4 ms·

As a non-computer science person, I feel very dumb right now. :-(

• racl101 6y ago
  As a guy who graduated in comp sci I feel even dumber right now. :( edit: cause I don't remember much of this stuff.
  • hinkley 6y ago
    There are two big reasons you have trouble recalling a piece of information about your craft: You use it so much that it is down to intuition, or you never use it at all. For example, my relationship to Orders of Complexity has been reduced to sorting options in my head, and picking the first one that is simple enough to keep working, and fast enough to satisfy the current and estimated future scope of the problem (which is also intuitive Capacity Planning). If you make me explain the decision it might sound like I picked one at random.
    • HashBasher 6y ago
      You actually have sorted in your career?
      • hinkley 6y ago
        Quite a bit. Lots of data has ranks/priorities, lots of UI has to be organized. Are you asking if I have written (shipped) a sort implementation? Only once, ages ago. No built-in stable sort, and none of the dozen articles I found had examples that scaled past 20 elements (which I found quite upsetting). I did my own port of mergesort that was almost 2 orders of magnitude faster. Constant complexity kills. It's good to build a few on your own to become an informed consumer. Just don't 1) ship it or 2) use it as an interview question. If you want NIH people, you get them by asking NIH questions during the interview process.