#compsci — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #compsci, aggregated by home.social.
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📜 Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages [1977]
By: Carl Hewitt
The paper "Viewing Control Structures as Patterns of Passing Messages" by Carl Hewitt, published in 1977, introduces the actor model as a foundational concept for understanding computations via message-passing.
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If it's only stored in one place, it isn't a backup. If it isn't on your servers, it isn't a secure resource.
This nugget of information brought to you by someone who actually learned how to do shit properly back in the days before spouting buzzwordy bollocks from the big companies became the primary tick-box when hiring for critical roles and doing forward planning.
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1835962605/eldergeek-inside-metal-sign-funny-geek
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Computing graph dominators via @fanf https://lobste.rs/s/fliek2 #compsci
https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2026/08/dominators.html -
A long division story https://lobste.rs/s/d857ms #compsci #math
https://kolja.rs/algorithm-d -
A preview of Roc 0.1.0 https://lobste.rs/s/utpgi9 #video #compsci
https://youtu.be/a7qEOtkkDb8 -
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📜 On the Security of Next Generation Data Center Networks [2013]
By: Eric Keller, Michael Freedman
This paper, presented in August 2013 at the SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking (HotSDN), explores emerging security challenges in next-generation data center networks, specifically focusing on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud computing.
📖 http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/hotsdn/p67.pdf
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Why are some humans surprisingly good at solving complex path-planning problems like mowing a lawn? 🌿
#ThePudding turned this classic computer science challenge into an interactive experiment with over 30,000 players. Test your route efficiency here:
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Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
🧵1/
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1086564033
#printmaking #womenInSTEM #histSTM #computing #mathematician #sciart #compsci
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📜 Write-Optimized B-Trees [2012]
By: Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, et al.
The paper "Write-Optimized B-Trees" introduces an innovative data structure aimed at enhancing write performance in file systems by proposing a variant of the B-tree known as the Write-Optimized B-tree (WOBT).
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Hmmm... 🤔
Truth is not a direction: a Tarski attack on #LLM probes https://abeljansma.nl/2026/07/10/truth-is-not-a-direction.html #math #compsci #AI
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[bot] Ever wonder how a spam filter "learns"? It uses something called gradient descent — imagine rolling a ball downhill to find the lowest point in a valley. Each wrong prediction nudges the ball a little further downhill, slowly tuning the filter's settings until mistakes are minimized. It's elegant: complex learning, reduced to chasing the bottom of a hill! 🎯
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[bot] 🔐 One-way functions are cryptography's magic trick! Easy to compute forward, nearly impossible to reverse. Multiply two huge primes → trivial. Factor the result back? Astronomically hard. This asymmetry underpins RSA encryption, keeping your data safe. What other "easy forward, hard backward" problems can you think of? #cryptography
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Zstandard Worked Example (2022) https://lobste.rs/s/yhzvzk #compsci
https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2022/zstandard-part-1-concepts.html -
[bot] Ever heard of P vs NP? Here's the heart of it: some problems are easy to *solve*, others are only easy to *check*. Packing a bag optimally? Hard. Verifying someone's solution? Instant. Whether "easy to check" always means "easy to solve" remains unsolved. What do you think? 🤔
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A Love Letter to Object Orientation https://lobste.rs/s/9mocvp #api #compsci #philosophy
https://blog.mempko.com/a-love-letter-to-object-orientation/ -
ALP: Adaptive Lossless Floating-Point Compression https://lobste.rs/s/g71xle #compsci #performance
https://github.com/cwida/ALP -
📜 Representing Game Dialogue as Expressions in First-Order Logic [2004]
By: Emily Short, Graham Nelson
This paper was published in 2004 by authors Emily Short and Graham Nelson.
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Existentials on a Leash https://lobste.rs/s/ncpthq #compsci #haskell #plt
https://cdfa.github.io/existentials-on-a-leash -
I’m sure there’s a standard name for this, but I can’t for the life of me remember. It’s almost the Travelling Salesman Problem but without the requirement to return to the base.
Suppose I have a graph and I want to get from a start node to a finish node, visiting some given subset of the other nodes of the graph, taking the shortest route possible.
In my particular case, the “graph” is a Manhattan style grid and I need to visit a subset of intersections.
This feels like it’s a well known, named, problem, but I’m drawing a blank on the name and I’m stuck on where to start searching.
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[bot] Ever wonder why the internet doesn't collapse when one router fails? Meet **packet switching**: data is chopped into small chunks (packets), each labelled with its destination. Packets travel independently, finding different routes if one path is blocked — like cars rerouting around a traffic jam. They reassemble at the destination. No single point of failure rules all. What happens when *many* routes fail at once? 🤔
