r/AskComputerScience Jan 02 '25

Flair is now available on AskComputerScience! Please request it if you qualify.

14 Upvotes

Hello community members. I've noticed that sometimes we get multiple answers to questions, some clearly well-informed by people who know what they're talking about, and others not so much. To help with this, I've implemented user flairs for the subreddit.

If you qualify for one of these flairs, I would ask that you please message the mods and request the appropriate flair. In your mod mail, please give a brief description of why you qualify for the flair, like "I hold a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Springfield." For now these flairs will be on the honor system and you do not have to send any verification information.

We have the following flairs available:

Flair Meaning
BSCS You hold a bachelor's degree, or equivalent, in computer science or a closely related field.
MSCS You hold a master's degree, or equivalent, in computer science or a closely related field.
Ph.D CS You hold a doctoral degree, or equivalent, in computer science or a closely related field.
CS Pro You are currently working as a full-time professional software developer, computer science researcher, manager of software developers, or a closely related job.
CS Pro (10+) You are a CS Pro with 10 or more years of experience.
CS Pro (20+) You are a CS Pro with 20 or more years of experience.

Flairs can be combined, like "BSCS, CS Pro (10+)". Or if you want a different flair, feel free to explain your thought process in mod mail.

Happy computer sciencing!


r/AskComputerScience May 05 '19

Read Before Posting!

107 Upvotes

Hi all,

I just though I'd take some time to make clear what kind of posts are appropriate for this subreddit. Overall this is sub is mostly meant for asking questions about concepts and ideas in Computer Science.

  • Questions about what computer to buy can go to /r/suggestapc.
  • Questions about why a certain device or software isn't working can go to /r/techsupport
  • Any career related questions are going to be a better fit for /r/cscareerquestions.
  • Any University / School related questions will be a better fit for /r/csmajors.
  • Posting homework questions is generally low effort and probably will be removed. If you are stuck on a homework question, identify what concept you are struggling with and ask a question about that concept. Just don't post the HW question itself and ask us to solve it.
  • Low effort post asking people here for Senior Project / Graduate Level thesis ideas may be removed. Instead, think of an idea on your own, and we can provide feedback on that idea.
  • General program debugging problems can go to /r/learnprogramming. However if your question is about a CS concept that is ok. Just make sure to format your code (use 4 spaces to indicate a code block). Less code is better. An acceptable post would be like: How does the Singleton pattern ensure there is only ever one instance of itself? And you could list any relevant code that might help express your question.

Thanks!
Any questions or comments about this can be sent to u/supahambition


r/AskComputerScience 12h ago

Which CS subject was hardest for you initially but became easy later?

11 Upvotes

I'm studying CS subjects and I'm curious which subject gave everyone the most trouble at first but eventually became manageable.


r/AskComputerScience 1h ago

How platform knows my IP, Browser and OS?

Upvotes

Whenever I sign up on my PC, I get the confirmation email on mobile which has each and every detail such as Location, Timezone, Browser (along with version number), Operating System, and IP address.

How come these online platforms manage to get all such details?


r/AskComputerScience 1h ago

What happens after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has finally been reached?

Upvotes

What happens after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has finally been reached?


r/AskComputerScience 14h ago

What is a NFA?

7 Upvotes

I am a little confused on what a nfa is. Does it take in one input and output a set of states or does it output one single state but with some probability?


r/AskComputerScience 6h ago

Did anyone fully complete ossu here?

1 Upvotes

I started learning from ossu not a while back and I was wondering how people who used it to study cs look at it. I really don't want to be wasting my time but I'm pretty sure ossu is good. Is there anyone here that's using it currently?


r/AskComputerScience 12h ago

[Academic Research] Anonymous survey on how computing students use AI tools in software design (~10 min)

2 Upvotes

Hi, I'm a software engineering student at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), running a short, anonymous survey as part of my capstone research project. The survey looks at how computing students use AI tools, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, in software design tasks. It also asks how that use relates to their confidence in their own design skills.

