Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com