A reflection on an experience I had while interviewing.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in with web technology. In high school, I read Jesse Liberty’s Complete Idiot`s Guide to a Career in Computer Programming learning about Perl, CGI (common gateway interface), HTML, and other technologies. It wasn’t until I finished a degree in mathematics that I really started learning the basics, namely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. At that point, folks were just starting to come out of the dark ages of table-base layouts and experimenting with separating content (HTML) from presentation (CSS) from behavior (JavaScript).

Today we’re going to talk about what a Bloom filter is and discuss some of the applications in data science. In a later post, we’ll build a simple implementation with the goal of learning more about how they work. What is a Bloom Filter? A Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure. Let’s break that term down. Any time you hear the word “probabilistic” the first thing that should come to mind is “error.