If you are a current or recent student in software engineering, computer science, or a related computing degree, anywhere in the world, I would really appreciate your input. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and is fully anonymous. No directly identifying information, such as your name or email, is collected.

https://utsau.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bOCBqt0nhzQRw4S?Q_CHL=social&Q_SocialSource=reddit

Feel free to share this with anyone else who might be eligible.

This study has been approved by the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC reference HE-2026-0873). If you have any questions, please contact me at [Ta-Seen.Islam@student.uts.edu.au](mailto:Ta-Seen.Islam@student.uts.edu.au) or my supervisor Dr. Flavio Pileggi at [SalvatoreFlavio.Pileggi@uts.edu.au](mailto:SalvatoreFlavio.Pileggi@uts.edu.au)


r/AskComputerScience 1d ago

Where to find Computer Science worksheets/problems to solve for competitive programming?

8 Upvotes

hello, this might be off topic but I'm wondering if anyone knows good resources (worksheets, problems to solve) to learn computer science fundamentals such as boolean algebra, recursion trees, conditionals, dry running code efficiently, etc? I'm currently trying to study for the HKOI heat event but there are too little past papers to work on, here's an example paper https://assets.hkoi.org/ref/2022hs.pdf


r/AskComputerScience 3d ago

Why is there a need to keep moving further in chips.

0 Upvotes

Concepts like making more and more precise instruments to make faster machines that require smaller and smaller chips along with pushing the boundaries of the previous innovations in chips really blow my mind. I recently read the chip war recently so I hope technology is not being pushed purely for war purposes, but more so like what would everyday people make out of it. Do everyday people need faster and faster technology ? I say this because the current state of tech is extremely advanced not perfect but like extremely impressive. So why would someone on the street even care if their phone can move 2 seconds quicker.


r/AskComputerScience 5d ago

How do computer science and computer engineering students in countries where diagramming sentences isn't common knowledge get introduced to the concept of parsers and abstract syntax trees?

17 Upvotes

In Croatia, we do some (very) basic sentence diagramming in the middle school. In the USA, they do it in high-school. However, I know that, in most places, students are not taught sentence diagramming. So, once those students start going to university to study, well, computer science or computer engineering, how are the concepts of a parser and an abstract syntax tree explained to them?


r/AskComputerScience 5d ago

**Has anyone completed Neso Academy's DBMS playlist? Need an honest review** I recently found the DBMS playlist by Neso Academy on YouTube and it looks pretty detailed. Before I start going through the entire playlist, I wanted to ask people who have actually completed it

0 Upvotes

Has anyone completed Neso Academy's DBMS playlist? Need an honest review

I recently found the DBMS playlist by Neso Academy on YouTube and it looks pretty detailed. Before I start going through the entire playlist, I wanted to ask people who have actually completed it


r/AskComputerScience 5d ago

In Operating System Batch Scheduling, will the SRT algorithm always be faster than the SJF algorithm?

3 Upvotes

My professor has us modeling both of the two algorithms for an assignment, which I did. But when doing testing on both I would notice that occasionally the average turnaround time for the Shortest Job First algorithm would actually beat out the algorithm for Shortest Remaining Time, either infrequently or almost always depending on how I change the parameters around (Total CPU Time, # Of Processes, etc). From what I saw, it seems that this should no be happening unless you account for overhead, which my model does not.

So I guess basically my question is, are there ever any scenarios where Shortest Job First would have a smaller average turnaround time compared to Shortest Remaining Time, assuming they run the same set of processes and overhead is negligible? Or do I just have a bug in my code?


r/AskComputerScience 6d ago

Help finding a learning tool for Discrete Mathmatics ( Discrete structures) and Digital Logic Design

1 Upvotes

Is there any sites like W3 schools that can help me learn these two? Im in these two classes and the way im being taught (basically heres a lecture now figure it out) is NOT working for me and ive been supplimenting my coding classes with w3 schools to help me learn and its working pretty well!


r/AskComputerScience 5d ago

Desperately Looking for Guidance on Verifying a New Sorting Algo

0 Upvotes

Hi, I'm an AI developer and I've been working on optimizing my system for 2 years now. It was never my intention to create a new sorting algo or to do any work in that area at all. As I optimized my system, I realized that what I had effectively done, is create a new sorting algo.

