Top all-time · #25778
My Journey Towards Emptiness!!
Personal blog · vkundeti.blogspot.comprogrammingmathphilosophy
My Journey Towards Emptiness!! is a personal blog at vkundeti.blogspot.com about programming, math and philosophy. Since 2010, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link its post on how Unix sort performs external merge sorting, and discuss memory use and sorting large files in shell pipelines versus Python. No commenter judges the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Algorithms, Theory, Spirituality, Life, Technology, Food and Workout : trying to sort these deterministically in $\Theta(1)$ time (constant time).
Most-linked posts?
- /2008/03/tech-algorithmic-details-of-unix-sort.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-14
What Hacker News says?
Actually sort is even better than normal (purely in-memory) merge sort. It looks at available memory and writes out sorted files to merge. http://vkundeti.blogspot.com/2008/03/tech-algorithmic-detail...
Comment linking /2008/03/tech-algorithmic-details-of-unix-sort.html
on “Command-line tools for data science”You're correct, the Python version is O(N) instead of O(1) in RAM usage for two reasons, one easily fixed and one not. Sorry if I'm belaboring the point, but I think it's worth going into a little more detail. The easily fixable issue is that the shell pipeline buffers reads, whereas my Python version just uses sys.stdin.read() for simplicity. I could have buffered the reads by using Python's generators/iterators in…
Comment linking /2008/03/tech-algorithmic-details-of-unix-sort.html
on “The Word Count Problem”Unix sort already does a merge sort (search for it), which is your default solution if you just want to sort individual lines based on a field: http://vkundeti.blogspot.com/2008/03/tech-algorithmic-detail... Thus, sort -u <filename> is your go-to for simple jobs. (Note that you'll need to have enough extra disk space to hold all of the temporary files.) If you need to do something more sophisticated (e.g. joining li…
Comment linking /2008/03/tech-algorithmic-details-of-unix-sort.html
on “Ask HN: Sorting massive text files?”