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Comment by cvoss | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't use a word that can carry a precise mathematical meaning in a sentence that literally uses mathematical notation in order to speak precisely and then expect readers not to interpret the word in the precise mathematical way.

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You should if you expect your readers to be normal humans who understand obvious context, and not pedantic HN readers who understand obvious context but delight in nit-picking it anyway.

You can, but it's not should.

>pedantic

Who the fuck do you think is the intended audience for an article about an algorithm in `git bundle create`? I spent approximately two minutes of my life trying to figure out where the O(n^2) algorithm was being invoked in such a way that it influenced an exponential.

Exponential was bolded in the same sentence as a big-O. 50/50 troll/author oversight.

Maybe not 'morepedantic

Ah yes because "normal humans" know what O(n^2) means but damnit they are going to use exponential wrong.

I'm a normal human and I know what O(n^2) means. There are dozens of us.

I somewhat agree, but for lack of a better word, what would you use? Quadratically doesn't have the same punch

“Dramatically” ?

"a lot"

"by a factor of `n`" also sounds impressive.

If you just mean "a lot" in a non-technical sense, there are plenty of words available. enormously. immensely. tremendously. remarkably. incredibly. vastly.

“From quadratic to linear” seems fine.

“From quadratic to linear” or “... to constant” seems fine.

Algorithmic? Big-O? Polynomially? Linear improvement? O(n^2) to O(n)? Or if you want to be less mathematically precise: enormous improvement?

Using exponential in this way in any context is a faux pas, because it's highly ambiguous, and requires context for clarification. But in this situation the context clearly resolved to the mathematically accurate definition, except it was used in the other way.

Runtimes dropped precipitously.

Quadratically doesn't have the same punch because it is actually exponentially less than exponentially. So doing it for extra punch (as opposed to not knowing the correct word) in a technical context would just be lying. It'd be like a paper saying they had a result with p less than one in a trillion for "extra punch" when they actually had p=0.1.

I find the whole article rather poorly written. Most likely using an LLM.

We simplify the big O notation in computer science. This is standard practice.

Just drop the constants, it doesn't matter /s

Production systems running and melting here...

Especially when the colloquial meaning derives from the mathematical meaning.

“Words mean things.”

If you can’t agree with this, then you shouldn’t be speaking or writing, IMO.

Those who argue that words that mean different things are actually equivalent have no business dealing with language.

I understood every word, phrase, and sentence you wrote. But I did not understand your point. Still, I got the meaning of your words, so presumably you're satisfied.

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