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.

Show HN: Nameplate, a name and a status bar color for every VS Code window

Drones hit two ships off coast of Bulgaria, sinking one

Show HN: Manage Skills, Memories, and Agents.md Files Across Tools and Projects

Redis in the Wild: Unexpectedly Bumping into Antirez in His Hometown

Fx 40

Render IA: renders de arquitectura con inteligencia artificial

Pratītyasamutpāda: The 2,500 Year Old Rule Behind Einstein and CRDTs

Anthropic Subscriptions Offer 5x+ More Value Than OpenAI

SPUR: New standard for tracking AI tools' use of publishers' content

WSP MCP – Free MCP Plugin for WordPress

MVCC and Replay-Based Rebasing OCC (Re2OCC)

Every country has its own Internet now

Bei Stau: Retungsgasse (move-over lane) [video]

Bringing predictive analytics to the agentic AI era

Karl Deisseroth on winning the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine

Europe is pouring billions into space. Can Glasgow's satellite industry keep up?

Show HN: Purify-edge, DOMPurify without jsdom that runs on Cloudflare Workers

Scaling Kubernetes Workloads with Node Swap

Why does earthquake prediction remain impossible

Where Is the Love in Renoir?

Scala Almost Succeeded

Show HN: Thyme – A New AI-Based App Reverse Engineering Tool

Long-Gone Newspaper Was the Best Job I Ever Had

PHPStan 2.3: Leap in Performance, Generics, Detecting Unused Variables

Ask HN: Alternatives to NeurIPS, ICLR and ICML

New repository settings for configuring pull request access

Ask HN: Would you pay for saving AI cost?

Proof-Carrying-BPF Programs for the eBPF Verifier

Show HN: YardSmart – a simpler way to rent construction equipment locally

Effects of creatine supplementation with and without exercise