Comment by kentonv
2 days ago
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).
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.
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 :(.
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...)
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.
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 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’.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697
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
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.
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.
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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
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.
Ah but it’s not racist. It can’t be. Jeff and Sanjay have never had race conditions.
:)
> 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
> but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(
It’s not racist. It’s just to do with name length.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"Why do you pick on Protocol Buffers so much?
Because it’s easy to pick on myself. :)"
Damn!
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
Maybe both in the URL?
You could add a meme generator that's like the Django docs tutorial with the internet web-poll
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.
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