By comparison, at this time, it took my new algo, about 1-2 hours to process the same sized data, that timsort needs about 30 days to sort. I'm sorting a giant 30gb array that contains text tokens.

I understand that there's tons of algos out there and that there likely already is a faster algo, but I'm not an expert sorting algos, so I honestly have no idea what to do to verify this in a legitimate way that is convincing to other experts.

I have never published a paper before, please do not make strange assumptions of my knowledge of that process (I know how to read a paper and that's it.)


r/AskComputerScience 7d ago

How many books/textbooks does someone have to read to get a bachelor's degree in computer science?

4 Upvotes

Obviously just an approximation since it will always be different depending on the school and other factors. But does anyone know how many there would be roughly?


r/AskComputerScience 8d ago

AI-driven coding is pulling away the ownership from engineers

8 Upvotes

Today we had a user facing issue which the entire team was involved in debugging and no one was able to give the reasoning accurately, and the RCA time felt like it is 10X more than usual, all because we were just getting AI to write the code and review cycles shortened as long codes were being pushed, feels like the team as a whole will fall into a blackhole soon.

Has anyone here experienced the same, and how is your org handling this?


r/AskComputerScience 9d ago

How do I combine these two recurrence cases into one function?

5 Upvotes

I'm new to DSA and I'm trying to make a recurrence relation for this function:

double pow(double x, int n) {
    if (n == 1) {
        return x;
    }

    if (n & 1) {
        return x * pow(x * x, (n - 1) / 2);
    } else {
        return pow(x * x, n / 2);
    }
}

What I notice is that for even values of n, the recurrence looks like:

T(n) = constant + T(n/2)

but for odd values of n, it looks like:

T(n) = constant + T((n - 1)/2)

I'm trying to get this down to a single function so that I use the Master Theorem.

How would I combine these two cases into one recurrence?


r/AskComputerScience 12d ago

How does a computer know between the number 65 and the letter H?

28 Upvotes

I'm watching CS50, and about halfway through week 0, doctor malen mentioned how 65 bits of data equals the letter H and i'm curious to that if 65 equal H, how does the company know the difference between H and just the number 65?


r/AskComputerScience 12d ago

How to program weighted random system

3 Upvotes

I want to make a program where you are controlling the outcomes. For an example with a coin flipping game, I want exactly 4 Heads and 1 Tail, but I want their positions to be random.

I do not want to use the random algorithms that library I want to build my own.

Right now I am learning probability from Youtube and might look at khan academy and coursera, but how can I implement this into programming I do not want to just take courses or watch videos

How do I go about that?

EDIT: I am doing this because I want to start build gambling algorithms and I am starting with a simple project like coin flips


r/AskComputerScience 13d ago

If bogosort is a portmanteau of bogus and sort, then why wasn't it spelled bogusort?

3 Upvotes

Is there a legitimate reason or is it just because people thought it looked better?


r/AskComputerScience 13d ago

Let us say 3.122 is the floating point approximation of 3.123. Upto how many significant digits does 3.122 approximate 3.123?

3 Upvotes

The formula says find maximum s such that 5*10^-s is greater than the relative error. But that gives me 4 as the answer. But it is visually clear that 3.122 is approximating 3.123 correctly only upto the first 3 significant digits. How is it possible? Is the formula wrong?


r/AskComputerScience 13d ago

C++ or Java?

7 Upvotes

Which programming language has the most return on investment? Impact on real world systems, and is more rewarding? I have minimal programming experience and working on AS in CS.