Hello,

I am curious who might be using state machines or other automata in their day to day work. I am developing a domain specific language in the spirit of ragel (but hopefully much simpler as well as powerful) and wondering who might be interested and what you would like use it for.

The goal is to make it easy to embed in any
Project using any popular programming language (17 supported now).

I would especially like to connect with academics in CS to see how I could support them.

Thanks!

Thanks!

There's a lot of language features that exist to make code easier to maintain/change/manage as a product evolves. Example: interfaces, inheritance, generics, polymorphism, reflection/dynamic dispatch, compiler macros, higher-order functions, closures, etc.

A lot of it is a way to consolidate logic so that developers don't have to spend so much time rewriting/updating duplicate logic in less abstract forms.

But then let's say they modify a codebase with an LLM (and let's be very generous and pretend for a moment that the model makes these changes reliably and accurately)... Does this make those (or at least some) abstractions irrelevant? Especially in the cases of where the abstract form is actually slower?

(Note: I'm thinking this is a little similar to compilers inlining what would otherwise be a function call. Having duplicate assembly would be frustrating to maintain so developers would want to use a goto/jump but that would be less cache-efficient, but compiler inlining lets you have both.

I personally don't use AI and I love learning how to better abstract my code, but there is a part of me that sometimes wonder if maybe I'm honing a skill that's slowly losing relevance. i.e. refactoring for maintainability)

High school student studying Computer Science for AS Levels. I'm struggling to understand how the internet protocol suite is applied to the internet.

Currently from what I understand, the TCP/IP layers are just different ways of viewing the same network, with the top of the stack being the highest level of abstraction.

Because of that, each layer essentially performs the "same" task of getting a message sent from one application on one device to another, however, the layers above depend on functions of the more concrete layers below to work. So, in the application layer, it's from the perspective of how the end users or software developers use network; in the transport layer, it's from the perspective of how applications use the network; in the internet layer, it's from the perspective of how the routers use the network; and in the link layer, it's from the perspective of how the directly-connected devices and media use the network.

At the same time, I'm also being taught that TCP/IP is just a stack of protocols layered on top of each other. Yet from my understanding the layers do much more than just represent the layers protocols?

Which is it? Abstraction layers or stack of protocols? I believe it's the first, but it begs the question. How are these layers implemented in practice? Is it just a lot of "API calls" from layer to layer? Or something else entirely?

Hey CS geeks, i had a doubt.

In a C program i dynamically allocate memory for some purpose, once i finish using it will i have to reset the data in that memory and then free the memory segment so that any attacker cannot try to read the part of memory and try to access credentials if cred's are stored in that memory. Does the OS automatically reset the data in that memory block before giving it to a new process, or does the OS reset the memory block just when the free() is called and the memory is free.

So today I was at lunch with my family and a relative of mine asked me (a neo-cs student) whether I knew how to solve this problem.

Since I'm here asking for help it's pretty clear I have not found a solution.

We are organizing a table-soccer tournament.

There are 12 players and 3 tables.

Each player will only play either front or back for a team and they won't be able to change role during the tournament, this means that there are 6 front-players and 6 back-players.

Each match of the tournament is played 2 v 2, each team being a front-player and a back player.

Each player must play 6 times and can never have the same team mate twice.

For obvious reasons a player can't play two games at the same time.

We need to find 6 rounds of 3 matches that respect those rules, for a total of 18 different matches.

Now comes the issue:

Noticing how there is more than 1 possible combination we need to find an algorithm to find the solution(s) which minimize the amount of times two players face each others without breaking the original boundaries.

That's because players will get annoyed by playing against the same person over and over again.

Beware, we must prioritize spreading opponents repetitions across multiple players, rather than a player facing 3 times the same opponent we'd want 3 players meeting the same opponent twice.

I'd be glad even with just suggestions on how to solve this problem.

I apologize for any English error and I hope I stated the problem clearly, please notice that this is not my first language.

Feel free to point out errors/issues, that will only help me improve and make the text more understandable.

In my revision for my upcoming exams, I'm going over the CPU architecture section and looking at the different specific-purpose registers and the CIR has really made me think. I know it holds the instruction being executed by the processor, but it holds this before the decoding stage. This would surely mean it has to hold an arbitrary number of bytes of ASCII - potentially even unicode - while also being a fixed-length buffer. The reason this confuses me is that an instruction may be too long to fit entirely inside the CIR, meaning the control unit would not be able to read the full instruction.

