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It looks like you stopped reading after the second paragraph; this caused you to completely mischaracterize the OP. In particular, the paragraph you quoted is
by doug1001 10y ago
It looks like you stopped reading after the second paragraph; this caused you to completely mischaracterize the OP.
In particular, the paragraph you quoted is the second in the OP; in it, the author is summarising the conventional technique not the one they propose.
of course, this is a common device--ie, "here's the conventional way to do X; here's what we propose here"
in other words, to provide the appropriate context, the paragraph you copied above, should be prefaced with "here's the conventional way to do X"
and in fact, the next paragraph, begins like this: "With the HyperLogLog counter it’s all different"
- throwaway973201 10y agoThis is all just an over-engineered way of saying: "If a person's lifetime tally of all unique fans (say: 150 different people, cumulative) consistently matches the typical number of unique fans per thread/article (say: ~135 on any particular post) then those fans are probably employees with vested interests" (in other words, it's the same people upvoting that guy every time, and they're all in a gang) You don't need big O notation and hash tables to conflate that idea. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality