Top all-time · #7638
Parth Parikh
Personal blog · pncnmnp.github.io/blogs · on HN as pncnmnpsystemshistory
Parth Parikh's personal blog at pncnmnp.github.io covers systems and history. Since 2021, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “Roaring Bitmaps”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Parth Parikh's Roaring Bitmaps post as a simpler alternative to HyperLogLog for counting, in a thread on distributed counters. Other linked comments cite no specific post.
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.
personal site
Most-linked posts?
- Roaring Bitmaps3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-03-02
- General Guide for exploring large open-source codebases3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-02
- Spectral Bloom Filters for Client-Side Search2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-01
- Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-15
- The Secret World of Data Structures and Algorithms2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-08
- Playing Twenty Questions with ChatGPT2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-18
What Hacker News says?
I remember playing with Manim last year. I wrote a blog-post regarding the same: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/manim.html Some of their older documentation (now less relevant) is available on Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200122124703/https://manim-tb-...
Comment linking /blogs/manim.html
on “Manim – an animation engine for explanatory math videos”Submitted Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000) as a story · 139 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if it's a big deal for business, but for my bachelor's thesis, we showed how we could use a type of counting bloom filters (mentioned in the blog) known as Spectral Bloom Filters, for client-side searching on static websites. Basically, it means doing all the searching and ranking directly on the client side, without needing to send any requests to the server. https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/spectral-bl…
Comment linking /blogs/spectral-bloom-filters.html
on “A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters”Submitted We'll buy back your Typewriter for Uncle Sam as a story · 130 points
HN discussionMakes me think about Dijkstra being horrified to learn that the US was sending astronauts into space using unproven computer code [0]. Eventually, we'll have programmers trusting the AI generated code as much as we trust compiler generated code. Sometimes I think this will be the evolution of programming (like binary to assembler to compiled to interpreted to generated )... Other times I think about how we've grown…
Comment linking /blogs/translating-dijakstra.html
on “Over 100k Infected Repos Found on GitHub”Submitted IBM 305 RAMAC and the 1960 Winter Olympics as a story · 95 points
HN discussionWhen my friends and I were undergrads (3rd year, I believe), we had an absolute blast exploring this exact topic - the intersection of Bloom Filters and client side searching. So much so that it became part of our undergrad thesis. It all started when Stavros's blog was circulated on Hacker News! The way we approached the search part was by using "Spectral Bloom Filters" - https://theory.stanford.edu/~matias/papers/…
Comment linking /blogs/sthir-talk-2020.pdf
on “Bloom filters are good for search that does not scale”Submitted To Make, or to Buy: The Economics of Decision Models as a story · 75 points
HN discussionHyperLogLog and PostgreSQL: https://github.com/citusdata/postgresql-hll Or even simpler, Roaring Bitmaps: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/roaring-bitmaps.html https://blog.quastor.org/p/grab-rate-limiting https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/CRoaring
Comment linking /blogs/roaring-bitmaps.html
on “Netflix's Distributed Counter Abstraction”Submitted Timing Wheels as a story · 51 points
HN discussionThanks! I'm still going through the tutorial, but this looks neat! I love ATC games. There are some other fun ones out there, like ATC-Manager-2 ( https://github.com/sempostma/atc-manager-2 ) and BSD's atc ( https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=atc ). On Android, I've had fun memories playing Endless ATC and Unmatched Air Traffic Control. One thing I've noticed about these ATC games is that they tend to be more…
Comment linking /blogs/navitrainer.html
on “OpenScope Air Traffic Control Simulator”Submitted Tangoing with a Martin Gardner Word Game as a story · 48 points
HN discussion> Rather than determining if the current site has been submitted by querying the Firebase/Algolia APIs with every page you visit, the extension contains regularly-updating Bloom filters for all submitted HN stories to preserve user privacy. Nice! I built a pi-hole esque stub dns-resolver that uses Bloom Filters generated from hostfiles (60 MiB, 5M entries --> 2 MiB with 1% false positives) and it worked like a charm…
Comment linking /blogs/spectral-bloom-filters.html
on “Show HN: Hackernews-Button – Bloom Filter-based, private HN browsing extension”Submitted Roaring Bitmaps as a story · 14 points
HN discussionFor fun, a while back, I built a small-scale crossword solver. It used Moby's thesaurus, pre-trained word vectors, and Wordnet to guess probable solutions and used an SMT solver to arrange those solutions on the grid. Github: https://github.com/pncnmnp/Crossword-Solver Blog-post: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/crossword-1.html
Comment linking /blogs/crossword-1.html
on “I was terrible at crosswords so I built an AI to do them”Submitted Approximate Distance Oracles as a story · 12 points
HN discussionNice article! I am about to reach the five-year mark of blogging ( https://pncnmnp.github.io/blog.html ) - I started during my second year as an undergraduate. Over the years, I've seen that: * Keeping the blogging stack minimal helps. Using simple tools has helped me focus entirely on the content. For instance, I write everything in Google Docs and then manually convert it to HTML. * It is beyond okay to feel stuck…
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Blogging Through the Decades”Submitted Tearing into ChatGPT's Container Environment as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAbsolutely! For inspiration on how roaring bitmaps can be used in practice, check out https://roaringbitmap.org/ . The blog post is part of a book I am writing on obscure data structures ( https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/dsa-book.html ), so explaining the history was a way to dive into the evolution of this topic and the limitations of each implementation, in order to motivate a SOTA.
Comment linking /blogs/dsa-book.html
on “Consistently faster and smaller compressed bitmaps with Roaring (2016)”Submitted The Secret World of Data Structures and Algorithms, Chapter 4 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHey everyone, if you're looking for a more approachable guide on bitmap compression, I wrote a blog post on it this year: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/roaring-bitmaps.html . It covers run-length encoding, BBC, WAH, Concise, and even Roaring Bitmaps.
Comment linking /blogs/roaring-bitmaps.html
on “Consistently faster and smaller compressed bitmaps with Roaring (2016)”Submitted Scrambling Eggs for Spotify with Knuth's Fibonacci Hashing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI recently wrote a fun blog post ( https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/odd-sketches.html ) about how to estimate Jaccard Similarity using min hashing, what b-bit min hashing is, and how to improve upon its limitations using a 2014 data structure called odd sketches. Jaccard Similarity's history is also quite interesting. From my blog: > In the late 19th century, the United States and several European nations were focuse…
Comment linking /blogs/odd-sketches.html
on “Jaccard Index”Submitted Before Xerox, there was Addressograph as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI enjoy reading and writing about unusual data structures. Recently, I wrote a blog post on KHyperLogLog ( https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/khyperloglog.html ), which is a data structure that estimates the privacy risks of very large databases. If you're interested in this topic, I have also written about: * Approximate Distance Oracles ( https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/distance-oracles.html ), and * Spectral Bloom F…
Comment linking /blogs/spectral-bloom-filters.html
on “Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?”Submitted What do Kirchhoff, Cayley, and Carroll have in common? And who is Kahrimanian? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://pncnmnp.github.io/blog.html I like blogging about data structures, algorithms, research papers that I find interesting, and topics related to the history of computing.
Comment linking /blog.html
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Tinker Postman Collector Scribe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted One Billion Row Challenge in Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tangoing with a Martin Gardner Word Game as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
