There is one sentence I really took out from the years at university, it was at a database implementation course:
> If you have a trouble solving some problem, see if sorting the data first helps.
I feel that sorting data is the ultimate computer science hack. Many, many, classes of problems turn into O(log n) problems, once you sort your input in some way. It might not be the most effective way of solving the problem, but it's often a fairly good one.
So I'm really enjoying how good sorting algorithms are getting and how despite the O complexity remains mostly the same, the real computing efficiency is improving significantly.
> If you have a trouble solving some problem, see if sorting the data first helps.
I feel that sorting data is the ultimate computer science hack. Many, many, classes of problems turn into O(log n) problems, once you sort your input in some way. It might not be the most effective way of solving the problem, but it's often a fairly good one.
So I'm really enjoying how good sorting algorithms are getting and how despite the O complexity remains mostly the same, the real computing efficiency is improving significantly.