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.

The Misalignment Is Within: Why Mathematics Must Embrace the AI Paradigm

OSS Author of Guake, HTTPretty, Lettuce and Sure is unemployed and needs help

Chrome Extension Job Alerts

The Death of Reading (With James Marriott) [audio]

Graph Technology Roundup – August 2026

Why China Can't Innovate (2014)

An Interview with Rich Jaycobs

The Complete History of the Elves of Middle-Earth [video]

A Key Safety Feature Shipped in the May OpenTofu Release

Show HN: A game about fake news and memes

Rendering pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app

Australia says OpenAI agent hacked into government website

Pentagon Investigating How F-35 Fighter Jet Parts Bound for US Were Diverted

AP: Avoid language that gives [AI] human characteristics

Qubits on NonQuantum HW Tested

Liquid Network Security Incident Assessment

FLAWED's Flaws and What This Means for Industry Research

Geminigravit Core: De la teoría estática

We used an AI agent to fix an open-source bug. Someone asked to ban us

Shadow roots, explained with live examples

Show HN: Does per-step reasoning effort save money in Claude Code?

Show HN: ChaosTree – Cache-Aware Java NavigableMap and NavigableSet Library

Show HN: Posting Puzzle – A Game Made of Post's Correspondence Problem

AI startups with hyper ARR growth – what's happening inside these companies?

Nesbox: A fast MicroVM with GPU sharing

Using my transit card data to create a year in review experience

Virtio-nvgpu: Near-native Nvidia GPU access inside a KVM guest

Scientists build most accurate atomic clock

AI Has Cracked the Most Diabolical Problems in Math. Why Can't It Solve Chess?

lm-detector: Model fingerprint detection on Web and CLI