Hacker News Reader

Comment by drwl | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) == O(1)

True if you are wearing your mathematician's or computer scientist's hat. If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50". Context usually makes it obvious which one it is.

> If you are wearing your engineer's or physicist's hat, "O(10)" means "probably >= 5 but <= 50".

Ahgg, leave this poor notation alone. What has it ever done to you?

What has it ever done to you?

Expanding to "of order 10" in spoken language.

Heh, or perhaps we could say that it's simply a short hand colloquialism for "on the order of 10 years"? ;-) As somebody with physics and engineering degrees, as well as 20 years of CS experience, I'd very much enjoy it if we'd stop perpetuating the idea that nobody without a PhD in CS understands asymptotic complexity.

Man, I hope the engineers who design the bridges I use paid more attention in their math classes.

I am perplexed by the negativity. This has nothing to do with mathematics, it's about notational conventions. Only knowing about one of them does not make you better at taking limits.

If the objection is about context dependence, why is nobody going "Would you mind elaborating on the O(10) and what you mean by that? O(10) is the orthogonal group in ten dimensions".

Mathematical notation is a language, and its abuse can be justified if it facilitates communication. Even professional mathematicians do so when writing papers: The audience is not an automated theorem prover, but other humans, and we don't throw syntax errors if we encounter an expression that does not conform to a narrow set of formal rules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com