You created a brand new HN account to shitpost about Rob Pike? I'm not even mad, that's amazing.

To be honest, this is not a shitpost in my opinion. He might really have met Pike and Pike really might have said that some day.

If you loved that you’ll love my story about meeting Rob Pike in an LA grocery store.

Go on...

I don't know, the name "hc based hacker" doesn't help

Does this bar serve anything other than everclear?

The idea is not bad but it sounds a bit extreme... Indeed choosing the right sorting algorithm is important and depends on one's problem to solve. But, 99.99% of the time, a general, all-round algorithm will do the job within 99% of the best-one's performance...

But when it fails, well, it will fail big... In my experience, some devs (me included :-)) make tests with a reduced dataset 'cos they can iterate faster and then go in production without testing on a real-size dataset. All of a sudden, the o(n²) edge case becomes, well, a problem :-)

Reminds me of the time some dev[0] accidentally recreated the traveling salesman problem, created unit test with 5 items in it, said "looks good", and pushed it.

[0] - me

If you ignore linear/non-comparison algorithms like radix or bucketsort. Those are much harder to optimize to your particular problem but should result in significantly lower run times when properly adapted.

Sadly I can't disagree for myself either! Doing diligent performance testing is hard to prioritise.