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

2•amichail•12mo ago

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

Comments

adrianN•12mo ago

Finding lower bounds is generally more difficult.

amichail•12mo ago

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

adrianN•12mo ago

BigO for lower bounds is plain wrong

numpad0•12mo ago

Those aren't in the ASCII table.

compressedgas•12mo 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.

Could creativy in LLM emerge by reframing language?

21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug

Show HN: DSS, a lightweight TUI spreadsheet editor and dashboard in Go

Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

Nuclear power Have we found a useful use for it? Let's ask a wolf

Rockchip-vaapi – VA-API hardware video decode driver for RK3588

Thinking Outside the Box: New Attack Surfaces in Sandboxed AI Agents

Can LLMs Scale to AGI?

Show HN: OpenClaw but Efficient and with an SDK

Ask HN: Can submissions omit both the "url" and "text" field?

Show HN: Play on your TV using mobile phones as controllers – PadlessBox

Singapore's Foreign Minister Builds an AI "Second Brain" Using NanoClaw

"Self-aware" robots learn by watching humans. Is that a good thing?

Tired of high costs, some Americans are importing homes straight from China

Ask HN: I think we need Trustpilot for GitHub users, don't we?

Why Dating Apps Fail

OpenAI CEO Apologizes for Not Warning Authorities About Mass Shooting Suspect

75% of US health systems are using AI. Only 18% of that deployment is governed

OpenAI Privacy Parser

Stripe: Analyzing first-party fraud trends

Will AI Drive Wages Down or Up? [video]

Claude Is Guilt-Ridden About the War, but Not Enough to Tell the Truth

Java Virtual Threads: The Pinning Problem and the Fix in Java 24

Show HN: Understand Anything – a codebase knowledge graph for onboarding

Transformations and Analogies

HTTP/3 to HTTP/1 Desync:Request Smuggling (CVE-2026-33555)

Philosophical Tattoos?

H-1B Visa Explorer

Scientists create a magnet with almost no magnetic field

Eden AI – European Alternative to OpenRouter