

Why Bloom filters work the way they do (2012) - BIackSwan
http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/why-bloom-filters-work-the-way-they-do/

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jbellis
He missed the best way to generate hashes. Most people do:
[http://spyced.blogspot.com/2009/01/all-you-ever-wanted-to-
kn...](http://spyced.blogspot.com/2009/01/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-
about.html)

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natch
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.

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pflanze
Reminds me of "Smaller than Bloom filters"[1] by Adam Langley (who's working
on Chrome).

[1]
[https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/04/29/filters.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/04/29/filters.html)

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jedberg
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.

~~~
akavi
Really?

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.

