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All probabilistic structures are fascinating to me. I'm most enamored with HyperLogLog - estimating the number of distinct elements in extremely large sets of d
by groby_b 4y ago
All probabilistic structures are fascinating to me. I'm most enamored with HyperLogLog - estimating the number of distinct elements in extremely large sets of data without having to build a set of seen elements - but the entire field is pretty awesome.
The canonical use case for HLL is counting unique visitors. But any large dataset where you only need a good approximation is a valid target :)
- drinkcocacola 4y agoI used to work for a mobile analytics company, and HLL made things SO much easier and fast that at the time we changed all our queries to be based on HLL. At the time, the ability of being able to sum uniques was like black magic, and still to this day I am quite impressed about HyperLogLog.