Jeff's team substantially achieved their goals before the DeepMind stuff- DeepVariant was well-respected, but almost every person who worked on it and related systems got burned out and moved on.

What is success, anyway, in biotech? Is it making a drug that makes a lot of money? What if you do that, but it costs so much that people go bankrupt taking it? Or is the goal to make substantial improvements to the technology, potentially discovering key biological details that truly improve people's lives? Many would say that becoming a successful real estate ownership company is the real destination of any successful pharma/biotech.

Whoa. Finally someone I relate with! Thanks for such amazing intel!

In my opinion forays into biology by moonshot hopefuls fail for one of two reasons: either they completely ignore all the current wisdom from academia and industry, or they recruit the very academia people who are culturally responsible for the science rot we have at this time. Calico (and CZI, and im starting to fear, Arc) fell prey to the latter. Once you recruit one tenured professor IMO youre done. The level of tenure track trauma and academic rot they bring in can burn even a trillion dollars into dead-end initiatives.

IMO (after decades of daydreaming about this scenario), the only plausible way to recreate a Bell labs for Biology is to start something behind a single radical person, and recruit the smartest undergrads into that place directly. Ensure that they never become experts at just one thing so they have no allegiance to a method or field. And then let that hoarde loose on a single problem and see what comes out. For better or worse neuralink seems to be doing that right. Just wish they didnt abuse the monkeys that much!

To me success in biotechnology is if I measurably help make a drug that makes a person smile and breathe easy that would otherwise not have. Surprisingly easy and hard at the same time.

Having worked with them I would say Sanjay is certainly NOT the "junior" partner. Nor vice versa. They have different strengths but I couldn't say that one or the other is a better engineer overall.

Maybe both in the URL?

You could add a meme generator that's like the Django docs tutorial with the internet web-poll

Hi Kenton! No worries at all. I tend to be quieter than Jeff anyway (less public speaking etc.) and I am happy to not have a dedicated website. :-). -Sanjay

Hey Sanjay, long time no see. Thanks for the note!

But I'm fully aware you wouldn't want a "Sanjay Facts", and that's not the point. ;)

You are both legends. Your original MapReduce paper is what inspired me to work for Google (2006-2009), narrowly dodging a career as a quant on Wall Street.

blink

Legend. Popping up here after his last comment was 13 years ago.

Your job is unfinished :-)

You still have to create a Youtube channel for Jeff Dean/Sanjay Ghemawat (slayers of code!) like "Entertaining AI" did for "Chuck Norris" - https://www.youtube.com/@Entertaining_AI

> I have no idea to what extent they still work together today

They just got their own (unofficial) Lego set: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2006581022666928415

Ah but it’s not racist. It can’t be. Jeff and Sanjay have never had race conditions.

"Why do you pick on Protocol Buffers so much?

Because it’s easy to pick on myself. :)"

Damn!

My further comment will be buried, but its a rip on Chuck Norris facts, and was pretty ... whatever ... "geek culture". That was only proved by Chuck Norris' endorsement of Mike Huckabee back in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--EGyU57efY

> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. ... It's not clear whether this fact is really true, or whether this line is simply part of the joke, so I've omitted the usual (TRUE) identifier here. Interpret this as you see fit :)

I think this one's true-ish. Back in the day when Google didn't have good cron services for the corp and production domains [1], Jeff Dean's workstation ran a job that made something called (iirc) the "protocol buffer debug database". Basically, a big file (probably an sstable) with compiled .proto introspection data for a huge number of checked-in protobufs. You could use it to produce human-readable debug output from what was otherwise a fairly indecipherable blob. I don't think it was ever intended for production use, but some things that shouldn't have ended up using it. I think after Jeff had been on vacation for a while, his `prodaccess` credentials expired, the job stopped working, maybe the output became unavailable, and some things broke.

Here's a related story I know is true: when I was running Google Reader, I got paged frequently for Bigtable replication delay, and I eventually traced it to trouble accessing files that shared GFS chunkservers with this database. I mentioned it on some mailing list, and almost immediately afterward Jeff Dean CCed me on a code review changing the file's replication from r=3 to r=12. The problem went away.

[1] this lasted longer than you would expect

The other thing that ran under Jeff's desk for a long time was Code Search, the old one.

