NoSpotOfGround
@NoSpotOfGround@lemmy.world
- Comment on Even if it sounds smart, it might be dumb. 19 hours ago:
Disagree. Just because luck saved your ass doesn’t mean what you did wasn’t stupid.
Winning a round of Russian Roulette doesn’t make you a genius.
- Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today 1 week ago:
Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.
- Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today 1 week ago:
The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: blog.codingconfessions.com/…/how-unix-spell-ran-i…:
TL;DR
If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:
- McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.
- For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.
- When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.
- They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.
- McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.
* Using Golomb's code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.
- Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.
- Comment on The vast majority of "Remind Me"s notifications in Reddit will never be seen by users who set them. 1 week ago:
offended beeping
- Comment on The vast majority of "Remind Me"s notifications in Reddit will never be seen by users who set them. 1 week ago:
I will be messaging you in 7 days on 2025-04-07 10:06:96 UTC to remind you that there is no RemindMe! bot on lemmy.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I just funged it. You’ll never get me, coppers.
- Comment on SHUT UP ABOUT NICOLE 3 weeks ago:
E
- Comment on Yall guess who showed up in my dms 4 weeks ago:
No scam. She’s just a lonely girl who can’t believe no-one here is taking her seriously… Tragic story as old as time.
- Comment on Undocumented 'Backdoor' Found In Chinese Bluetooth Chip Used By a Billion Devices. 4 weeks ago:
Well, no, China is bad because freedom is very restricted there and because they have ambitions to dominate the world.
Yes, every other world power in the world is more or less the same. People cannot, in general, be trusted to be “good” when given the opportunity to abuse. A world power can be held in check by the presence and efforts of other world powers, though.
- Comment on Do tell!!! 4 weeks ago:
You’re not my mom!
- Comment on Tesla sales crash continues in Europe, with Germany down 70% 4 weeks ago:
Let us enjoy our schadenfreude!!
- Comment on Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying 4 weeks ago:
Oh, right, you did say “just got mine”… Never mind me. It does seem like it could be a mismatch between what the adb was compiled for and what it’s being asked to install on.
- Comment on Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying 4 weeks ago:
I think it needs special hardware to run on:
It is developed to run on an Orbic mobile hotspot (Amazon, Ebay) which is available for $20 or less at the time of this writing.
- Comment on GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser 5 weeks ago:
Ok, fair enough then. Could have been a simple misunderstanding.
- Comment on GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser 5 weeks ago:
Ok, you keep saying that but never explain why/how. Like, why refuse such a small change so aggressively?
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@lemmy.world | 491 comments
- Comment on It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? 5 months ago:
There is no such thing as a pineapple tree. That’s an AI image.
Pineapples grow in an even more ridiculous way.
- Comment on Couple tried to sell baby for a 6-pack of beer and $1,000 at campground, police say 6 months ago:
Yeah, I mean getting the parents to sign an explicit contract and taking a photo of them signing… They were aiming to do the right thing.