+1 insightful and educational -- in more ways than one!
> "sort the hashes, and rice code the deltas"
Being quite sure that wasn't a racial slur, I looked it up:
> "Rice coding (invented by Robert F. Rice) denotes using a subset of the family of Golomb codes to produce a simpler (but possibly suboptimal) prefix code. Rice used this set of codes in an adaptive coding scheme; "Rice coding" can refer either to that adaptive scheme or to using that subset of Golomb codes."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_coding)
> "sort the hashes, and rice code the deltas"
Being quite sure that wasn't a racial slur, I looked it up:
> "Rice coding (invented by Robert F. Rice) denotes using a subset of the family of Golomb codes to produce a simpler (but possibly suboptimal) prefix code. Rice used this set of codes in an adaptive coding scheme; "Rice coding" can refer either to that adaptive scheme or to using that subset of Golomb codes." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_coding)