Hacker News Reader

This is a cute example, but it misses the mark. The efficient way to do fast nearest neighbor search is with a search tree (e.g., KDTree or BallTree), which brings down query time from linear to logarithmic in the number of items.

View on HN

Agreed, but since those two concerns are separate (algorithmic improvement vs. taking advantage of parallel hardware) I'm not sure I'd categorize this as "missing the mark" so much as that's a further improvement that could be made. For a blog post that looks to be an attempt to tout methods to easily exploit data parallelism, I think focusing on algorithmic improvement would be counter productive.

I tend to agree, but there is a tendency to throw hardware at things where some algorithmic improvements would work much better. See for example this blog post

http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com