I remember this. He went on vacation and since he wasn't available to login, code search indexing went down for a bit.

I submitted this "fact" and it is indeed a true story, exactly as you said.

The "global protobuf db" had comments all over it saying it's not intended for production-critical tasks, and it had a lot of caveats and gotchas even aside from being built by Jeff's desktop, but it was so convenient that people naturally ended up using it anyway.

There was a variant of this that occurred later. By that time there might not have been a dependency on Jeff's workstation anymore, but the DB, or at least one of its replicas, was getting copied to... /gfs/cg/home/sanjay/ — I don't believe it was Jeff this time. At some point, there was a very long PCR in the Oregon datacenter, perhaps even the same one that happened a few weeks after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. With the CG cluster powered off for multiple days, a bunch of stuff broke, but in this case the issue might have been solved by dumping the data and/or reading it from elsewhere.

Ha, I also recall this fact about the protobuf DB after all these years

Another Jeff Dean fact should be "Russ Cox was Jeff Dean's intern"

This was either 2006 or 2007, whenever Russ started. I remember when Jeff and Sanjay wrote "gsearch", a distributed grep over google3 that ran on 40-80 machines [1].

There was a series of talks called "Nooglers and the PDB" I think, and I remember Jeff explained gsearch to maybe 20-40 of us in a small conference room in building 43.

It was a tiny and elegant piece of code -- something like ~2000 total lines of C++, with "indexer" (I think it just catted all the files, which were later mapped into memory), replicated server, client, and Borg config.

The auth for the indexer lived in Jeff's home dir, perhaps similar to the protobuf DB.

That was some of the first "real Google C++ distributed system" code I read, and it was eye opening.

---

After that talk, I submitted a small CL to that directory (which I think Sanjay balked at slightly, but Jeff accepted). And then I put a Perforce watch on it to see what other changes were being submitted.

I think the code was dormant for awhile, but later I saw someone named Russ Cox started submitting a ton of changes to it. That became the public Google Code Search product [2]. My memory is that Russ wrote something like 30K lines of google3 C++ in a single summer, and then went on to write RE2 (which I later used in Bigtable, etc.)

Much of that work is described here: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

I remember someone telling him on a mailing list something like "you can't just write your own regex engine; there are too many corner cases in PCRE"

And many people know that Russ Cox went on to be one of the main contributors to the Go language. After the Code Search internship, he worked on Go, which was open sourced in 2009.

---

[1] Actually I wonder if today if this could perform well enough a single machine with 64 or 128 cores. Back then I think the prod machines were something like 2, 4, or 8 cores.

[2] This was the trigram regex search over open source code on the web. Later, there was also the structured search with compiler front ends, led by Steve Yegge.

Side note: I used this query to test LLM recall: Do jeff dean and russ cox know each other?

Interesting results:

1. Gemini pointed me back at MY OWN comment, above, an hour after I wrote it. So Google is crawling the web FAST. It also pointed to: https://learning.acm.org/bytecast/ep78-russ-cox

This matches my recent experience -- Gemini is enhanced for many use cases by superior recall

2. Claude also knows this, pointing to pages like: https://usesthis.com/interviews/jeff.dean/ - https://goodlisten.co/clip/the-unlikely-friendship-that-shap... (never seen this)

3. ChatGPT did the worst. It said

... they have likely crossed paths professionally given their roles at Google and other tech circles. ...

While I can't confirm if they know each other personally or have worked directly together on projects, they both would have had substantial overlap in their careers at Google.

(edit: I should add I pay for Claude but not Gemini or ChatGPT; this was not a very scientific test)

Not just Google. I had ChatGPT regurgitate my HN comment (without linking to it) about 15 minutes after posting it. That was a year ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649774

Hopefully YCombinator can afford to pay for the constant caching of all HN comments. /s :)

> Gemini pointed me back at MY OWN comment, above, an hour after I wrote it. So Google is crawling the web FAST. It also pointed to: https://learning.acm.org/bytecast/ep78-russ-cox ... I had ChatGPT regurgitate my HN comment (without linking to it) about 15 minutes after posting it.

Sounds like HN is the kind of place for effective & effortless "Answer Engine Optimization".

