Optimizations on Linear Search (2016)

Re:Optimizations on Linear Search (2016) by YesThatTom2 on Saturday October 03, 2020 @12:27PM (#24673031)

> Why is he discarding compsci literally in the introduction? Does he really think "big O" is all there is, presumably because those ivory tower compsci people have no clue about computers?

Hi! I'm the author. I do have an ivory tower compsci degree. I'm poking fun at myself as much as anyone else.

> There are some good bits of advice in the article, too, though.

Thanks! "Everything Sysadmin" is my 3x/yearly column in ACM Queue. My goal is to bring a bit of operational reality to an organization with a reputation for being ivory tower. Click on the phrase "everything sysadmin" to see the other columns I've written.

> So, when you are using C/C++, "small" for this problem is a billion elements.

I know, right? "Small" has gotten so big that we have to re-think our gut reactions and recalibrate our back-of-the-envelope estimations. Just imagine how big small will be for the next generation of developers?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Optimizations on Linear Search (2016) by thewebcount on Saturday October 03, 2020 @12:59PM (#24673255)

I just want to say that I really enjoyed this article. I was surprised to see all the negativity here on HN about it! Thank you for writing it, as it really got me thinking. I've done some of these things before, but it's easy to lose the forest for the trees when you're deep down in the middle of solving some problem.

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Re:Optimizations on Linear Search (2016) by mark-r on Saturday October 03, 2020 @12:49PM (#24673183)

Moore's law is dead. Small won't change nearly as fast as it used to.

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Re:Optimizations on Linear Search (2016) by voldacar on Saturday October 03, 2020 @01:45PM (#24673547)

>Just imagine how big small will be for the next generation of developers?

about the same, since moores law is dead for cpus, and ram doesnt seem to be getting much faster either

[ Parent | on HN ]