Great to see people getting into this useful data structure.
But this blog post makes a simple topic look super complicated. When all the math formulas are not needed to make the explanation work, they come off as just a gratuitous attempt to impress the reader.
By contrast, Jon Bently, in his Programming Pearls 2nd Edition, page 145-146, has a much more concise and understandable description. The other nuances not mentioned fall out intuitively from what he describes there.
I think needlessly complex descriptions of bloom filters are one of the reasons the approach seems less known than it should be.
Every time I speak to a group, I take a quick survey as to how many people know what a bloom filter is. Even at the most nerdiest of tech talks, it's rarely above 50%.
It amazes me that this is not something that is taught in school these days (or maybe it is now?), considering it is such a powerful tool in a distributed environment.
Maybe it's environment specific, but bloom filters seem to be the "an aglet is the plastic thing at the end of a shoelace" of CS, ie., the "little know fact" that everyone knows.
