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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Now we just need HyperLogLog by example.

(HyperLogLogs are vaguely similar data structures in that you hash things a bunch to store a value inside, except instead of set-membership inquiries, they're better at cardinality-estimation purposes.)

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Not in the style of the submitted article, but HyperLogLog was mentioned [0] last year on Nick's Blogs Damn Cool Algortihms series [1]. Discussion on HN [2].

[0] http://blog.notdot.net/2012/09/Dam-Cool-Algorithms-Cardinali...

[1] http://blog.notdot.net/tag/damn-cool-algorithms

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488946

Well, there you are: a nice explanation of HyperLogLog, along with graphs, and a javascript demo to play with. And a tribute to Philippe Flajolet who came up with the algorithm.

http://blog.aggregateknowledge.com/2012/10/25/sketch-of-the-...

The Aggregate Knowledge blog is mind blowing for everything sketch related.

Is that demo widget custom, or did they use a tool to generate it? Do you know?

According to this comment http://blog.aggregateknowledge.com/2012/10/25/sketch-of-the-... , it's custom made and based on d3.

It would make the world a lot better if somebody made it easy to create that widget in IPython Notebook or some similar tool.

#IShouldDoThatButIProbablyWont

I hope you write it! I also imagine an encyclopedia of many different algorithm examples, each with demonstrations and graphical explanations. Bret Victor has talked about that sort of thing, and it greatly intrigues me.

I'm not sure what Bret Victor had in mind, but the second part of Skiena's text The Algorithm Design Manual already does a good job at this. Similar write ups are available online [0], in less detail than the text, e.g. [1]. They all open with a pictorial representation of possible input and corresponding output to aid in scanning when you have a problem to solve. There is also the Encyclopedia of Algorithms [2], and the NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [3], history of at [4].

[0] http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/

[1] http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/files/dictionaries.shtml

[2] https://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+scien...

[3] http://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Algorithms_and_D...

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