Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 269 posts.

Databases & Data
198

Finding unique items: hash vs. sort

A while back, I was trying to speed up some code which finds unique items in a collection. For example, transforming "AABBADCAB" => "ABDC" . There are two ways to do this efficiently - one is based on sorting, the other based on hashing. So, which is faster? I couldn't find the answer, so I ran some experiments and…