Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pavlov 3068 days ago
Consider the simplest case where your set members are just bits.

If you have three bits and you care about the order, that's a 3-bit number -- it can take 8 different values.

If you have those same bits but you don't care about the order, the operation is a "bit count" -- you can only have 4 different values.