Ask HN: Why is big O often used in CS when omega or theta should be used?

2•amichail•1y ago

Do most people not know about omega and theta or perhaps they intentionally misuse asymptotic notation?

Comments

adrianN•1y ago

Finding lower bounds is generally more difficult.

amichail•1y ago

People often use big O notation in all cases including for lower bounds.

adrianN•1y ago

BigO for lower bounds is plain wrong

numpad0•1y ago

Those aren't in the ASCII table.

compressedgas•1y ago

I've found some people on a well known QA site to be so strict with big-O notation that I don't use it anymore and instead only refer to constant, linear, quadratic time and so on. Even when O(1), O(n), O(n^2) would be actually easier to write even if they are technically wrong.

Jesse Nickles, the guy behind SlickStack, is under a criminal arrest warrant

Gas Station "Royal Honey" tests positive for opiates, Viagra component

Proposed data centre would release 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs of energy/day

Postmortem on Claude Code Cursor extension hack

Ex-o2 FRITZ Box 6660 Cable: enabling LAN 1 as WAN via a bootloader variable

Sub-microsecond SEC 15c3-5 risk checks on AWS F2 via FPGA MMIO

Why Agent Memory Benchmarks Need a Reproducible Evaluation Pipeline

Trump Demands a Cut of Alina Habba's $50M Pardon Deal

Iain McGilchrist: Great discoveries are not made following the scientific method

Reason you should still learn Machine Learning/Deep Learning, etc.

Show HN: The Agentic State

Katamari Damacy but it's The Met collection

Ask for Advice about JavaScript

Silicon Socialism – East Germany's Microchip Race

New AI-driven malware feeds stolen data to Claude to rank victims' assets

ChatGPT: Chat and Work are coming together in one experience

Show HN: Complete Trading Chart engine for web

WeVisCut: The Whole Editing Room in One Agent, from Narration to Long-Form Video

A Powerful Mosquito-Hunting Laser Uses A.I. To Zap Winged Pests

F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix

How to Model "Taarof" with AI [video]

AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture

Junk debt rout sparks 'bloodbath' for credit investors

AI Can Write More of the Code. We Still Have to Engineer the System

Optical Circuit Switch Technology Built on Low-Loss Silicon Photonics Platform

Zhipu AI: China's Enterprise AI Champion [video]

An insecure world built on trust stores

Bones may release proteins that slow aging and extend life span

OS X crammed onto an HTC Shift tablet (2010)

Climate Data Scientist Explains What the Numbers Mean