(My 7am meeting was cancelled, now I'm just already tired with a full day ahead. The worm was a lie!)

Woke up early. Got no worm. Am I bird?

They're construction workers?! It's been so long, I thought they were just living outside my window

You know imposter syndrome is real when you stare too long into the abyss

and the abyss does not, in fact, stare back at you

I don't know man, the abyss isn't returning my calls

You know imposter syndrome is real when you stare too long into the abyss

and the abyss does not, in fact, stare back at you

This is this coming Wednesday! Register for Rahul' talk at 📝 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Submissions are now open for RANDOM 2026: easychair.org/conferences/...

Call for papers: randomconference.com/random-2026-...

RANDOM 2026 will be held in Boston, MA, on August 19–21, 2026, together with APPROX 2026.

We look forward to your submissions!

BEEN* proven. Sorry. It's the shock.

Bertrand's postulate - Wikipedia

More: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertran...

Bertrand's postulate states that, for every integer n, there is a prime number between n and 2n. Better bounds are known, but 2 comments:

(1) this is very useful! For many algos, you can assume "for free" the param n is prime, since there's always one nearby.

(2) IT'S AGAIN BE PROVEN BY CHEBYSHEV

Announcing the #ICML2026 tutorials!

All ten tutorials will be presented the first day of the conference, Monday July 6.

Read the blog post for more details on the selection process!

blog.icml.cc/2026/04/02/a...

More on this: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

TCS+ RSVP: Rahul Ilango (2026/04/08) Gödel in Cryptography: Zero-Knowledge Proofs With No Interaction, No Setup, and Perfect Soundness

📢 Our next TCS+ talk of the season will be Wednesday, April 8 (10am PT, 1pm ET, 19:00 CEST): Rahul Ilango, from MIT, will tell us about Gödel in Cryptography!

RSVP to receive the link (available one day prior to the talk): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Engineering Vacation Research Internship Program Our Engineering Vacation Research Internship Program provides valuable engineering, computer science and project management research experience during summer and winter for students interested in a re...

Applications for the Faculty of Engineering's Vacation Research Internship program are now open! If you are an UG or PG student in Australia, join us this Winter for a research internship in one of the School of Computer Science's 40 projects!

Apply by ⏰ April 19: www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/...

(and yes, by the way: I ate both lunches)

So, yesterday we had two consecutive meetings scheduled over the lunch break, with food provided. Which made me wonder if that was the worst possible.

Turns out, yes: it is provably impossible to schedule more meetings in that time slot! This is called the No-Three-Lunch Theorem

Puny human. I, like people in the know, cross my 8s.

The 1st European Workshop on the Theory of Differential Privacy (eurotdp.pages.ista.ac.at) will open for submissions today! We expect to be open for submissions until end of April, but there is limited capacity so we may need to stop accepting submissions earlier. Send a 4-page abstract, like TPDP.

Engineering Vacation Research Internship Program Our Engineering Vacation Research Internship Program provides valuable engineering, computer science and project management research experience during summer and winter for students interested in a re...

For the full list (not just Computer Science) of VRI projects in Engineering at #USyd and details on the research internship program, see www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/...

Computer science internships

The call for Winter Vacation Research Internships (VRI) in CS at #USyd is out! Open to students (undergrads and postgrads) currently enrolled in an 🇦🇺 uni.

Have a look! Apply by April 19.

www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/...

(Want to work with me? Check out CS2026/9, CS2026/10, CS2026/38, CS2026/39)

And you care about the size of the universe because it's the (rough) parameter you depend on in a way or another: its logarithm tells you how many bits you need for *one* element, and its value itself tells you what the naive array-based (really fast indexing) would cost you in terms of space.

Well, what you really care about, in the end, is space v. time (space for data, time to do lookups and operations on it). Which is what the things after the first paragraph are about! (If you only care about space, use a linked list...)

That's good! I've been appalled at the nonsense Copilot and Gemini are apparently telling my intro to algos students about big-Omega and "best-case complexity".

Thanks - that being said, I'd rather write it myself from Knuth's paper than rely on GenAI for that. I am trying to be as accurate as I can, and I don't trust LLMs (trained on lots of wrong or simplified/inaccurate proofs) or my own verification skills (assuming verification=o(writing)) to use them.

The basic idea of hash tables is that “the universe is a big place, but it’s mostly empty."

Hash tables, or how to leverage the sinking feeling of loneliness you get when you look at the sky

Good catch, thanks! That one is a typo I literally introduced yesterday when... trying to be consistent. It's gone now.

Thank you, Rasmus!

Thanks, I'll fix that!

Mmh... Where am I using m for log |X|? That's probably a typo to be fixed, but I cannot find it.