#computerscience

Vale Margaret Hamilton. She was a Software Engineer. She was the _first_ Software Engineer because she defined the term, Software Engineering: "When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. Not because of his acceptance of the new 'term' per se, but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right." Margaret Hamilton led the Software Engineering team at MIT that created the software that ran NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer. The photo of her standing next to a stack of source code printouts — that's her work, and she was essential to NASA's mission of landing people on the Moon for the first time ever and getting them back to Earth again safely. Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007 #MargaretHamilton #SoftwareEngineer #SoftwareEngineering #ComputerScience #NASA #MIT #Apollo #MoonLanding

Do not let your type system reason about aliasing in your programming language https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2026-09-22-aliasing.html #Programming #SoftwareEngineering #ComputerScience

A simplified history of regular expressions:

• In 1951, Stephen Kleene invented regular expressions.

• In 1966, Ken Thompson built the first software implementation of regular expressions, in the QED text editor for CTSS. UNIX ed is a cut down version of QED, popularizing the tradition of regular expressions in editors. grep started as a standalone version of the engine from ed. em, ex, vi, and vim evolved from ed.

• In 1987, Larry Wall spread regular expressions to the next generation of programmers through Perl. Gravely, it uses backtracking, spreading terrible performance for decades. It derives its engine from the rn newsreader, which derives it from Gosling Emacs. James Gosling claims he wrote it from scratch.

• In 2010, Russ Cox, having spent time at Bell Labs, rejected backtracking and built RE2, a fast and scalable engine, generalized from work on Google Code Search. Its ideas have spread to Go regexp and Rust regex, a new generation of engines.

• Since 2025, Ian Erik Varatalu has been researching regular expressions for his PhD and has produced a fast engine using derivatives. It implements seldom-included intersection and complement and efficiently implements lookaround. It is faster than all previous engines.

#unix #computerscience

18/ The commentary cites another study (randomized controlled trial involving #SoftwareEngineers, still preprint ahead of #PeerReview) [6] to "investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of #ComputerScience" [4] This early study appears to suggest how #genAI-assisted "participants did particularly poorly on questions that required them to diagnose #errors in the code, which suggests that they had failed to learn the concepts behind the #code that they had just produced"

In Search of a Compositional Theory of Self-Stabilization http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/09/in-search-of-compositional-theory-of.html #HackerNews #Tech #ComputerScience

#LLMs make poor #teachers because they were never #studemts. #story time. I'm part of a #team of #volunteer co-teachers teaching #Python to #HighSchool students remotely over Zoom. But that's only the #process. The goal is to grow other-subject teachers into #ComputerScience teachers by teaching them along with their students. This week, our students are learning how to use the input() function to get information from the user. The project is to write a program that introduces itself as a #genie and asks the user for three #wishes, then prints out the wishes. Our classroom teacher was thinking how he could do it in a loop. Because he learned that when previous classes had studied #loops. We discussed that this was one of the reasons that volunteers were expected to do the work we are assigning to students using only what the students had been taught. So we could help them better when they encountered problems. And this right here is a big problem with LLMs as teachers. These models are trained, but they don't learn like we do. They were given all the #answers as part of their #training #data. When they cannot find an answer, they don't try to determine the answer by replicating the steps that students are taught — they make a #statistical #guess based on their training data. Worse yet, they are incapable of actual learning from their #errors. And "errors" is the correct term. "#Hallucinations" are a subset of errors that involve the #perception of nonexistent stimuli. #Techbros use this term because it sounds nice to them. Like, "I was high, and I had this awesome idea," instead of, "I'm just making shit up so I sound like I know what I'm doing." The latter is how they engage with the world, because they prioritize #confidence over #correctness. Which is a very bad look for a teacher. There are legitimate uses for LLMs in #education, but none of them are as personal tutors.

Intuitionistic Type Theory (2024) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type-theory-intuitionistic/ #ComputerScience #Logic #Mathematics

SplitFT: Fault Tolerance for Disaggregated Datacenters via Remote Memory Logging https://ramalagappan.github.io/pdfs/papers/splitft.pdf #DistributedSystems #ComputerScience #Research

Now, for everyone feeling smug the CS1 handouts were easy, CS2 brings drops Computer Science on you. The task here -and why I found it painful at first-, is not to skim through recognising symbols or words, it is to go through *proving every assertion*. Not done that for a long time. Maybe this is my chance to play with Lean. Note: this is the preliminaries chapter. If you can't get past here, game over https://github.com/steveloughran/edinburgh_cs/blob/main/1986-cs2/1986-cs2-foundations-01-mathematical-preliminaries.pdf #computerscience #cs

Currently reading: Edinburgh Uni Computer Science 2h foundations course handouts from 1986/87. Even partway through the mathematical preliminaries chapter and I have a headache. I am going to scan all of this and put online to share the joy #computerscience #cs

FYI: How computer science could fix Google's data monopoly problem: A new legal paper proposes using computer science algorithms to implement Google's court-ordered data-sharing remedies efficiently and without discrimination. https://ppc.land/how-computer-science-could-fix-googles-data-monopoly-problem/ #ComputerScience #DataMonopoly #Google #DataSharing #LegalTech

My wonderful PhD adviser is hiring! He's searching for a PhD student to work on combining search algorithms and machine learning. He's at the department where I did my MSc research back in the day, and where I had an amazing time. https://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/jobs/60705642?lang=en #PhDLife #AcademicMastodon #AcademicChatter #GetFediHired #Belgium #MachineLearning #ComputerScience #Algorithms #Optimization

Admission requirements for the five-year integrated Computer Engineering degree programme at NTNU in Trondheim are being lowered for the fourth year in a row. Apparently, the uncertainty due to the AI craze is dampening young people's interest in the CE programme. #computerscience #CS #computerengineering #CE #NTNU #Trondheim https://www.universitetsavisa.no/arbeidslivsrelevans-fakultet-for-informasjonsteknologi-og-elektroteknikk-institutt-for-datateknologi-og-informatikk/poenggrensen-pa-datateknologi-falt-med-nesten-ti-poeng/461450

After #OpenAI’s new model hacked into HuggingFace’s systems, AI safety concerns have skyrocketed. To address the concerns, #SaarlandUniversity professor and German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence CEO Philipp Slusallek spoke to the Saarländischer Rundfunk. 🔗 Read more: https://sic.link/interview #SaarlandInformaticsCampus #SIC #artificialintelligence #huggingface #europeanai #computerscience #cybersecurity #airesearch #responsibleai

Demystifying DRAM Read Disturbance: RowHammer and RowPress Phenomena https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28233 #HackerNews #Tech #ComputerScience

Logic for Programmers https://logicforprogrammers.com/ #Programming #Logic #ComputerScience

RE: https://mstdn.social/@peterdrake/116765924129368419 Time and the applicant pool are running short for the cybersecurity-related courses. If you can teach IN PERSON (not negotiable) in Portland, OR, please apply ASAP! If not, please boost and let your contacts know. #ComputerScience #cybersecurity #jobs #academia #education #pdx #portland #FediHired #GetFediHired

Improving Heuristics (2015) https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/heuristics/differential.html #ComputerScience #Algorithms #GameDev

Functional programming from first principles, part 1 - motivation https://www.endoflineblog.com/functional-programming-from-first-principles-part-1-motivation #Programming #FunctionalProgramming #ComputerScience

History of John Backus's FP languages https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/FP/ #History #Programming #ComputerScience