Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"Nope." An "algorithm" can be about things other than memory allocation. Say you have a collection of sensors the you poll. ZOI is saying that the system that polls them shouldn't[1] have some kind of hard assumption that there will only ever be, say, specifically 4. You could still statically allocate the storage on a given system, for example in an embedded system where the software is compile-time configured for a given hardware.

However, if you pass the "poll_sensors" function a size of 60 million when the system was designed for "about 4, I guess", it's likely that you're operating the algorithm in a regime it wasn't designed for. You may (or may not, this is just another trade-off) wish to know about it.

[1]: of course you can always construct exceptions. If you follow every rule you subscribe to dogmatically, then you're doing something more akin to religion then engineering.



> If you follow every rule you subscribe to dogmatically, then you're doing something more akin to religion

My impression of religion is dogmatically following only a changeable subset of the rules you subscribe to, where subscribe means "they are in our special book"




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: