Viewing profile — robconery

I believe we're talking past each other. Big O has nothing to do with "actual run time*. It doesn't care what about the number of inputs you have - just that you have them. Mathema…

The Big O of an algorithm does not change based on data size. Even if your set had precisely 1 record in it - the code you write, if it loops over every item in the set (even if it…

OP here - O(N log N) is not O(n^2). If n is 1000 then log n is 10, which is 1000 * 10 which is 10,000. That's a bit less than 1000 * 1000.

OP here. Agree that thinking about code is better than using a rule of thumb, but we need to start somewhere don't we? I tried to make it clear in the post that looping over n item…

OP here - Big O notation is simply shorthand math. When you're discussing things in this way, time complexity and performance are the same thing. When you care about resource usage…

OP here. Big O is indeed "worst case scenario" always, the size of the data set doesn't matter. An O(n) operation doesn't care if the data is sorted - even if it's the first item a…

Derp. OP here - yep typo and corrected thank you!

OP here - as a matter of fact I try to do just this, starting with the database. I'm mostly a data person so I try to think through, as deeply as I can, what I should expect in eve…

OP here - OP has checked out (and lived with) trinary logic. Just because you appreciate null doesn't mean it should be kept in programming languages and existing programs. That th…

OP here - Yes that's the operation the question wasn't supposed to be a literal one, rather a consistency issue, which illustrates the larger point that different languages deal wi…

>it's not true to say they don't exist in other languages Sounds good, waiting for an example to support this... >It's also wrong to suggest that Null has no place in "logic". Bool…

OP here - I was going to go into that - it's an interesting story. There are null references, as you say, but there's also the null object pattern and the null type. I decided to j…

There are a lot debates about this and from my experience the biggest issue with running PostgreSQL on Windows is the “Windows Tax”: background processes and services you don’t nee…

Thanks for the thoughts. As with many others I'll offer to you that my entire post is not about piracy. I've lived with piracy of my stuff for the last 7 years. Part of doing busin…

It's a little different than the simple theft of a TV, although yes you raise a decent point. As I've been saying to people: just a reasonable effort is all I ask . There is a wate…

Yes, I did. As did Troy. No reponse (now as then). You entirely miss the point of the article - it's not about piracy, it's about a marketplace for pirated goods. That's what Udemy…

Define "dangerous". Listen mate, if you make money on something and that something is stolen - you are responsible. Udemy created this marketplace for stolen things; people steal t…

It's fractionally slower, true, because of the serialization hit (string to binary). The real juice comes from the GIN index - and if you apply it to specific columns instead of a …

The first function matches any call to it with an error - this is how (apparently) you pass error information on to the result. There's no graceful exit with an error. The keyword …

OP here - I wanted to offer a comparison of the SQL vs. the ReQL query. Indeed if ACID is something you need, then yes a horizontally-scaling DB is probably something that deserves…

OP here - many NoSQL/document DBs will trade off write acks for eventual consistency. I really liked their approach to pushing toward durability by default - that in particular was…

I think experience is one thing I'm not short of.

Nope - been at this for 24 or so years now. I wish I was an "underclassman" again - everything was quite fun back then... which I suppose is the point of the post which sort of sai…