BSD, Ruby, Rust, Rambling
Find the best-possible Elite Dangerous Shields
In the popular space simulation game, Elite Dangerous, one of the challenges is determining how best to outfit your ship — if you’re going into combat, choosing the right shield, with the right boosters and the right engineering can be the difference between life or death.
So why not sap the fun out of it by using a computer to work out the best configuration for us?
Continue ReadingIt has, like, graphs, and stuff.
Bloom filters are one of my favourite data structures, in no small part because of just how simple they are.
I first encountered them when I worked at Newzbin, when we needed a way of quickly determining if we’d seen a Usenet Message-ID before.
Their simplicity meant we were very quickly able to go from concept to a stable general-purpose microservice which served us well for many years.
One of the trickier aspects is knowing how to size one - typically you know how many items and what sort of false-positive rate you can stand, but how do you translate that to how many bits you need and how many hash functions to use?
Well, bam. The latest iteration of my calculator can calculate almost any valid set of parameters, and give you pretty graphs in real time, while offering server-side fallback. I hope you find it useful.