A thing I just realized when talking to a colleague who isn't an engineer: you know how there is an O(N) way and an O(N^2) way to answer the question "Which lines in this CSV file have an email address which is not unique in the file?" ? Well:
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The primary beneficiary of the O(N) solution isn't the computer; it's you. The O(N) solution, if you know how to do it, is faster and easier to write, easier to reason about, and easier to extend. (The actual problem was slightly more involved than this gloss, as it often is.)
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(If you're wondering what this O(N) vs O(N^2) thing means: it's notation used in computer science to describe the asymptotic time complexity of an algorithm. That's a mouthful. In less specialized language, the distinction is "Do I have to compare every item to every other one?")
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"How do you tell than a list with 100,000 words in it doesn't include a duplicate without checking each word against every other word, Patrick?" Excellent question! Answer: you stuff each word as you're checking it into hash table and then you only have to go through list once.
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Replying to @patio11
Nontechnical guys next question: What’s a hash table Patrick?
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Happy to help, nontechnical guys! It's a fundamental data structure which is used *pervasively* in professional programming. The bottom line is it lets you insert things very fast and retrieve them (or check presence) very fast, regardless of how many things there are in table.
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