[cutkosky]

(an) author here: paper will likely be coming out in O(month). But, yes it turns out that the method is minimax optimal for stochastic convex optimization for a wide variety of parameter settings. Of course, minimax optimality alone does not fully explain empirical success - we've had minimax optimal algorithms for decades!

[xpe]

This would have been witty IMO: "the paper will be out in O(negative_peer_reviews)"

> (an) author here: paper will likely be coming out in O(month)

Ug. I'm adding "O(month)" to my list of bootless metaphors.

Why? (1) Because in Big-O notation, O(month) would equal O(day), which is not the intended meaning in the comment above; (2) It is non-sensical; one would never say e.g. "the run-time of an algorithm is O(seconds)" -- we write some kind of input inside the parens, not the output

Anyhow, we already have the words roughly and about; e.g. "about a month".

Feel free to call me pedantic, but words matter.

[goldemerald]

I thought it was a clever/nerdy way to say in the worst case it will be out in a month. I imagine they have an internal review they have to get through first, and it's not clear if that will be done next week or in May.

[pigpang]

We can safely assume that approximate time needed to produce papers is t_approx = O(n), where n is number of papers. O(t_approx) makes no sense.

[xpe]

I think the above comment probably meant "where n is number of _pages_".

[blt]

agree, just a good "sanity check" for first-order optimization algos.