I participated in an internship in the summer of 2007. One of the things I found particularly interesting was gsearch. At the time, there were search engines for source code, but I was not aware of any that supported regular expressions. My internship host encouraged me by saying, “Try digging through repositories and look for the source code.”

In 2010, due to the China hacking thing, Google locked down its network a lot.

At least one production service went down because it relied on a job running on Jeff Dean's personal computer that no longer had access. Unfortunately I forget what job it was.

My highlight are

  During his own Google interview, Jeff Dean was asked the implications if P=NP were true. He said "P = 0 or N = 1." Then, before the interviewer had even finished laughing, Jeff examined Google's public certificate and wrote the private key on the whiteboard.

  Jeff Dean wrote an O(n^2) algorithm once. It was for the Traveling Salesman Problem

I read it more as a parody of The Most Interesting Man in the World as opposed to Chuck Norris.

"Chuck Norris facts" was a text-only meme format from the mid '00s. Stuff like "Chuck Norris is the only man to ever defeat a brick wall in a game of tennis" or "When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn't push himself up, he pushes the Earth down." The Jeff Dean Facts use the same format. It doesn't have anything to do with Chuck Norris himself.

I vaguely remember another instance of this around a guy in the army - I forgot if it was at boot camp or what the rank was, but it was something along the lines of “things I’m no longer allowed to do” and just had a bunch of silly military joke/prank type things… man I wonder if I could dig that up again, I think it might have been late 90s internet.

That would be Skippy's List[0], which as far as I know is the seminal work in the genre (at least on the internet). I originally learned about it through a (rather less compact) version about someone's D&D crimes[1], which was closer to my cultural wheelhouse, but the original holds up even if you have to google some phrases.

[0] https://skippyslist.com/list/

[1] https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html

> May not pretend to be a fascist stormtrooper, while on duty.

The Dos Equis ad campaign came well after Chuck Norris jokes

New Yorker published an interesting article on Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat few years ago - The Friendship That Made Google Huge [0]

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

OK "Jeff Dean once shifted a bit so hard it ended up on another computer" got a proper chuckle from me

This is the basis for the software that allows you to use a single mouse to control a mouse pointer on several computers.

> Jeff once simultaneously reduced all binary sizes by 3% and raised the severity of a previously known low-priority Python bug to critical-priority in a single change that contained no Python code.

This sounds really plausible. A change to the C toolchain/library (for example, specialized/inlined memcpy) may affect binary sizes significantly, and may change the behavior of something the C standard leaves undefined (for example, memcpy with overlapping arguments).

I have such a Python bug right now because of something that fork()s in a way that can't posix_spawn(). One of those is a lot easier to make performant than the other.

> When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, it's so crowded Don Knuth has to sit on the floor. (TRUE)

That's actually funny and cool if true. I think what's even more impressive is that this stuff was all pre-AI boom.

It probably is. I think the same thing happened when Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) gave a talk at Google. I was there, it was crowded, and Don Knuth showed up. 90% sure he sat on the floor.

I would definitely give up my seat to Don Knuth.

In theory I would too, but I was also on the floor, and believe it or not I didn't notice Don Knuth was there until after the talk had started.

Friends and I nabbed front-row seats to the Munroe talk; after a time we were asked to take seats a few rows back to make room for Knuth and others. He definitely did not sit on the floor.

Well, that shows what my 90% sure memory is worth. I sit corrected.

FWIW the XKCD talk at Google is here (wow, 18 years ago! I remember watching this video when it was posted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 (Knuth comes up to ask a question at 21:30) (Can't tell from the video where he was sitting otherwise, though there are definitely at least some people sitting on the floor.)

Yes, Jeff told me this one personally. Knuth came in right before the talk started and the room was full. I think somebody later gave up a seat for him.

Love it!

> Jeff Dean compiles and runs his code before submitting, but only to check for compiler and CPU bugs.

Sadly, I have encountered this, in many "Non-Jeff-Dean" developers.

What I’ve found is some really average developers thinking they’re Jeff Dean, or at least have that attitude.

The more specific the "fact" is to the target, the better IMO.

- Bruce Schneier facts - https://www.schneierfacts.com/

- Doug McIlroy facts - https://github.com/mischief/9problems/blob/master/lib/dougfa...

> Bruce Schneier intercepts all your internal monologues by a man-in-the-middle attack.

