alt Hacker NewsI recently wrote a command-line full-text search engine [1]. I needed to implement an inverted index. I choose what seems like the "dumb" solution at first glance: a trie (prefix tree).
There are "smarter" solutions like radix tries, hash tables, or even skip lists, but for any design choice, you also have to examine the tradeoffs. A goal of my project is to make the code simpler to understand and less of a black box, so a simpler data structure made sense, especially since other design choices would not have been all that much faster or use that much less memory for this application.
I guess the moral of the story is to just examine all your options during the design stage. Machine learning solutions are just that, another tool in the toolbox. If another simpler and often cheaper solution gets the job done without all of that fuss, you should consider using it, especially if it ends up being more reliable.
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Similar I have a script that has the following format: “q replace all onstances of http: with https: in all txt files recurisvely”
And it goes the ChatGPT comes back with and runs the appropriate command.
What body of knowledge (books, tutorials etc) did you use while developing it?
> I choose what seems like the "dumb" solution at first glance: a trie (prefix tree).
> There are "smarter" solutions like... hash tables.... A goal of my project is to make the code simpler to understand and less of a black box, so a simpler data structure made sense, especially since other design choices would not have been all that much faster or use that much less memory for this application.
Strangely, my own software-related answer is the opposite for the same reason.
I was implementing something for which I wanted to approximate a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_common_supersequence , and my research at the time led me to a trie-based approach. But I was working in Python, and didn't want to actually define a node class and all the logic to build the trie, so I bodged it together with a dict (i.e., a hash table).