Nelson Elhage's blog. I write about software and software engineering.
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How do you find near-duplicates in a massive collection of documents? An exploration of the Jaccard similarity metric, and the MinHash hashing trick used to efficiently approximate it at web scale.
MongoDB is perhaps the most-widely-mocked piece of software out there right now. While some of the mockery is out-of-date or rooted in misunderstandings, much of it is well-deserved, and it’s difficult to disagree that much of MongoDB’s engineering is incredibly simplistic, inefficient, and immature compared to…