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

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - 18th April 2026
Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year - 17th April 2026
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 - 16th April 2026

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

google 404 scaling 147 sorting 6 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