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Links for 2012-12-03

  • Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

    The Register’s take on the early days of www.bbc.co.uk. Lots of politics, unsurprisingly.

    Fifteen years ago this month the BBC launched its News Online website. Developed internally with a skeleton team, the web service rapidly became the face of the BBC on the internet, and its biggest success story – winning four successive BAFTA awards. Remarkably, it operated at a third of the cost of rival commercial online news operations – unheard of in public-sector IT projects. Devised before there were really any content management systems, the technical architecture became a template for all major news systems, and one that’s still in use today. The team endured some furious internal politicking and sabotage to survive.

    (tags: bbc news history web uk the-register)

  • Irish mobile phone companies: still spammy

    ‘Pro tip: if you’re going to spam, try not to spam the DPC’s Director of Investigations.’ — lolz

    (tags: funny oh-dear three hutchinson ireland mobile spam dpc law)

  • Hamming weight

    Wikipedia page.

    The Hamming weight of a string is the number of symbols that are different from the zero-symbol of the alphabet used. It is thus equivalent to the Hamming distance from the all-zero string of the same length. For the most typical case, a string of bits, this is the number of 1’s in the string. In this binary case, it is also called the population count, popcount or sideways sum. It is the digit sum of the binary representation of a given number.
    Contains an efficient algorithm to compute this for a given long value, by ‘adding counts in a tree pattern.’

    (tags: algorithms hamming-distance bits hamming weight binary)

  • Efficient concurrent long set and map

    An ordered set and map data structure and algorithm for long keys and values, supporting concurrent reads by multiple threads and updates by a single thread.
    Some good stuff in the linked blog posts about Clojure’s PersistentHashMap and PersistentVector data structures, too.

    (tags: arrays java tries data-structures persistent clojure concurrent set map)

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