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.

Latvian government collapses after Ukrainian drones strike oil facility

Musk accused of 'selective amnesia,' Altman of lying as OpenAI trial nears end

Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha

White-collar workers report growing feelings of 'AI brain fry'

How Do VPNs Protect Your Privacy? VPN Overview

Secrets at Rest: SOPS and Age for Docker Compose Homelabs

Self-destructing $2k Nvidia chips for distributed solar data ctrs in lampposts

I ran forensics on closed models and discovered no one is using dense attention

Countdown to Apophis Close Approach–Cascading Hazards from Asteroid Impacts

Systematically Auditing AI Agent Benchmarks with BenchJack

Show HN: Trailmaps.app – Mobile maps that match the trail

Musk's China trip during OpenAI trial prompts apology from his lawyer

How to Fix "DMARC Quarantine/Reject Policy Not Enabled"

How do you tell who's thinking?

Ingest – Capture Anything from Anywhere

Cowboy files plans for up to 20k orbital data centers

Bay Area customers may face warnings, fees under Recology's new camera system

Water on Earth

Big tech is sacrificing its cashflows to prop up the AI boom

Possible Samsung strike puts more pressure on memory pricing

Beyond Git: Coordinating humans, agents, and automation in a repo with a ledger

Audit of Serai's Substrate Blockchain

The secretive and lucrative world of orchid breeding

Spam Resistant Forges

Untangling Communication (2001) [pdf]

Don't let your old NVMe gather dust: It's the fastest USB stick you own

AI Wellbeing – Measuring and Improving the Functional Pleasure and Pain of AIs

Heads up: new Google support scam uses a REAL email from Google: sysadmin

US plans to indict Cuba's Raul Castro, US DOJ official says

We Didn't Ask for This Internet