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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I read about halfway into this article, and when the author started talking about Javascript, the "this" keyword, and the politics about the job, I stopped.

What does that have to do with bloom filters? Get to the point!

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Bloom filters are cool , but the writer is pretty annoying. It's written like they discovered bloom filters or something.

Just read the last section.

I don't know, the first 5 paragraphs were about his lunch.

He admits that he's trying to imitate Paul Ford (because somebody told him to) and failing, which is a fair assessment of the situation. You can just skip to the "In Bloom" heading... there isn't really any information before that.

the post is how he's returning a favor, which he explains in the post, in the "returning the favor" section

But that doesn't tell me how Bloom filters work. I don't care about his dinner or what favors he owes, unless he's planning on turning those expository details into a clever metaphor later in the article, or if they really are something that's important for me to understand.

I'm all for educational pieces that are told through a conversation between characters - you can get some creative writing out of that. However, the bug that he's asked to fix, the Polish typographer friend, and the dinner scene are barely connected to the subject. We don't even get a nice technical explanation of why the bug is impossible to fix or what that means with regards to the trade-offs in using Bloom filters.

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