I am only semi technical so most of these go right over my head, but after watching a ton of Jeff Dean interviews, etc it is really fun to see how a 10-100x engineer can operate over such a long career (while seemingly a normal and kind person to boot)

My 3 When Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi. As a young boy, Jeff Dean reprogrammed his Etch A Sketch to play Tetris.

I have been laughing about the PIN/pi joke over and over for the past 24 hours.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

To me this will remain his best work.

Even with the ellipsized link I knew you were talking about one of a few things because the link shows up as `:visited` for me... had to be either BigTable, MapReduce, or Spanner. All good reads.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

As I write this, catb is not serving promptly... so https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

I also recommend Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering : https://youtu.be/4PaWFYm0kEw?si=nqfxSae52-89x5Ye&t=653

I once mailed a CL to Sanjay. He replied, "This is outside of my expertise. Can you send it to Jeff?"

One of my more junior teammates got their CL assigned to Sanjay for review, she had no idea who he was and I just told her to look at all her new badges tomorrow.

IME Sanjay responds to CLs way faster than I expected.

I've never had in for a review at google, I think it only happens if you change something very top level. I did an internship under him the summer before he joined Google at Dec/Compaq SRC though. I learned a lot of tricks from him then (like using graphviz to print out compiler graphs to do debugging).

I was messing around with one of the old RNGs, trying to kill off a few thousand tests that depended on its exact output sequence.

I didn’t think I’d laugh, but a few of these cheered me up. Laughter is such a good medicine.

Agreed! I felt the same way but sitting here with my morning coffee chuckling away. A good start to the day.

Ok I'll try. Jeff Dean read the instructions on his family sized bottle of shampoo in the shower. They said lather, rince, repeat. He almost died of hypothermia, but wrote a goto in conditioner just in time.

Funny, but also a reminder of how rare it is to find people who combine deep technical ability with the calm, high-leverage decision-making that scales teams. Memes aside, those are the folks who quietly shape entire fields.

What does "readability" mean? It's mentioned in several of these jokes: "binary readability", etc.

readability grants a code reviewer the power to approve changes in a specific language

I was wondering if someone was going to ask. It's the most bizzare aspect of code reviews at Google.

And "Readability" doesn't mean you are good at a language, it means you are good at it in the way Google uses it. C++ readability is the poster child of this. Borgcron, not so much.

Did you mean Borgmon? Borgcron is just GCL.

Sawzall is another good example of an unreadable language.

A bit more detail: long ago, before the time of the Great Brace War, people wrote code using all sorts of styles: tabs/spaces, short or long variable/function names, Hungarian notation or not, comments or not, long blocks or short, and so on. You could often tell which of your teammates wrote a block of code simply by newline usage. This made it hard to read and contribute code in a less familiar part of the codebase.

Google mitigated this problem at scale by introducing the concept of "readability" for each language (C++, Java, and Python, simpler times). If you had readability, you could approve another person's change for that language. If you didn't, you could still review the code, but the reviewee also had to go find someone else with readability.

After you'd accumulated a certain number of commits in a language, you could try to get your own readability by bundling up your CLs (changelists) and submitting them to the readability queue, where a certain group of senior people with readability would evaluate whether your code was sufficiently idiomatic. This process could take months, or even years if you didn't write much in a particular language. In any event, it felt like a real achievement to get readability.

The upshot of all this was that most code at Google felt authorless in a good way: if you knew and expected Google style, all the codebase felt the same, and you could concentrate on the logic flow rather than the regional dialect. And needless to say all the energy wasted on whose style was best was squelched in the readability queue.

This is all past tense because I last wrote code for Google more than 10 years ago, and I'm sure the process has changed since then. Code formatters, shared editor defaults, and presubmit checks have surely automated away a lot of the toil, and there's much less of a monorepo culture these days, so there are probably more style dialects (in addition to many, many more permitted languages).

I left in 2023. From memory at that time:

1) go kinda eliminates a lot of the reasons for style guides to exist w/ `go fmt` and separately, I think the Go readability team made a conscious decision to approach readability differently anyway,

2) ... once you had a couple people on your local team w/ readability, if your team wanted to do things a certain way, well, style guides and formal readability wasn't really an issue anymore.

It is a formal process via which it is confirmed that you know enough of X to submit code to the codebase, where X can be c++, java, python, etc. If you don't have X readability, then, in addition to your main code reviewer, you need to have a readability reviewer look at your code, who will be focusing only on X, not the logic of your code.

A few more:

Jeff Dean doesn't use a compiler; he just glares at his source code until it executes.

Jeff Dean once optimized a sleep(10) call to return in 5 seconds.

Jeff Dean’s keyboard doesn’t have a Backspace key; he simply doesn't make mistakes.

/end. There's no need to get up. I will see myself out.

In an alternate universe, pi is rational, and Jeff Dean is not.

The TheJeffDeanFacts repo contains no issues. (TRUE)

Maybe I just run in different circles but I was always under the impression that the so called Chuck Norris of programming was Jon Skeet, another rather "famous" google employee

He's the Chuck Norris of StackOverflow, maybe.

Yeah I thought exactly the same, but I guess Jon Skeet is from a different era altogether, we're moving into a world where many programmers perhaps have never even entered StackOverflow. I feel old.

Jon Skeet was very much a local hero on StackOverflow, and on StackOverflow only.

Claude & Codex are still learning from Jon Skeet.

To me, the Chuck Norris of programming has to be Fabrice Bellard

I remember one that isn't in the list. Paraphrasing:

"Jeff Dean has access to the priority above P1. He's only used it once. It's why February only has 28 days."

I also remember that but I think it was attributed to someone else. The site hosted several (internally famous person) facts, but none of them were as famous as Jeff Dean.

> Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O(1/n) algorithm.

I can think of a lot of 1/n algorithms! Head, Tail...

Those are still O(1)

Right, lol

This is the sort of thing that's perfect as a fortune file, so here you go: https://github.com/theodric/fortitude/tree/master/jeffdeanfa...

There is also a thread on Stack Exchange [1] for John Skeet facts, who has the most reputation there.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...

My other favorite internal internal meme from that era was the Broccoli Man video, "I just want to serve 5 Terabytes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

Someone should IARC the internal one.

"When God said: "Let there be light!", Jeff Dean was there to do the code review."

I think this makes more sense: "When God said: "Let there be light!", Jeff Dean said "LGTM, Approve"

Jeff Dean achieved a Weismann score of 42.

We need a Dave Cutler facts equivalent too. But the ppl who could have made this are probably retired or

Any recommendations for a talk by him to watch or something written by him to read?

yes

on a serious note, this recent-ish interview on AI is illuminating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq8MhTFCs80

Guy happens to be the lead of Google AI right now.

My outsider understanding: Google AI (a Google team which Jeff Dean ran) was merged with DeepMind to create Google DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet, like Google).

Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind and Jeff Dean is now the Chief Scientist of Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind

https://research.google/people/jeff/

I joined Google in mid-1999, and I'm currently Google's Chief Scientist, focusing on AI advances for Google DeepMind and Google Research. My areas of focus include machine learning and AI and applications of AI to problems that help billions of people in societally beneficial ways. I have a broad variety of interests, including machine learning, large-scale distributed systems, computer systems performance, compression techniques, information retrieval, application of machine learning to search and other related problems, microprocessor architecture, compiler optimizations, and the development of new products that organize information in new and interesting ways.

What’s Mustang? Web search?

yes

It is or was the serving component of the main index. The part that does the posting list intersections and lookups.

Web Search Serving. Many generations ago.

I get jeff dean is a great engineer and probably had nothing to do with this, but I always thought this "googly" memeing of chuck norris was so lame.

I mean, chuck norris even did it to endorse mike huckabee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--EGyU57efY

I’m not sure I’m comfortable idolizing someone living like this

Another one I have heard is "Jeff Dean's stare can fix bitrot"

It's nice that a company has senior engineers that are known by name and looked up to. It shows that engineers are valued, and a meritocracy exists.

Yes, but the downside is even highly accomplished engineers feel unworthy. For example, when I started in 2008, they said everybody should make a "Google Resume" (ongoing list of all the stuff you did at Google) and linked to Jeff's as an example.

He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine that ran for over a decade... numerous improvements to search and ads quality (back in the days when search and ads quality meant something)... and that was just the first few years.

Everyone at Google has imposter syndrome. If you don't, this is how they make sure you get it.

