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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

I mean, I run 6 days a week so my running socks get beat up pretty bad. When they are dead, I need to throw them out. So my options are:

1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles.

2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the same - just grab 2.

(And technically I have 2 styles of socks, summer socks and winter socks. Summer socks is a buttload of cotton socks that get bought in bulk. Winter socks are 3-4 pairs of identical wool socks that last much longer).

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My son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?

I think technically caring about having socks that doesn't match rules him out. He's testing strongly for hipster though.

Hey, definitely a nerd. For fun he finds code races in Redis/Bayeux server failover. Also he fights in clubs, bashing his friends with sticks. And designs card/board games.

I'm going to second the "definitely a nerd", since not only did he make up an arbitrary rule, he even altered his behavior to be logically consistent ("well, matches can happen in random choice, so I can't disallow those ..."). That's pretty cool.

I do that just because I'm too lazy to match my socks, or I only have a few clean socks left and none of them match. I can't honestly say I've ever thought about it from a 'what would someone else think?' perspective before reading your comment. Heh, maybe people think I'm colorblind and are just too polite to ask, or nobody notices.

I can't say I notice other peoples socks either now that I think about it.

White vs Black pretty easy to notice :)

>I have to match socks between several different styles Do I understand correctly that you throw all your socks into a drawer/container, and when you need a pair, you go and have to find two matching ones?

This may be cultural (or even familial) thing, but I always curl two socks up into a ball so that they stay together. When I need a pair, I just take one ball, uncurl it, and voila.

But do you curl matching socks or not?

If you have many different styles, you need to go hunt around and find matches. Curl or not just delays the matching problem, it does not solve it.

Having all the socks be the same makes matching an O(1) problem.

but if you curl them after drying, you have a much smaller pool to find the pair from, the just washed socks (which will be the socks you use the most anyway). So it's faster that way, than to mix them all up and only then match.

My wife has about twenty pairs of socks, and no more than a few of the pairs are the same variety. It's like some masochistic combinatorics problem every single time I fold socks. My kid and I literally were playing "sock go fish" a few times to get him to help (except ... I was more interested in the pairing, rather than taking turns. Doh.)

Laundry-folding happiness is increased significantly when I don't have to play "Find-the-mate" every time I pick up a sock (which applies to my kids' socks as well, since they are all patterned, but thankfully my son likes wearing party-colored socks, so I only need to match on shape).

I have two "vintages" of socks -- the old ones that I hate, and the newer ones that I prefer, roughly equally divided. I would donate + re-buy if I had more than two flavors of socks.

Sock go-fish is _genius_

I pretend I am a computer doing a matching problem. I have a buffer of unmatched socks that I compare each sock as I pull it out of the pile, and if unmatched I add to the buffer. Kinda fun.

Yes, I pair them after washing, and curl them after drying. Putting them together makes searching O(n) instead of O(n^2) if you have a particular style in mind.

Of course, homogeneity makes this even faster, but you lose the benefit of choice, variability and fashionableness. Quid pro quo.

I think his point was that if you're seeking out all the pairs when you curl them together, you're still spending unnecessary time and effort matching socks, just ahead of time instead of in the moment when you need socks

Exactly he does an O(N^2) Pair followed by a later O(N) search.

Why not do a O(1) Pair folloed by an O(1) Search.

Of course, there's an enlightening stackoverflow question on this: http://stackoverflow.com/q/14415881/220347

Finally, my graduate-level algorithms class comes in handy in real life.

Intuitively I'd say a human pairing socks is far better than O(n2) because finding something that matches a given sock is close to O(1) on small sets.

I'd suggest Darn Tough wool socks. Buy two of them per season if you want. They are guaranteed for life. No, they really are. Return them, and they send you new ones. My wife has returned them twice. I'm still on my first pair and I run and go backpacking. They are awesome. Plus, wool is one of the best materials for not stinking (anti-bacterial) so you don't even have to wash them (every time) if you leave them out to dry.

Ok, maybe I assumed you don't use them as heavily and also have more socks.

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