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Comment by cutkosky | Hacker News Reader

(an) author here: paper will likely be coming out in O(month). But, yes it turns out that the method is minimax optimal for stochastic convex optimization for a wide variety of parameter settings. Of course, minimax optimality alone does not fully explain empirical success - we've had minimax optimal algorithms for decades!

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This would have been witty IMO: "the paper will be out in O(negative_peer_reviews)"

> (an) author here: paper will likely be coming out in O(month)

Ug. I'm adding "O(month)" to my list of bootless metaphors.

Why? (1) Because in Big-O notation, O(month) would equal O(day), which is not the intended meaning in the comment above; (2) It is non-sensical; one would never say e.g. "the run-time of an algorithm is O(seconds)" -- we write some kind of input inside the parens, not the output

Anyhow, we already have the words roughly and about; e.g. "about a month".

Feel free to call me pedantic, but words matter.

I thought it was a clever/nerdy way to say in the worst case it will be out in a month. I imagine they have an internal review they have to get through first, and it's not clear if that will be done next week or in May.

We can safely assume that approximate time needed to produce papers is t_approx = O(n), where n is number of papers. O(t_approx) makes no sense.

I think the above comment probably meant "where n is number of _pages_".

agree, just a good "sanity check" for first-order optimization algos.

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