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.

SDL Library Adds Support for the New Steam Controller Without Depending on Steam

Justice Department Investigation Determines Yale Discriminated Based on Race

NanoTDB – Golang Append-Only Time Series DB

Known by Their Actions: Fingerprinting LLM Browser Agents via UI Traces

Tachyons Neo – Utility CSS without build step

Show HN: OrcaSheets, local first analytics engine to process billions of rows

How to Enter Side Doors

Nairobi became a nexus for the black market in giant harvester ants

Scryve-tools – Unified wallet auth for CKB, EVM, and BTC in one NPM package

The Earliest Known Dentistry Wasn't Done by Our Species

Show HN: Sanjaya – Academic paper discovery and extraction (OpenAlex/Scrapy)

Rest alone doesn't fix burnout. Here's the structural reason why

Show HN: One Markdown File to Set Up Claude, Codex, Cursor and Copilot

Show HN: Domain DMARC Checker

Overseas fakers using AI videos to push a narrative of UK decline, BBC finds

Show HN: Mailenc – Test if your PGP email setup works

AI Will Not Make Everyone More Productive

Britain's latest civil servant is a chatbot trained on Gov.uk misery

Ask HN: How do you listen to research papers? (TTS workflows for commutes)

Ways in which GenAI has changed the way I write code so far

Geography is four-dimensional

Show HN: My time has come – let Claude Code wrap up before 5-hour usage runs out

Stochastic Parrots: Frequently Unasked Questions

Node 26.1.0 – experimental node:FFI module

Best Realtime Voice Agent in 2026

Tech groups score win on clean energy rules for gas-powered data centres

Giggle for Girls app discriminated against trans woman; judges double damages

Apple's iPhone 18 Modem Switch Comes with a Quiet Privacy Benefit

Galileo's Basilisk

UK sovereign LLM inference