4 ms·

What's your greatest hack?

• jonmrodriguez 15y ago
  With only 17 hours caffeinated to go before a weekly meeting with my research advisor, and desperate to create some results to show, I accidentally reinvented the Rabin-Karp algorithm for string search: http://stanford.edu/~jonr1/software-faire-poster.jpg http://stanford.edu/~jonr1/software-faire-poster.jpg (see center panel) My thought process at the time was: Shit, brute force string search takes over ten minutes on my data! There must be a way to speed this up. Hm. It probably involves hashing somehow...
  • pestaa 15y ago
    Was it the caffeine or the time constraint? :) Great hack nevertheless! I wonder if the data in question was indexed, it'd have solved your problem in an instant?
    • jonmrodriguez 15y ago
      Mostly the time constraint. Nah, it wasn't indexed, hence the necessity to build up such an index as the first step of the algorithm.
      • pestaa 15y ago
        Yes I realized that, my question was more like, "couldn't you just put the data in a relational database or a full text search engine and avoid reinventing?". Depends on the scenario, of course, and judging by how you solved it, yours seems like an exception, and not rule.