Wasn't Peter Norvig one of the key people behind Google Search? Would it be correct to say that scientists did the research, maybe reference implementations in Lisp or Python, and later Jeff Dean did the actual C++ production?

Peter worked on search, yes. I think he mainly focused on quality. See his comment on "Managing Gigabytes" (https://www.amazon.com/review/R33MIMY7A7C2H8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...) which was an early reference for the compression techniques used to make search fast.

The way jeff described it was that there was a very early contingent who took Larry's original code and made a production system out of it, but it wasn't very good- the indexer basically had to be run all the way through without errors to make a new index- and that was delaying a release of a fresh new index, so results were getting stale. At that point Jeff "invented" mapreduce (the shuffle stage was Sanjay) and wrote the new indexer and the search engine as well.

I'm not aware of any LISP implementation of the Google search engine; if there was one, it would have been extremely early, like in the stanford days, I think.

> It shows that engineers are valued

yep

> and a meritocracy exists

not necessarily. It shows the system got one excellent engineer to an appropriate position. But it doesn't show that the system isn't promoting bozos too, and keeping other excellent engineers down.

> But it doesn't show that the system isn't promoting bozos too, and keeping other excellent engineers down.

Has anyone worked at GOOG and also other corporations? How do the alternative cultures compare?

can he beat llms ? don't think so.

Jeff is so good at AI, he invented much of the infrastructure to implement LLMs, mostly to increase the productivity of other programmers.

Anyone of modest competence can beat LLMs.

loved this so much i made a jeff dean persona for my AI: https://www.zo.computer/pub/persona/prs_WtLmiGHQmHqaMKIy

Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.

As far as I can tell, no one seems to think much of value was lost.

It turns out when you usher the dissenters out of the room, you hear a lot less dissent.

It’s not like they were summarily executed. They are much freer now outside of corporate control to speak their minds as they please.

The only real question is if anyone deems them worth listening to.

I mean, I follow them.

Their problem domain is pretty niche and they're pretty technical on it so I don't doubt their traction is mostly academics.

even at the time that was the verdict

ai ethics was/is useless. it felt a lot like the movie industry of the 1930s saying they will police themselves just to keep any bigger regulator away

... And then they didn't!

for good reasons.

To say "AI ethics is useless" is itself useless.

Morality is not there to be useful, right or wrong in moral sense are normative categories not utilitarian ones.

But what you possibly may mean is really AI ethics self-regulation by large tech corporation does not work. (If that was your intended statement, I'd agree.)

I'm having trouble following what exactly this means.

So Jeff wanted the team to modify an existing publication to fit the PR spin on AI, the ethics team refused, and Jeff dissolved the team?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

This is overstating it by a lot. Jeff was the AI lead at the time, and there was a big conflict between management and the ethics team

And I actually think Google needs to pay more attention to AI ethics ... but it's a publically traded company and the incentives are all wrong -- i.e. it's going to do whatever it needs to do keep up with the competition, similar to what happened with Google+ (perceived competition from Facebook)

You mean he fired one person who threatened to quit if the changes to the paper weren't to their liking? Or am I misremembering?

you are not misremembering.

Just another Jeff Dean optimizing out unneeded code story.

That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.

Isn't it crazy how the media can do that? It really doesn't matter how much good you do in the world if your enemies speak louder. At least in the public's perception.

Not sure if he was told to stop the paper and fire the team, or whether he decided that himself.

But in any case, it's a stain on an overwise exceptionally brilliant career with wonderful software engineering achievements.

I wonder if they ever wondered if they'd do it again?

reading about this incident years later, i gotta say, dang Gebru was right on a lot of things

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

Jeff Dean is a lot smarter than me, more accomplished, and more talented. But let’s be honest. He was a big part of TensorFlow and TensorFlow sucks. And I imagine it reflects a lot about Jeff Dean internally. Smart, clever, but maybe over complicated or over engineered. And that itself reflects hugely at what Google tends to like, and why he’s so successful (at Google).

And if we’re being brutally honest, I wonder how he would have faired at somewhere like Bell Labs ;)

Let's be honest: you don't have the slightest idea about what you're talking about.

TensorFlow lost because it’s an inferior API and dev UX. Hate to break it to you.

I’m sure it got Jeff a lot of high-fives because it’s very complicated though!

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