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Ye gods, what a waste of time. This is what you get when you let reddit brogrammers run away with their own pedestrian imaginations.

  To keep a count of uniques, you have 
  to store every IP address that you 
  ever see. And upon receiving a new IP 
  address, you have to first check that 
  the new IP address has not been run 
  across before, and only then do you 
  increment the site counter. Under the 
  best of situations, the storage and 
  the computation probably scale 
  as O(log(n)).
Okay, guy. Scamper off back to your SEO click-bait advertising gif banner day job, and don't work on anything important.

The seas are boiling the foundations of the ecosystem in a stew of toxic waste and plastic. Species are going extinct. Governments are waging wars with robots, while starving countries are crushed, bought and sold wholesale, and spy satellites are enumerating all of us, as we walk to seven eleven for another pack of smokes, and here's an article about tracking unique users by... checking their... IP adresses...

What is this? 1998?



It looks like you stopped reading after the second paragraph; this caused you to completely mischaracterize the OP.

In particular, the paragraph you quoted is the second in the OP; in it, the author is summarising the conventional technique not the one they propose.

of course, this is a common device--ie, "here's the conventional way to do X; here's what we propose here"

in other words, to provide the appropriate context, the paragraph you copied above, should be prefaced with "here's the conventional way to do X"

and in fact, the next paragraph, begins like this: "With the HyperLogLog counter it’s all different"


This is all just an over-engineered way of saying:

"If a person's lifetime tally of all unique fans (say: 150 different people, cumulative) consistently matches the typical number of unique fans per thread/article (say: ~135 on any particular post) then those fans are probably employees with vested interests"

(in other words, it's the same people upvoting that guy every time, and they're all in a gang)

You don't need big O notation and hash tables to conflate that idea.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality




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