Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%

Stand-up Maths · 3.1M views · 2022 · 28:47

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Software performance & optimizationAlgorithms & data structuresRecreational & visual mathexplainer

Why Hacker News recommends it

Cited as a fun example of how algorithmic changes can yield enormous performance gains.

What it is

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2023.

What Hacker News said

Recommends db48x · 2022-12 · on “Ask HN: Is there a code golf community but for performance instead of size?”

See also “Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%” < [this video] > by Matt Parker. It can be a really fun game!

Cites CRConrad · 2022-12 · on “A Neat XOR Trick”

> 'Drastically' in this context can mean the slower approach taking billions of times longer. Standupmaths - "Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%": [this video] (OK, 41 billion percent is only 0.41 billion times better, but still.)

Cites high_priest · 2023-08 · on “Squeeze the hell out of the system you have”

Quick google yields very good examples in huge improvements on a single algorithm level: [this video] Easy to imagine how even smaller improvements across 10-100 steps of data processing, can become even better.