Today's fun and educational Python recipe

[Irmen de Jong]

On 04-05-11 21:13, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>>> It turns out that people in the 1970's were pretty smart :-)
>>
>> I think that often, the cleverness of people is inversely proportional
>> to the amount of CPU power and RAM that they have in their computer.
>
> The Google guys have plenty of CPU power *and* plenty of
> cleverness :-)

Haha, true. We need to add a Googlyness factor in the equation.
Or perhaps: think what they could achieve if they only had a few 
machines instead of thousands ;-)


>> Also: wasn't there a talk on Pycon in which a bloom filter was mentioned?
>
> Yes!  As a matter of fact there was:
> http://www.slideshare.net/c.titus.brown/pycon-2011-talk-ngram-assembly-with-bloom-filters

Thanks, that was the one.

I didn't attend Pycon but I watched a truckload of talks on blip.tv and 
that one caught my attention because of its somewhat funny title
'handling ridiculous amounts of data with probabilistic data structures'

I didn't understand all of it but the name Bloom Filter stuck, it seems. 
  Adding it to my list of bookmarks of 
useful-stuff-I-intend-to-use-one-day-in-the-future...

Irmen