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    Timo Bingmann

    panthema.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2013

    Timo Bingmann is a computer scientist who writes about algorithms, data structures, and tools, including Sound of Sorting and STX B+ tree.

    Visit blogRSSHN submissions
    ProgrammingSystems & Performance
    What HN says

    HN links it for the Sound of Sorting visualization, the STX B+ tree, and the COBS index and NVMe access speed posts.

    Stats for nerds
    31HN people shared it
    20linked in comments
    114story points
    Nov 2025last shared
    2013people per year2025

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      The Sound of Sorting – "Audibilization" and Visualization of Algorithms (2013)
      20 people · 92 points · first shared 2013 · 8 comments on HN
    2. 2
      CryptoTE – An Easy to Use Text Editor with Integrated Encryption
      1 person · 16 points · first shared 2016 · 10 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Speedtest and Comparsion of Open-Source Cryptography Libraries (2008)
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2014 · Discussion on HN
    4. 4
      Parallel Super Scalar String Sample Sort
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2013 · Discussion on HN
    5. 5
      Digup – A Digest Updating Tool
      1 person · 1 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Vibe Coding, QWERTY, and US Healthcare
      1 person · 1 points · first shared 2026 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      Stx btree
      2 people · first shared 2014
    8. 8
      0322 nvme batched block access speed
      1 person · first shared 2022
    9. 9
      1206 Thrill High Performance Algorithmic Distributed Batch Data Processing with CPP
      1 person · first shared 2017
    10. 10
      1008 COBS A Compact Bit Sliced Signature Index
      1 person · first shared 2025

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • ColinWrightFeb 2020

      Here's how it was made: https://panthema.net/2013/sound-of-sorting/

      It's history here on HN is intriguing, and a little sad. So many submissions, so little discussion. Do people feel that there's nothing to be said?

      3 comments:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6829772

      2 comments:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819544

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6536773

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6138505

      1 comment:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10768096

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9385926

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805803

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140319

      Many of the preceding comments were people just saying that there were lots of submissions, but no comments!

      Even so, there are, indeed, so many submissions with no comments at…

    • pauldixNov 2025

      I believe you could do this effectively with COBS (COmpact Bit Sliced signature index): https://panthema.net/2019/1008-COBS-A-Compact-Bit-Sliced-Signature-Index/

      It's a pretty neat algorithm from a paper in 2019 for the application "to index k-mers of DNA samples or q-grams from text documents". You can take a collection of bloom filters built for documents and then combine them together to have a single filter that will tell you which docs it maps to. Like an inverted index meets a bloom filter.

      I'm using it in a totally different domain for an upcoming release in InfluxDB (time series database).

      There's also code online here: https://github.com/bingmann/cobs

    • gvinciguerraJan 2021

      Hi @jabberwcky! The plot refers to a B+tree implementation optimised for main-memory (https://panthema.net/2007/stx-btree/). We didn't show the performance for larger/smaller page sizes because in our machine they performed poorly. Indeed, you can see from the figure that the fastest B+tree configuration had page size set to 512 bytes. The one using 1024-byte pages is already much slower, that's why we didn't clutter the plot with page sizes larger than 1k ;)

    • xani_Sep 2022

      Someone did test exactly that:

      https://panthema.net/2019/0322-nvme-batched-block-access-speed/

      From my experience as long as you can do that access multithreaded you won't really be penalized for random reads. Single threaded access I've seen as much as read performance halved (used fio for testing), but that didn't translate into multithreaded benchmarks

    • lorenzhsMay 2018

      Nope that’s more like cache write speed. Single-threaded sequential access to RAM is typically more like 10-15GB/s for current server CPUs: https://panthema.net/2013/pmbw/results.html - it’s true that workstation machines tend to have somewhat higher sequential throughout compared to the server-heavy list at that URL, but it’s more like 20GB/s, not 50-60.

    • clvtorFeb 2019

      few sorting links with explanations and visualizations:

      https://imgur.com/gallery/RM3wl

      https://panthema.net/2013/sound-of-sorting/

      https://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/sorting-visualisation-sortification-and-sonification-of-an-algorithm/

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