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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

I mean, in this case, it's 2^{0.6039n}, and the n is pretty important. I can see why trying to automatically detect cases like this would run into a bunch of wrong behaviors (either styling text that was not meant to be math notation, or parsing the implied math notation incorrectly).

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Okay, I had the problem going the other way. I assumed the n was a symbol on the previous number, like an f suffix in C. But even still, 2^(0.6039n) could have been rendered in a nice way stripping out the parenthesis, leaving the core text mathematically correct.

Email the mods to have the title edited, hn@ycombinator.com; it’s a worthwhile change here.

“in 2^[0.6039n+o(n)] time” could be a better edit than the paper’s provided title, though I selected [] rather than {} for human use. I defer to experts in the field on whether it matters to declare O(n) or not.

You'll want small o, not big O. Otherwise there's no point in mentioning the constant factor 0.6039.

And yes the o(n) is relevant. Though I guess implied to some extent.

Oops, fixed!

Changing {} to [] seems like a very strange suggestion to me. {} is used here because it's the way you group things in LaTeX. If you were going to change it for human use, why not just use parenthesis? What's wrong with {} in the first place?

Sure, that’s fine too. Whatever makes more sense than the current title is an improvement, and I can’t judge what’s best for this audience.

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