1 HN user recommended this explainer1 month2022–2023score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Cited as a fun example of how algorithmic changes can yield enormous performance gains.
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.
“Quick google yields very good examples in huge improvements on a single algorithm level” (HN, 2023)
> '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.)
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.
Example of huge improvement from a single algorithm change
Also keep in mind that there’s people out there that will take your code and make it 40.363.757.265% more efficient (perhaps not in this case) [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes