samwho

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61.
by samwho 1y ago
All the code is at https://github.com/samwho/visualisations . I didn’t use much more than basic JS, CSS, and HTML for this one. The only third party dependency, iirc, was one to parse JavaScript into an AST.
62.
by samwho 1y ago
I’m glad you like them! <3
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by samwho 1y ago
Ah, I conflated worst case with upper bound. My mistake.
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by samwho 1y ago
That’s a good idea, I should try that.
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by samwho 1y ago
Ahh I see, thank you!
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by samwho 1y ago
They do! Part of me wanted to go back and change the sum function to something else but in the end I figured it’s not important.
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by samwho 1y ago
I should have probably been a lot more clear about who the target audience of my post was.
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by samwho 1y ago
I replied to this effect to someone else in this thread, but I think it's reasonable for people to want to have an idea of what big O is for (in software engineering!) without having to have a grounding in calculus. The notation is use
69.
by samwho 1y ago
I made some wording changes based on what you wrote, I'd appreciate your feedback. I'm struggling to understand how the part about big theta is false. Is the best case for bubble sort not O(n)? I've deleted the section for th
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by samwho 1y ago
There's a comment thread further down that disagrees with you.
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by samwho 1y ago
I think it's pretty common for folks to enter the software field without a CS degree, start building apps, and see big O notation without understanding what it is. These people have jobs, deadlines, they want to ship features that make
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by samwho 1y ago
I'd love to hear more about how a quadratic sorting algorithm could be said to be O(n^3). That isn't intuitive to me.
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by samwho 1y ago
It was, thank you so much <3
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by samwho 1y ago
Part of the problem is that a lot of people that come across big O notation have no need, interest, or time to learn calculus. I think it's reasonable for that to be the case, too.
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by samwho 1y ago
I'm aiming this at junior software engineers without math or computer science backgrounds. My own computer science background is very old at this point, and I never did have the math. So I'm not surprised I've made mistakes t
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by samwho 1y ago
That framing really helps, thank you. <3
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by samwho 1y ago
No, I'm grateful for the time you're spending time helping me understand. I'm struggling to come up with wording that satisfies everyone and venting some frustration at you. I'm sorry, that wasn't fair of me. It&#x2
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by samwho 1y ago
Thank you.
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by samwho 1y ago
I appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me, thank you. I feel like the way I have it is a reasonable, if strictly incorrect, simplification for someone new to the material. When I write these, I have the newly-hired bootcamp gra
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by samwho 1y ago
This is how you would explain it?
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by samwho 1y ago
So your contention is with the word “always”? It doesn’t always mean worst case? I got told off by someone else for _not_ saying this. I really just want to find the way of describing this that won’t net me comments like yours. It is very d
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by samwho 1y ago
I’d love to hear how those two things differ, and how I could include it in the post in a way that won’t be too scary for a beginner to the topic. That section in particular has already seen several revisions based on other peoples’ comment
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by samwho 1y ago
It’s okay, you’re not the first to point it out to me! I’d be interested to hear how you would explain it when you’re at a more appropriate device.
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by samwho 1y ago
I couldn’t resist.
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by samwho 1y ago
Thank you! I’m really glad you enjoyed it.
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A visual introduction to big O notation(samwho.dev)
691 points by samwho 1y ago|193 comments
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by samwho 1y ago
Your talk is a lot better than my quiz. Interestingly you say comments aren’t valid in the middle of the local part but I thought they are, and the parser I used agreed. Maybe obsolete behaviour? I didn’t realise quotes could be dot separat
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by samwho 1y ago
Thank you <3 which one got the biggest laugh?
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by samwho 1y ago
Are there valid emails without an @? I’m very vaguely aware of bang paths but didn’t want to include them because they’re a bit too esoteric.
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by samwho 1y ago
It’s okay <3 it doesn’t surprise me that both of these topics have been covered before, and both are fairly small input spaces so there’s bound to be similarities or overlap. I do love Gary’s “wat” talk, it was certainly part of the insp

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