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.

Cyber Letters of Marque and Reprisal – Digital Privateers to Combat Cyber Crime

L3 Simulator: agent orchestrator over GH issues

Google Gemini Launch Delayed as Tech Falls Short of Internal Goals

California authorizes its DMV to join a national ID database

JD Vance: Jeffrey Epstein had clear connection to Mossad

Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway

AI disruption in private credit: exposure to software firms in BDCs (BIS)

NASA Dragonfly - a rotorcraft to explore Saturn's moon Titan

Connect more of your apps to Search

Linus Torvalds rebukes anti-AI stances in the Linux kernel code review process

Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Removable Battery Replacement Procedure

Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI

MergeStat: Query your Git repo with SQL

Young Drivers Are Going 'Psycho' on the Road–and Filming It

CLR: Checker of Lifetimes and other Refinement types for Zig

SPCX is now Wall Street's most shorted new stock

Minefield Quiz: Countries of the World with No Borders

Pricklypear: Vibeslop Interpreted Lisp with Postgres AST, Written in OCaml

React Native in 2026

Show HN: easy-tz – A fast, 10KB, dependency-free getTimeZonesAt(timestamp)

OneCommander: Modern File Manager for Windows 11 and 10

Switzerland turned its train tracks into solar power plants

Show HN: A Claude Code skill that finds dev tools – or stays silent

Kbd-1.0-Codex-Micro

Can AI reliably generate dashboards from Excel or CSV files?

Choosing GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, or Luna in Codex

Show HN: Pagora AI, WordPress AI page builder that outputs plain HTML/CSS/JS

Show HN: MechArchive – an open, sourced catalog of the robots

The Moment Steven Bartlett Realizes His Podcast Is Compromised [video]

Capture Clauses as Effects