Hi, I'm working on a puzzle that involves analyzing all size k subsets and figuring out which one is optimal. I wrote a solution that works when the number of subsets is small, but it runs out of memory for larger problems. Now I'm trying to translate an iterative function written in python to java so that I can analyze each subset as it's created and get only the value that represents how optimized it is and not the entire set so that I won't run out of memory. Here is what I have so far and it doesn't seem to finish even for very small problems:

public static LinkedList<LinkedList<Integer>> getSets(int k, LinkedList<Integer> set)
{
    int N = set.size();
    int maxsets = nCr(N, k);
    LinkedList<LinkedList<Integer>> toRet = new LinkedList<LinkedList<Integer>>();

    int remains, thresh;
    LinkedList<Integer> newset; 
    for (int i=0; i<maxsets; i++)
    {
        remains = k;
        newset = new LinkedList<Integer>();
        for (int val=1; val<=N; val++)
        {
            if (remains==0)
                break;
            thresh = nCr(N-val, remains-1);
            if (i < thresh)
            {
                newset.add(set.get(val-1));
                remains --;
            }
            else 
            {
                i -= thresh;
            }
        }
        toRet.add(newset);
    }

    return toRet;

}

Can anybody help me debug this function or suggest another algorithm for iteratively generating size k subsets?

EDIT: I finally got this function working, I had to create a new variable that was the same as i to do the i and thresh comparison because python handles for loop indexes differently.