Live data from Hacker News

Michael Rabin has died

en.wikipedia.org

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: Michael Rabin has died

#31
post #18

Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace. Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated. I've been meaning to write…

I recently found his fingerprint algorithm and wrote a utility that uses it to find duplicate MIPS code for decompilation[0] and build unique identifiers that can be used to find duplicates without sharing any potentially copyrighted data[1].

This replaced some O(n²) searches through ASCII text, reducing search time from dozens of seconds to fractions of a second.

0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch 1 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch/wiki/Identifiers

Re: Michael Rabin has died

#34
post #3

I took his Introduction to Cryptography class when he was a visiting professor at Columbia. Absolute master of an old-school chalkboard lecturer. They don't make them like that any more.

I know him from Harvard and came here to say pretty much the same thing. RIP.

Re: Michael Rabin has died

#35
post #7

First sentence starts with horrible antisemitism. Can someone fix it? (on my phone with kids so not in a position to)

I used to regularly donate to the wikimedia foundation every year. I stopped doing that as I find the whole project is now a political tool and cannot be relied on. Even ignoring vandalism like here, sometimtes the same articles get different meanings depending on the language you view them in.

Re: Michael Rabin has died

#36
post #18

Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace. Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated. I've been meaning to write…

I'm working on a data annotation system based around Rabin fingerprints. They're a really neat idea.

I especially like how if you end up with hash characteristics that you don't like, your can just select a different irreducible Galois polynomial and now you've got a whole new hash algorithm. It's like tuning to a different frequency.

For me it means I don't have to worry about cases where there aren't enough nearby fingerprints for the annotation to adhere to, I can just add or remove polynomials until I get a good density.

Re: Michael Rabin has died

#37
post #27

"As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher." Interesting. Some people are lucky enough to find their vocation quite early in life.

Wow hadn't heard of him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Netanyahu

Yeah.

Everything is intertwined at some level.

Interesting.

Re: Michael Rabin has died

#38
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep adding different slurs. Awful and disgraceful.

Anti-Jew rhetoric is at a level unseen since WW2. It’s the new normal. It’s horrible.

Yeah, I come into contact with some form of Jewish hate on a literal daily basis now. It’s been this way for months.
Post reply on HN