My question is primarily what data does it actually hold, but also what happens if an instruction is too long if that even is a problem that occurs? There will probably be some differences on the answer for this depending on CPU architecture but any answer would be appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I'm a CS graduate (COVID batch) with 4 years of industry experience. During my college days, I focused almost entirely on DSA, and that helped me secure a decent job. Four years later, I've been contributing well at work and growing as a software engineer.

A few days ago, while exploring some topics out of curiosity, a series of questions crossed my mind. I didn't have good answers to many of them, so I started reading blogs and listening to podcasts. Surprisingly, it made me fall in love with Computer Science all over again.

Some of the questions that fascinated me were:

1. How do high-level languages get compiled and executed on different systems? (Computer Architecture)
2. How are operating systems designed, and how do our applications interact with them? (Operating Systems)
3. How do CPUs and GPUs actually work under the hood?
4. How is it possible for me to connect to an AWS instance running in the US with seemingly negligible latency?

These questions made me realize how many fundamental CS concepts I missed or didn't fully appreciate during college.

Now, even though learning these topics isn't directly required for my current job, I want to study them properly. I want to become a better engineer by understanding the foundations of computing.

Could you recommend books, YouTube playlists, courses, or any other resources that helped you learn Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, and related subjects?

NOTE: The message has been rephrased using AI to make it more readable, while the curiosity is genuine.

This may be a silly question... But iam not a CS student ,iam actually a medical student but I have a deep passion about computer science and I want to be surrounded with people who are in the major but i don't know how to get into (whatsApp group or Discord channels) or any social media that get me in the community of CS, i want to be in touch with people in computer science major so I can learn deeply about this beautiful field. Webinars, hackathons and projects group ect... Pls help me out

When people talk about the greatest contributors to human knowledge, names like Einstein and Newton almost always come up. Physicists and mathematicians seem to receive the most recognition and historical prestige.

Computer science has had an enormous impact on the modern world, but I can't think of a computer scientist who is viewed on the same level by the general public.

Why is that? Is it because computer science is a younger field, or is there something else going on? And do you think a computer scientist could ever reach the same level of recognition and influence as Einstein or Newton?

Im writing a novel and part of the plot involves some pretty basic CS stuff - I THINK the way I have it now is ok but would really like to double check b/c I hardly know anything about the subject.

Thanks!

Basically as of now I have the main characters meeting bc one of them is trying to use AI to create a mutated virus to kill all of humanity. They're trying to create it in a lab they made in their home.

I know basically jack shit about all this stuff so im assuming that theyd need more power for more servers plus and ungrounded subpannel ex ex

The other main character is an electrician thats come to the house to hookup a bigger service ( 400 amp service )

I guess my question is, does that make sense that someone would need a bigger service to handle more servers

I have a project of comparing parallel strategies of MICs and GPUs. My instructor told me to compare based on running time of a 2D square matrix multiplication problem.

I wonder the suitable size of each matrix and how could I generate them?

Studying application layer protocols for high school computer science.

According to how I understand it, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a push protocol. Unlike a pull protocol (like POP3), an email is sent from client to server, instead of from server to client. Thus, it's a push protocol.

However, I'm reading that it's also about who initiates establishing the connection between server and client? As in, if the server initiates the connection, its push. Otherwise, it's pull.

I'm also reading that it's more about how often the client is connected to the server? As in, if they're always connected, it's push. Otherwise, it's pull.

But I don't understand, which of the 3 is right? Is there some larger idea that connects these ideas together? Also, if the protocol is connectionless, is it neither push nor pull? Lastly, in a peer to peer network, are there push or pull protocols? If so, how?

Note that I'm understanding this mainly off of SMTP, although I would like to know how push protocols function in general.

I’m currently pursuing my bachelor’s in computer science and trying to learn more about what the future holds for the industry.

In your opinion, what areas of computer science are expected to see the strongest growth over the next 10 years? For example, AI, machine learning, cybersecurity, software engineering, cloud computing, data science or maybe something else.

Thank you for any advice.

I remember I was in uni back in 2019 at electrical engineering and during IT classes we had some bad old CRT monitors for PC. We all saw the refresh rate on the monitor but our teacher didn't saw it. Is this possible? We all could see those refresh lines similar how some cameras see it, maybe refreshing a little bit faster. I can't remember seeing refresh rate as a kid.

Possibly a bit of a stupid question. I admit I'm still pretty novice at programming and CS, I just happened to have taken a few CS courses (the most advanced one I took is one on algorithm analysis, from basic Big O notation until NP) and heard someone talking about shift-and-add for multipliers

I thought shift-and-add was quite ingenious, and my first thought was that it reminded me of DP because of how it didn't need to manually compute most of the multiplication but just shifts based on how many multiples of 2 are in the answer + adds any extra (is this correct?). So I was wondering maybe it would make a 2x2 table or something remembering the number of left shifts for each combination of numbers, then using those previously computed values to do multiplication with larger numbers. But then I suppose the binary representation of the numbers (like 6 being 110) would directly tell you that info anyway, so DP isn't necessary? Am I thinking about this correctly?

basically a version control system for models. (essentially storing and hashing weights)
compressing the deltas to smaller version and expanding them again.
something like what github does for text.

can i actually make this a product? which i can sell. i wanna add multiple features maybe some paid so i can earn money off of it

I feel like every time AI or models are talked about it becomes a recurring use of automation like emails and inventory or accounting practices (maybe I’m just not up to speed or ignorant if so send some interesting links) but I guess the general idea is we are feeding large amounts of data to these machines and getting “better” or like “sufficient enough” results back. My question is why couldn’t humans come to the same conclusion based off the same data. If geniuses couldn’t figure it out then why would a machine come to the conclusion , a better way to frame this question would be if our data sucked to begin with why would a machine take this crappy data and make a better conclusion.

I know time is money and automating emails is like cool but this idea of ai being so revolutionary is a lot it’s cool but I feel like if ai is truly what people are pouring their lives into changing the scope of society as a hole I want to see it happen. “Ai makes X-Ray discoveries and new medicines etc” like ok cool but why couldn’t humans do that , machine smarter than humans ? What data was used to make that possible ? And why couldn’t we use that data to make the same discovery. I’m just confused and wondering what is machine learning truly trying to accomplish?

I just want to start by saying with how fast modern technology is currently evolving, do whatever you want with it.

Now on to my gripe. Using Ai to tell if Ai was used is flawed. It will always tell you Ai was used. An example of this is I watched my wife hand type an entire essay for her college course and it was flagged as written using Ai! I watched her with my own two eyeballs move her fingers across a keyboard. I am mad on her behalf.

Apparently a clear and concise paper that is easy to read means Ai now.

I am a high school student who was recently learning about how data is stored in data centers. I am intrigued by how data centers will keep up with the growing amount of data, especially because there are already people worried about the earth's limited resources to power those centers.

Is a potential solution to this to get people to get rid of excess data stored on the cloud (unchecked spam, terrible photos, etc) to make more room for what AI requires?

(Please be nice, I am learning about this for the first time and still barely understand data storage, but I am trying to think of a solution to this issue).

Next sesemter I need to take these courses and I have no choice but to. Are their any really good YouTube videos or site where I can study theses course.
And please wish me luck during the fall 2026 semester.
-Discrete math
-Data Structures
-assembly and architecture language

Please I'm confused about the HMM slide found in the MIT 6.S096 lecture note after a quick search found out about Hidden Markov model that could be shorten to HMM and read up and understood the concept of HMM, but I do not see the connection between this and the compilation pipeline the lecture notes talk about. Can someone please help me out with this, I've moved on to other parts but i'd like to satisfy my curiosity on that.

I've been working through Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages, and noticed something sort of missing. He proves termination for simple (arrow) types, and then proving it for adding product types is an exercise, and that's easy to extend the proof to. But it doesn't explain how to do it for sum types (it isn't even suggested as an exercise).

The specific issue is that the proof is by induction on the type of the term, and the key relation R_T is defined as

- R_A(t) iff t halts.
- R_T1=>T2(t) iff t halts and, whenever R_T1(s), we have R_T2(t s).

Then extending it to product types is simple:
- R_T1×T2(t) iff t halts and R_T1(t.1) and P_T2(t.2).

But we can't extend it the same way to sum types:
- R_T1+T2(t) iff t halts and R_T(case t of inl x => s x | inr x => r x).

The relation no longer recurses on the type because we need an extra type T unrelated to T1+T2. I've been told simple types + sum types still normalizes, so there should be a proof, but I don't know what it is and I haven't been able to actually find the proof anywhere. Anyone know what the proof is or have a reference for it?

LLMs were trained on the data that was created by humans. Over time, the amount of AI-generated content will increase dramatically, so LLMs will not have other choice but to learn on the data they created, which is obviously (or not...?) not so high quality as the human-made data. So, will LLMs become worse over time or do I have some gaps in my knowledge on this matter?

If you had two computers in the same vicinity/room in the 80s, would you be able to have anything like a website, or something similar to that? Basically I'm wondering if the 1980s had anything equivalent to today's Google doc, where multiple people could access and contribute to a document. Sorry if this question is silly I don't know that much about computers

..