Really annoys me that this is actually O(n log n) because for large enough n the merge sort will take longer than n*1e6 second. Randall should know better!
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
126 points (100.0% liked)
xkcd
10141 readers
6 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You should know better too! Behaviour at large n is irrelevant to "best case" complexity analysis of sorting algorithms
Of course it still matters, you just take the best case for n as n→∞, instead of the worst or average case.
And if anyone asks you optimise the function, just mess with the sleep function!
Sleep(1e5.9[...]), where [...] is everything else, and hope that the compiler or interpreter can handle non-integer exponents for this type of scientific notation.
It'd be easier to do 9e5, 8e5 and so on though. Linear decrease in time with each optimization. 1e5.9 seems risky.
Depends on how and/or if you want to curve future changes. Going 1e5.9, 1e5.8, 1e5.7, ... will curve logarithmically, while 9e5, 8e5, 7e5, ... will curve linearly within each power of ten, then get a discontinuity at 1e5 and go 9e4 and scale linearly at a different rate.
Of course, you'll have to be an absolute nerd to find that a problem and there's a nonzero chance that I'm such a nerd and I just admitted my guilt 😅
They need to fix their mobile website. It has large side margins for no reason, and the comic is tiny. I have to zoom in every time I visit to read the comic. Makes no sense.
There is m.xkcd.com but I don't link to that when I post here, only use it to copy the title text.
In this day and age, the regular site should serve a mobile-friendly page on a phone. There is CSS to detect the browser size and orientation and change the style.
Can you do it without loading a bunch of heavy scripts? Making a html responsive is always something challenging I face since I'm not a web developer. I just make htmls when I have to share some data visualization. And I couldn't find how to make it responsive without using bootstrap, sth-ui, etc and using their classes and scripts.
I'd love if vanilla CSS just had if statement like thing for "portrait/landscape" or ">threshold/not" for contents width and fonts.
It actually does, there's "@media" which lets you query stuff about the browser like if it's touchscreen vs mouse (and maximum/minimum width/height)
Example:
@media screen and (max-width: 1300px) {
do stuff for screens less than 1300px
}