[dmunoz]

Only tangentially related to your comment, but last year there was a series of postings "Damn Cool Algorithms" in which the last post covered HyperLogLog in the post on cardinality estimation [0]. Some discussion in the HackerNews submission [1].

[0] http://blog.notdot.net/2012/09/Dam-Cool-Algorithms-Cardinali... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488946