131–140 of 273 posts
wild that this a pattern like this would be part of git-core, but I guess we all overlook stuff on a regular basis
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Bruce Dawson says: I like to call this Dawson’s first law of computing: O(n^2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there. https://bsky.app/profile/randomascii.bsky.social/post/3lk4c6...
The second law is that O(n * log n) is for practical intents and purposes O(n).
For n of 10^9, where lgn takes 0.03 us and n takes 1 s, nlgn takes 29.9 s and n^2 takes 31.7 years.
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You don't have to enter any e-mail address to get an HN account. You login from a (Firefox) incognito window and get your cookies deleted the moment the window is closed. Why you're so afraid to let your ideas and views collect under a single account? Are they that controversial or are you weary of your own thoughts and don't want to see them again, or are you afraid to own your views as yours? We're talking (mostly)…
"fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially" If the backup times were O(n^2), are they now O(n^2 / 2^n)? I would guess not.
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If you replace an n^2 algorithm with a log(n) lookup you get an exponential speed up. Although a hashmap lookup is usually O(1), which is even faster.
That is not true unless n^C / e^n = log(n) where C is some constant, which it is not. The difference between log(n) and some polynomial is logarithmic, not exponential.
"fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially" If the backup times were O(n^2), are they now O(n^2 / 2^n)? I would guess not.
Also because I've often heard tha the quantum Fourier transform is an exponential speedup over the discrete Fourier transform, and there the scaling goes n^2->nlogn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to enter any e-mail address to get an HN account. You login from a (Firefox) incognito window and get your cookies deleted the moment the window is closed. Why you're so afraid to let your ideas and views collect under a single account? Are they that controversial or are you weary of your own thoughts and don't want to see them again, or are you afraid to own your views as yours? We're talking (mostly)…
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Nazi Germany & Jews issue is different. There's an aspect of forcing, and this is unethical and wrong on so many levels, and I'll just leave the subject here.
OTOH, from my perspective if you're afraid that you're writing a sensitive comment, you can create a throwaway. That's justifiable IMHO, but creating three accounts to discuss maps vs. loops, now that's different.
If we're talking about being ridiculous, bringing up Nazi Germany vs. Jews issue to a technical discussion is more ridiculous than the alleged ridiculousness of me asking the OP about their fears. To close, my questions was not to belittle or shame the OP, they were genuine. I'm not that person who jabs for giggles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you replace an n^2 algorithm with a log(n) lookup you get an exponential speed up. Although a hashmap lookup is usually O(1), which is even faster.
That is not true unless n^C / e^n = log(n) where C is some constant, which it is not. The difference between log(n) and some polynomial is logarithmic, not exponential.
I.e. you are saying and f(n) speedup means T(n)/f(n), but others would say it means f(T(n)) or some variation of that.
Cool discovery but the article could have been about 1/10 as long and still communicated effectively. At least they didn't post it as a video, so it was easy to skim to the important details.