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.

Gescom, MiniDisc and Mind-Boggling Mathematics

Tcpcat – Fast, lightweight network scanner written in Go

I Found Evidence of My House Spinning

Is there a directory for B2B SaaS that doesn't look terrible?

Show HN: Plainoldanalytics: Analytics Middlware for Go

U.S. iPhone 18 Pro Max has Qualcomm modem, all rest use Apple's new C2

Intelligence is not Enough (2023) [video]

Host Quartz Static Site on Bunny.net with Middleware Script

Device Drivers lab exercise – COSC562

Ask HN: What would it look like if AI agents "took over the internet"?

AI Was Supposed to Make Software Cheaper. So Why Is It More Expensive Now?

Show HN: RunBoth, a behaviour diff for code an AI changed

Why the Arena Group Has, Implausibly, Rebranded into an AI Company

The IRS Gave ICE Some Information It Really Shouldn't Have

Mathematicians aren't mourning their craft: Translating "After Math" for SE

Wendell Berry's Message Message to Readers: All We Need Is Here

Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?

FLARE: Verifying MILP Reformulations with LLM-Based Theorem Proving

Show HN: Getdesign – an agent that screenshots any site and writes design.md

JSON parsing in OxCaml: fast, but not too fast

Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Werner Vogels becomes Omarchy patron

Ask HN: Have LLMs demonstrated the ability to earn money by themselves?

Squish, Crease, Tear: An Intuition for Open and Continuous Maps in Topology

What David Sachs Got Right About the Anthropic Resignation

TwMillion: 3 Years of DDNet Tutorial at once [video]

Addons.mozilla.org Is Down

Unless the PS5 comes with maracas, I'll keep my Dreamcast (2020)

Token efficient Pi through Auto-Research

Show HN: My weekend build that brings Astra VM agents to WhatsApp