I want to have a very large hash table, i.e. so big it won't fit into memory. What's a good way to do that? I could use a database, but since it's only going to be key => value pairs that I am storing ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, encountered a paper that would change his life.

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew ...