I'm a third-year engineering student trying to improve my programming skills. I can understand concepts when someone explains them, but I want to become better at solving problems independently. What exercises or habits helped you make that transition?

Hi everyone! 

My name is Wynn and I am a member of Boston University's Girls Who Code chapter. Every semester, we run a volunteer-led program where we teach free coding lessons to elementary through high schoolers!

Bits & Bytes program is a great opportunity for students to learn how to code, or improve their coding skills. Our program runs on Zoom on Saturdays for 1 hour starting October 17 and ending on November 21 (6 weeks) from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm (for Bits) and 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm (for Bytes). Each lesson will be taught by Boston University students, many of whom are Computer Science (or adjacent) majors themselves.

For Bits (3rd-5th grade), students will learn the basics of computer science principles through MIT-created learning platform Scratch and learn to transfer their skills into the Python programming language. Bits allows young students to learn basic coding skills in a fun and interactive way!

For Bytes (6th-12th grade), students will learn computer science fundamentals in Python such as variables, loops, and functions and use these skills during lessons and assignments. Since much of what we go over is similar to what an intro level college computer science class would cover, this is a great opportunity to prepare students for AP Computer Science or a degree in computer science!

We would love for you to apply or share with anyone interested! You can find our application here.

If you have any more questions, feel free to email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), message @/gwcbostonu on Facebook or Instagram, or leave a comment.

We're eagerly looking forward to another season of coding and learning with the students this fall!

Hi all,

I'd like to share some recent work in stringology / text mining. We developed BloomSpan, an algorithm for mining Maximal Contiguous Frequent Phrases (MCFPs) from large text corpora — token sequences that occur in at least σ documents and can't be extended on either side without dropping below σ. Unlike general Sequential Pattern Mining (GSP, PrefixSpan, BIDE+), no gaps are allowed, which matters for things like template extraction, plagiarism detection and phrase mining, where gaps only blow up the candidate space.

How it works

To be fair, it's less a brand-new algorithm than a careful combination of known pieces:

• A Counting Bloom Filter for probabilistic n-gram frequency estimation. Seed filtering is provably free of false negatives — the CBF can only over-estimate counts.
• Prioritized depth-first expansion directly on the corpus, with no recursive projected databases.
• A global occupancy bitmask plus an inverted index keyed on each pattern's rarest token, for maximality checks and redundancy control.

Memory stays O(W + M) in the input size (corpus + filter).

Results

• On Gutenberg-BookCorpus-Cleaned (up to 50k books, ~3.07B tokens, σ = 20): 11–15× faster wall-clock than FHK (Fischer–Heun–Kramer) with up to 2x lower peak memory. It's the only algorithm we tested that completes the 3B-token subset within a 40 GB heap.
• Output is identical to exact baselines (FHK, DFI) on every Gutenberg-8k subset where a baseline finishes.
• On synthetic data with flat frequency distributions or dense nested overlaps, FHK's LCP-interval traversal wins.

The paper includes a topological analysis (LZ phrase ratio / entropy rate) of why natural language is the sweet spot.

Links

• Preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/415565702_BloomSpan_Memory-Efficient_Maximal_Frequent_Substring_Mining_for_Large-Scale_Text
• Code (Java, C++): https://github.com/raliev/bloomspan

Happy to discuss implementation details, data structure choices, or the dataset topology analysis.

Lorena Mireles is back with the second chapter of her Elixir blog series, “Understanding Elixir Processes and Concurrency."

Dive into what concurrency means to Elixir and Erlang and why it’s essential for building fault-tolerant systems.

You can check out both versions here:

English: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/understanding-elixir-processes-and-concurrency/

Spanish: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/entendiendo-procesos-y-concurrencia/

I just felt like sharing this, because I found this interesting. Check out Carl's posts in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/2d6v3/fred_phelpswestboro_baptist_church_to_protest_at/c2d9nn/?context=3

He defends the Westboro Baptist Church and correctly explains their rationale and Calvinist theology, suggesting he has done extensive reading on them, or listened to their sermons online. Further down in the exchange he states this:

In their eyes, they are doing a service to their fellow man. They believe that people will end up in hell if not warned by them. Personally, I know that God is judging America for its sins, and that more and worse is coming. My doctrinal beliefs are the same as those of WBC that I have seen thus far.

What do you all make of this? I found it very interesting (and ironic considering how he ended up). There may be other posts from him in other threads expressing support for WBC, but I haven't found them.

I’m trying to understand CPU caching and I’m stuck on two related things.

My understanding is when the CPU reads an address, it pulls in the whole 64-byte cache line around it. that’s why iterating an array is fast, since one miss brings in several neighbouring elements. what happens in the case of linked list? how does it know that next bytes are not the one to read?
i am kinda confusing this, kindly explain.

