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data structures.
I especially love learning about real world use cases of data structures.
What’s your favorite data structure (bonus if it’s something you’ve coded in real life to solve a fun problem). 
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Uhmmm, why are hash lookups O(N)?
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In the space of the input, it's because hash("foobar") takes twice as long as hash("foo"). A trie is often more efficient, in that same space, and overall .. . which defies expectations driven by inaccurate over-simplification.
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Hash tables are probabilisticly balanced trees, stored semi-flattened.
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This is the best take.
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Wrote some Patricia Trie stuff for an IP-address oriented use case a while back, and was very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was.
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This Tweet is unavailable.
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You can pack a trie like a b-tree for cache efficiency, and pipeline pre-fetching at least has a shot with a tree access. Hashes have no cache locality or predictability But you're right, and it depends on the data set and the problem.
End of conversation
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Data structures and algorithmic analysis? This is the kind of conversation that keeps me on twitter...
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