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I went back for a grad degree in CS (starting my third career), and the instructor in algorithms was a complete coding hard-ass--for which I am eternally grateful.
I didn't get my full degree (need a "real" job), but within two years I found the perfect business case for a Heap Sort, and it's been a life saver.
Situation: Need to perform team assignments to incoming records. Along with multiple assignment criteria, the final assignment should be to the guy/gal with the least number of current assignments. Need to process thousands of new team assignments at a time, and make it work out equitably in the end.
Solution: Create a MinHeap to hold each pool of candidates. When a team assignment comes in, pull top (meaning least-assigned) member from each pool, increment their counter, then throw them back into their MinHeap. The MinHeap takes care of keeping the pools organized.
I pretty much took publicly available code, abstracted out the array type, and changed the comparator to be defaulted to min but alterable. That way I can reverse the whole process and add other sorting capabilities if I ever need to.
It's only one use-case, but I've been using it over and over, with only minor modifications, if any. Resorting the entire pool (and having to select different sorting criteria every time) would have slowed the process down quite a bit. Probably not enough for a human to really notice, but I wanted the simplest maintenance arrangement that I could come up with.
vuolsi così colà dove si puote
ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare
--The answer to Minos and any question of "Why are we doing it this way?"
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Sounds interesting. If you can remember where you got the code (or left any copyright notice in place) there could be a good article in there - why not write it up?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Good point! I made sure to keep the source URL in the comments, so that won't be a problem. Since the question came up here, I wouldn't be surprised if the article would be useful.
vuolsi così colà dove si puote
ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare
--The answer to Minos and any question of "Why are we doing it this way?"
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Possibly Wirth book could help. It helped me when I wrote Heap Data Structure and Heap Sort[^] (shameless self-promotion). However I've forgot it and happily use bubblesort all the time 
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I usually sort my laundry into a heap as quickly as I can and them merge it all into the washing machine, if that helps.
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Heap sort is easy. Keep removing Min element for ascending sort. Keep removing Max element for descending sort. The tricky part is understanding how heap data structure allows for log(n) operation for GetMinx() or GetMax()
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This[^] may also be of help.
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Not really. IMO those visualizations work well for more trivial sorts; but once something more interesting is going on behind the scene you need to see more information than sequential item moves gives you. If you don't know how it works why things are moved around in the order they are in quicksort makes no sense. Nor does why a heap sort moves the biggest item to the front while shuffling the rest of the list before flipping it to the back as it orders them down. Ditto for WTE shellsort is doing (not one I'm even vaguely familiar with and neither the visualization, textual description, or code sample are enlightening).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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No clue...
But in 2005 I pay close attention and wrote my own List<T> class with all sort implementation and a little associated commented on when best call which one! 
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You might find this free coursea course of interest
Algorithms, Part I[^]
It's from Princeton University and co-taught by Robert Sedgewick (who was one of Knuth's grad students). It covers all sorts of algos including heapsort.
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Computer Science is a type of Math. With some mathematical proofs, you can explain the "trick" in a sentence or two, and with others you can't. For example, to prove the formula for the area of a right triangle, the trick is form a rectangle with two copies of it. But you can't explain the trick for proving the Pythagorean Theorem briefly. That's also the sitch with heapsort. Proving it involves several non-obvious steps, and you just have to slog through them.
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There are additional important sorting algorithms.
- Radix sort (also called bucket sort) whose performance is O(n logr n) where r is the number of buckets. Some people don't know there are sorts faster than O(n log2 n). Radix sort is interesting because IBM built a mechanical device that could sort data on Hollerith punch cards.
- FlashSort, a variation on radix sort that can sort some key distributions (like a consecutive subset of integers) in O(n).
I understand how heapsort and quicksort work. That's easy. But there are people who really understand them, who can use the pieces efficiently for other work. That's much harder.
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Like someone else said, sure, back when I was in college. But do you need to understand it today? There are tools that do sorting and so many other tasks. You can't understand the inner workings of all of them. Hell, when I come back to some of my old "still working, but now needing a mod" code, I sometimes don't understand it. At least not without some studying and reacquaintance with the problem I was solving at the time. The great majority of sorting I need to do is done via indexes in the database tools I use. Using a HeapSort is not really on my radar. Not that it hurts to internalize it and - if you've got that good of a memory - to remember it, but it's certainly not required.
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Just got this email AND a voicemail:
Hello my name is Tomas and I am a Technical Recruiter working with TEKsystems. I came across your information in our database and wanted to speak with you about your extensive .NET background and the trends that I see here currently in the Southern California market.
"I came across your information in our database"  Ya, ok, sure
"Trends"?? What trends in Southern California?
Please give me a call at your earliest convenience and we can discuss the trends.
I'm reaching for the phone..NOT!
Thanks Kevin I look forward to speaking with you soon.
You wait right by the phone...
Stupid recruiter trolling for commissions again
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Well, per your "signature", it seems his commissions are not broke, so he's seeking to fix it until it is!
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What they actually want is referrals to hiring managers. It's the same reason an agent will ask for references before you've discussed a role/been interviewed. I always say "If they offer me a role, I'll happily give you references". If they don't play, there is no job.
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Worked through them several times. They're ok.
Regards,
Rob Philpott.
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Rob Philpott wrote: Worked through them several times.
Same here. I had no issues with them. One of the gigs was quite good, actually. I never got spammed by them, though. Interesting.
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Ugh, yeah, I hate it when they spam your inbox AND your phone. I mean, if I was the least bit interested, I would have replied to the e-mail instead of tossing it in my junk box and blocking their entire domain.
That's my spam policy at work, by the way... They spam me once, I just block the whole domain... Some notable exceptions, of course.
And I hate the ones that send "On behalf of", so I have to set up manual filters to block the entire mass-mailing service instead of each one individually. "ccsend.com" really annoyed me with that for a while...
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This doesn't seem bad at all. They're just following up with you and trying to update their records. It's sales.
On the other hand, I received one today from a recruiter for a job position that was on the other side of the country and only required a fraction of the experience I have. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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I love reading these from you guys, I've been in the one contract for so long I have fallen off the radar of all agencies. They have a really short attention span, if you are not churning contracts they lose interest real quick.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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XP was a great improvement over 3.1. I skipped the stuff inbetween then and was happy to upgrade to W7.
But I definitely loathed the new Metro look of W8, and I'm really reluctant to install W10. And since I have updates disabled, I haven't been bothered with pesky notices, downloads, and all that crap.
In fact, I bought a nice new laptop a couple weeks ago and opted for W7. It did come with a thumb drive to upgrade to W10, it's sitting somewhere on my desk getting dusty.
So I wonder, what has happened that I'm just not looking forward to upgrading? How did Microsoft kill my enthusiasm? (Well, Metro is one answer.)
Marc
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I find that Windows 10 is a lot better than Windows 8.1 (limited experienced with Win8).
I installed it at home (gaming machine), I only have one minor issue right now is that Diablo 3 freezes, but that is related to the graphic driver.
If your machine is non-critical and has a fresh install of Windows (nothing installed yet), I would upgrade to test it and revert back if necessary.
If you machine is critical, then wait for drivers to stabilized before updating.
I'd rather be phishing!
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To me, XP and Win7 got it right, because all I needed was simple desktop, start menu and file manager. I didn't use any of the other stuff anyway, and in those systems the rest was fairy unobtrusive. A simple stripped down OS suits me just fine.
On top of that I can install applications that are specifically designed for the purpose they are to serve, not MS implementations of the stuff. I find that MS keep making the mistake of giving us features they think we want, rather than what we actually need. Who really needs Cortana in a desktop for instance?
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Who needs Cortana in a desktop? Uh, me. Apparently you haven't used it. It has a LOT to offer.
But keep using your antiquated OS. Ignore all the progress around you.
Meanwhile, I'll be doing things sort of like StarTrek envisioned. I just said, "Hey Cortana launch Insteon" and she told me she was launching Insteon Hub. And up it came. Quicker than moving my hands off the keyboard to touch the touchpad and do a some clicking.
And there is a LOT of other things it does. Just to mention one from yesterday. I ordered something from Amazon. Received a confirmation email from Amazon that contained the tracking number. Later, when I popped up the Cortana UI, there was an item that asked me if I wanted to check the status of my UPS package using the tracking number.
Pretty cool stuff that isn't in XP or Win7.
And in time, there will be a lot more interesting new things.
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