Simon Willison’s Weblog

How can I sort a huge amount of numbers?

25th February 2012

My answer to How can I sort a huge amount of numbers? on Quora

Sorting large amounts of data is one of the first exercises you’ll see described in any Hadoop or map/reduce tutorial—so I’d suggest taking a look at Hadoop.

Posted 25th February 2012 at 2:37 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

My review of Claude's new Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name - 9th September 2025
Recreating the Apollo AI adoption rate chart with GPT-5, Python and Pyodide - 9th September 2025
GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search - 6th September 2025

This is How can I sort a huge amount of numbers? by Simon Willison, posted on 25th February 2012.

google 383 scaling 144 quora 1005

Next: Has JSON pretty much replaced XML for string processing for the web, or are there use cases where XML is still necessary?

Previous: What are the ideal laser pointers for conference presentations?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe