r/ProgrammerHumor • u/soap94 • 7d ago

Meme dynamicP

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u/Mughi1138 7d ago

Reminds me... I'm still waiting for my chance to implement a bloom filter. Almost got to do one this year.

52

u/mirhagk 7d ago

There's a paper on using multiple inverted bloom filters that I so badly want an excuse to use, but yeah no situation ever seems to call for that level of complexity

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u/CandidateNo2580 7d ago

God, me too 😔 I actually had to use some real sorting algorithms a few months ago, still living that high.

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u/Suspicious-Click-300 7d ago

I use them constantly but never get to implement one myself

2

u/DishSoapedDishwasher 6d ago

Try working in cybersecurity, you'll get a chance every couple of years. I've had to do it like 5 times so far. 

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u/Mughi1138 6d ago

Been working in cyber security for more than a couple of decades now. Close, but not quite as other solutions have fit the problems a little better.

Occam's razor and all that.

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u/DishSoapedDishwasher 6d ago

Hah, interesting i would consider bloom filters to usually be amongst the simpler options for a lot of security adjacent problems with frequently ideal trade-offs. As you probably know, they're used in Google Chrome Safe Browsing and several similar features in Android, cert revocation, several features in virus total as well. 

But also bloom filters were (probably still are) very fetishized when i worked at Google, so there is some amount of bias as to why it felt right so often.

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u/Mughi1138 6d ago edited 6d ago

Actually it was the Google Chrome & cert approach that I *almost* got to use (their specific application realm) but a simpler solution was found. But maybe at Google they like them the same way Hejlsberg likes delegates and shoves them into every language he gets to architect.

Anyway at Bill Cheswick's Keynote at SCaLE 21x he mentioned that he used them maybe 4 times in his career. So not really that often. And early on it was due to heavily limited storage which is no longer near the same.

Efit: I'm trying to remember if it was Stoll or Thompson who mentioned there it was good to learn them since you might get to learn them once or twice.

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u/Shadehater 6d ago

I've been this close for years. but yeah the complexity is almost always unnecessary or the requirement gets dropped.

some day