It's amazing that I still remember my Slashdot password (after not using it for *years*), but when I see my comment attributed to "anonymous coward", I wonder why I bothered.

Get well!

Marius

Hash table operations are probabilisticly O(1), degrading to O(N) in the worst case (many hash collisions).

Unmodified quick sort has expected complexity O(N log N), but worst case O(N**2), so if you pick your data carefully, you can get either solution to be O(N**2).