You work for me, Computer.

By Brandon Bloom

A Googol at Google

Ok, well maybe not quite a Googol (1x10E100), but certainly 263-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807).

This quote was taken from talk by Steve Yegge:

We overflowed a long at Google once. Nobody thought that was possible, but it actually happened.

Working at Google has irreversibly damaged my ability to reason about numbers. One moment you are talking about petabytes of data and the next moment you are talking about nanoseconds. It is truly mind numbing, but it has become hard not to laugh when someone talks about a huuuuge dataset of a few gigabytes or a fast process at a few seconds.