Mental hashing for paper address books (with Python)

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/2010-October/000517.html

by limmeau • 16 years ago

49 11 16 years ago

lists.canonical.org

phreeza• 16 years ago

One problem I see with the evaluation is he uses a generic English corpus. The real application is names though, which probably have different statistical properties. Shouldn't be too hard to find a list of real names somewhere on the web.

edit: here for example http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm

limmeau• 16 years ago

Thanks for the link. Hash function "First and fourth letter" wins for english surnames:

https://gist.github.com/bd9fabf91a5501b215c5

(I copied the names table from your link and applied the original program to it)

lars512• 16 years ago

There's a tradeoff between speed of lookup and ability to find things when you only partially recall the name. For those situations (the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon), I'd pick either the first and final letters as the easiest to recall, or the first and second letters. The fourth letter won't be easy to retrieve unless you recall the name exactly.

kragen3• 16 years ago

This is awesome! Thanks!

The reason I used English corpus words was precisely that I did not have this surname frequency list handy.

I don't think this is a list of English names, though. #18 is Garcia, and #19 is Martinez, and so on. It's a list of US names. A similar list for Argentina would probably be most useful for me at the moment.

Amnon• 16 years ago

Did anyone notice the mailing list? It's one dedicated to the author. Interesting alternative for a blog.

gwern2• 16 years ago

I will say one thing, a blog would have trouble surviving since 1998: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-hacks/

kragen3• 16 years ago

The mailing list is having some trouble surviving, too. Apparently at some point Google decided our domain was spammy, and all the Gmail subscribers started getting their mail automatically spam-filtered. I contacted a bunch of people directly (via Google Talk or Facebook) to get them to fish the latest mail out of the spambox.

Beyond that, I don't know what to do. I guess I could post more often.

I certainly need a better blog interface for it. What I have right now is http://www.bentwookie.org/blog.

silentbicycle• 16 years ago

There are some real gems on the list, too:

"Smalltalk Performance and Moore's Law" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

"OCaml vs. SBCL, and various other interpreters" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...

"what affects programming language adoption?" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...

(kragen is also kragen here)

kragen3• 16 years ago

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed them.

abecedarius• 16 years ago

Rationale here: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/0...

Mental hashing for paper address books (with Python)

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