Comment by podocarp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by podocarp | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the (perhaps unrelated meme) hello I would like (graph of zeta function) number of apples. Statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged.

Indeed I have met professors who claim since something is O(1) it doesn't matter if you run it 4 times. No need to optimize. I think it's just part of the wider divide between theory and application. For instance big O also requires a register machine to make sense, which most courses don't define. Somehow addition and multiplication are O(1) in some places and O(n) or O(n^2) somewhere else. Also quite common is the fact that sets are slower than lists for lookup for small n, despite being O(1).

It's just a tool and we shouldn't miss the trees for the forest. I also understand this comment has nothing to do with the ETH or the article, but just some thoughts I have after reading the first chunk on complexity

> miss the trees for the forest

I think the common expression is to miss the forest (big picture) for the trees (details). But maybe you're playing on words and saying we shouldn't let the big picture (big O notation/analysis) obscure our attention to the details (an algorithm's actual efficiency and performance).

Did you ever pause to consider that theoretical computer science might not be done for the sake of midwit code monkeys whose deepest contact with complexity theory was when they learned to reverse a linked list in O(n) for their SWE interview?

indeed, the purpose of theoretical computer science is as a filtering and ranking mechanism for awarding tenure in universities

Where do you think the money comes from, and why do you think that is?

I'm not sure that retreating to the ivory tower is a winning rhetorical strategy.

Not sure why the hostility anyways. If appreciating TCS results really is a higher brow activity, then GP's indignation at computational models shouldn't upset you, quite the opposite. It's definitionally the normal experience.

And while I do find the blogpost in the OP trite, that is mostly because it's from someone who should absolutely be more intimate with the subject than such "midwitted code monkeys" (aka. normal people) you refer to, yet pretends to feel duped by OAI's results. Quite the different case, and I think is much more worthy of ridicule as a result. They're the high brow who should be appreciating, understanding, yet fail to.

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