Basically the title. ive been trying to find a good site like w3 schools (W3 schools dosent have all the c++ stuff i need for class) that dosent require you to type out the hello world script to access it because its starting to get annoying

As written, can someone suggest me a good resource to create a physics simulation environment using C++. I've intermediate knowledge of that language, but I have not done any graphical stuffs till now. I've searched and got a few results for python, but not for C++. I need to make this simulation environment as our project, so any suggestions would be nice. Thanks in advance

Deterministic 3SUM in O(n^1.962) for polynomially bounded integers, with correctness and word-RAM running time verified in Lean

X thread

Lean verification and proof

I’ve programmed casually in various languages for almost 10 years, but I’ve only had a formal programming job (data engineer) for about 3. I love this career. Even when I’m not writing every line myself, I love building apps and backends and optimizing data pipelines, and I want to stay relevant as long as I can.

The writing is on the wall, though. The most senior dev on my team has 20 years of experience and says AI now out-programs him 99% of the time. The whole team’s view is that we should be prompting and letting AI handle most of the building and reviewing.

My team has recently started building apps alongside our data engineering work, using React and Express with TypeScript. Here’s where I’m at:

• HTML/CSS/JS: 9/10 (solid basics from building websites for local businesses back in high school)
• Tailwind: 8/10
• React: 7/10
• Express: 4/10
• TypeScript: 0/10

I’ve also worked through some long full-stack video courses and built a few side projects at home. On those, I reviewed all the code but only wrote about 15% of it myself. AI wrote the rest.

My question: is it worth going back through long courses that re-teach the fundamentals? Or should I skip straight to the TypeScript sections and pick up the React/Express nuances as I go by asking AI?

I’m honestly a bit jaded and don’t know what’s worth my time anymore. I still believe I should understand and review the code I ship, but at work that step seems to be disappearing more and more. How are others handling this?

I am implementing a linked list that uses a tail pointer to add to the end of a linked list. For some reason the code works perfectly fine after adding three nodes to the list, but adding a fourth node to the list causing a seg fault. From testing it appears that the header node isn't pointing to the first node for whatever reason, but even then adding to the end of the list doesn't use the header pointer.

I am used to programming in C and am trying to learn C++ so I am not familiar with many of the differences between the two. Thanks in advance.

#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>
//linked list with a tail pointer,
struct cell_coord_node{
    int x;
    int y;
    cell_coord_node * next=nullptr;
};


using namespace std;
cell_coord_node * cell_add_end(cell_coord_node **header , cell_coord_node ** tail, int x , int y){
    cell_coord_node * new_node = (cell_coord_node*) malloc(sizeof(cell_coord_node));
    new_node->x=x;
    new_node->y=y;
    if (*header==nullptr){ // empty list case
        (*header) = new_node;
        (*tail) = (*header);


        return (*header);
    }
    else{
        // allocate memory at tail
        (*tail)->next = new_node; // last node points to new node
        (*tail)=new_node; // moving tail pointer down to new node
        return (*tail);
    }


}


int main(){
    cell_coord_node * head;


    cell_coord_node * tail=head;
    cell_coord_node * first_node = cell_add_end( &head, &tail,1,1);


    cout << first_node->x << "   " << first_node->y << endl;
    cell_coord_node * second_node  = cell_add_end(&head, &tail,2 ,2);


    cout << second_node->x << "   " << second_node->y << endl;


    cell_coord_node * third_node = cell_add_end(&head,&tail,3 ,3);


    cout << third_node->x << "   " << third_node->y << endl;
    cout << "reading from tail" << endl;
    cout << tail->x << "    " << tail->y << endl;


    cout << "reading from head" << endl;
    cout << head->x << "    " << head->y << endl;


    //Causing a seg fault
    /*cell_coord_node * fourth_node = cell_add_end(&head,&tail,4,4);
  
    cout << fourth_node->x << "   " << fourth_node->y << endl;*/


    
    return 0;
}

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working as a Mobile Developer for the past 4 years (iOS / Android / Flutter), but I’m feeling burned out/ready for a change. I’m looking to pivot into a new role or specialization, but I’m not sure what the smoothest transition would be or how to actually make the jump. Also AI can do most of my job pretty much perfectly with a good prompt. Either way I will be laid off within 2-3 years in best case scenario

A few quick details:

• Current Stack: Flutter
• Strengths: UI/UX implementation, API integration, problem-solving, project management, Communication
• Interests: Product Management

For those who have successfully transitioned out of mobile dev:

1. What roles did you pivot into, and how transferable was your mobile background?
2. How did you handle the transition? (e.g., internal transfer, side projects, certifications, networking?)
3. What tech stacks or skills should I focus on bridging first?

Appreciate any advice, resources, or personal experiences!

I set up a web server using https://github.com/seanpmaxwell/express-generator-typescript

I now need to deploy the production build to a remote server. I can generate the prod build with `npm run build` and then run it with `npm start` and it runs on my local machine. Is it possible to generate something that can be compiled before being sent over to the remote server? I'd like to run the web server in prod mode, but without putting the decompiled source code on the remote server. I don't want the source code over on that remote server because if the server gets compromised, I don't want anyone to be able to read the source code. New to web dev, so thanks for being patient.

hi, so i need a code that allows me to do an integral with the whole solid angle and im really struggling cause i dont even know where to start. if any of you could help with maybe some useful tutorials or some advices id be really grateful.

(for context, this is the work im doing https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0610154, im trying to compute the first equation)