3 ms·

You know the saying, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? I think the corollary to that is "If you don't have a hammer, nothing looks like a na

by yen223 12y ago

You know the saying, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? I think the corollary to that is "If you don't have a hammer, nothing looks like a nail". If you have little knowledge of graph theory, algorithms, and other such "esoteric nonsense", you wouldn't recognize situations where those will be helpful, which then reinforces your belief that algorithms are useless. I have seen too many times a person saying that algorithms are useless, who then gets stuck wondering why his naive O(n!) program is running so slow.

Maken 12y ago
This so much. I don't get how people can think that something so simply and straightforward as the time complexity of an algorithm is something superfluous that only belongs to some boring classes they took in university, and it has nothing to do with "real world problems". Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast.
- skwirl 12y ago
  > Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast. I imagine it has little to do with algorithms and everything to do with infrastructure. Most Google services (and even outside of Google - most services, websites, mobile applications, etc) are simple store data/retrieve data services. When it comes down to the source, fast data access is thanks to the database, and very few developers develop database systems.
  - mcphage 12y ago
    Data in the magnitude that Google, Amazon, and Facebook handle doesn't work in standard databases. They have to develop their own data stores to manage it. Check out AWS's offerings, there's a lot of special-purpose services there.
    - skwirl 12y ago
      That's great, but we're talking about a very small fraction of engineers who write DB systems. I have used some of AWS's DB offerings, and I didn't have to write complex algorithms to do it.

by yen223 12y ago

Maken 12y ago

This so much. I don't get how people can think that something so simply and straightforward as the time complexity of an algorithm is something superfluous that only belongs to some boring classes they took in university, and it has nothing to do with "real world problems". Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast.

skwirl 12y ago
> Those people complaining about Google caring so much about their engineers being able to deal with basic algorithmic, instead, should wonder why every Google service is so fast. I imagine it has little to do with algorithms and everything to do with infrastructure. Most Google services (and even outside of Google - most services, websites, mobile applications, etc) are simple store data/retrieve data services. When it comes down to the source, fast data access is thanks to the database, and very few developers develop database systems.
- mcphage 12y ago
  Data in the magnitude that Google, Amazon, and Facebook handle doesn't work in standard databases. They have to develop their own data stores to manage it. Check out AWS's offerings, there's a lot of special-purpose services there.
  - skwirl 12y ago
    That's great, but we're talking about a very small fraction of engineers who write DB systems. I have used some of AWS's DB offerings, and I didn't have to write complex algorithms to do it.