

Mental hashing for paper address books (with Python) - limmeau
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2010-October/000517.html

======
phreeza
One problem I see with the evaluation is he uses a generic English corpus. The
real application is names though, which probably have different statistical
properties. Shouldn't be too hard to find a list of real names somewhere on
the web.

edit: here for example <http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm>

~~~
limmeau
Thanks for the link. Hash function "First and fourth letter" wins for english
surnames:

<https://gist.github.com/bd9fabf91a5501b215c5>

(I copied the names table from your link and applied the original program to
it)

~~~
lars512
There's a tradeoff between speed of lookup and ability to find things when you
only partially recall the name. For those situations (the "tip-of-the-tongue"
phenomenon), I'd pick either the first and final letters as the easiest to
recall, or the first and second letters. The fourth letter won't be easy to
retrieve unless you recall the name exactly.

------
Amnon
Did anyone notice the mailing list? It's one dedicated to the author.
Interesting alternative for a blog.

~~~
silentbicycle
There are some real gems on the list, too:

"Smalltalk Performance and Moore's Law"
[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2007-March/0...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2007-March/000850.html)

"OCaml vs. SBCL, and various other interpreters"
[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2007-March/0...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2007-March/000852.html)

"what affects programming language adoption?"
[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-Novembe...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-November/000834.html)

(kragen is also kragen here)

~~~
kragen
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed them.

