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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

missing.csail.mit.edu

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Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#111

Post by beefhash »

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/security/

> An example of a hash function is SHA1, which is used in Git. It maps arbitrary-sized inputs to 160-bit outputs (which can be represented as 40 hexadecimal characters). We can try out the SHA1 hash on an input using the sha1sum command:

Can we please stop presenting SHA1 as a valid choice for a hash function anytime now? Especially in a security context? This passage is probably just a holdover from the 2008 version of this page, but it's still frustrating to see.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#112

Post by s_trumpet »

chatmasta wrote: post #109

When I was in college, we also followed a "traditional" CS curriculum. The introductory language was Scheme. The language in core courses was C. Advanced courses used whatever was best for the course, usually C or C++. Many of the courses have had the same problem sets since 1985. At the time, students had problems with it because "how are we supposed to build apps with this knowledge?!" There were even student effor…

Honestly, this course would have been a game-changer for those of us who went to terrible colleges with minimal opportunities for internships. The disconnect between theoretical classes and practical ones was simply too vast to grasp for the majority.

You sound like one of the top tier of students, being a programmer before entering college (which I assume was a good one). There are colleges out there where the faculty have only a theoretical relation to any actual useful knowledge. E.g. my semester-long networking class actually had less content than just watching a few YouTube videos. My operating systems class had a prof who was so completely clueless about so many things I can't list them. On the first day of class, he said "There are 3 OS (sic) - Windows, Mac and Unix" and refused to believe a student who told him that OSX is a unix. My CS education is entirely self-taught as a result.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#113

Post by rudedogg »

MereInterest wrote: post #86
Galanwe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Meta” means “one level of abstraction above”. I find it perfectly okay to use it in this context.

The point isn't whether a word fits a definition, but whether that word already has a definition with which the new definition will be confused.

And the word is specific to programming! The usage in the course seems incorrect to me too.

Everything else looks great though!

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#114

Post by _sdfo »

There are two sides to this kind of teaching. If you're MIT, you can afford to hire great lecturers who know to teach the students fundamental and deep truths about the tools they're using and not trivia. That way, they can generalize onto other tools, so anyone who studied git can quickly adapt to using cvs or svn. My university (in a developing country) is on the other side. Last semester was a disaster.

We had an AWS course, half of which was memorizing information about pricing and S3 tiers. If I were going into a job as an AWS guy, I'd definitely have to know that, but this is just third year of undergrad in CS :-/ and not a training course. The quizzes also had deliberately deceiving questions, which is the worst type of trivia!

Even better example. The Windows Server course was also compulsory (just like the AWS course) and mainly consisted of memorizing trivial information about context menus, which buttons to click and the licensing terms/durations/prices for different Windows Server versions. I'm jaded from the experience. Got my first two Cs in both since I spent time learning stuff described in the post instead of that nonsense.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#116

Post by kabes »

_sdfo wrote: post #114

There are two sides to this kind of teaching. If you're MIT, you can afford to hire great lecturers who know to teach the students fundamental and deep truths about the tools they're using and not trivia. That way, they can generalize onto other tools, so anyone who studied git can quickly adapt to using cvs or svn. My university (in a developing country) is on the other side. Last semester was a disaster. We had an…

I find it very weird to see something like an AWS course in a university-level CS curriculum.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#118

Post by physicles »

Aperocky wrote: post #28
lkbm wrote: post #4

In the lab for my second or third CS course, the professor was walking us through intro Unix usage, but he didn't take attendance so it ended up being just 2-4 of us showing up. After a few weeks, he cancelled the lectures and told us he'd just be around to answer questions, help with homework, etc. The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs. And that's the story of…

Life long vim user that was initiated by the terminal here, vim has a special place in my heart, not because the amount of customization that I was able to add, but because it enabled me to write actual diary. Here's the script. https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh All I had to do was to type $diary in the terminal and I'm writing my diary in vim. I had never had more extensive record of my li…

I’ve had something like this for about three years now, except it doesn’t open vim, I just use a single read command and it appends whatever I type with a time stamp. One file per quarter. And there’s a cron job to pop up a window each hour to remind me to type what I’m working on.

I’ve used this to figure out how much time I spent on certain tasks by sampling it Monte Carlo style. And sometimes when I run into some weird non-googleable problem, it happens again a few months later and the solution is in those files.

It’s like my own real-life syslog. Or like a scientist’s lab notebook.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#119

Post by honestoHeminway »

BurningFrog wrote: post #99
ip26 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." -- Bill Gates Some people just accept absurd drudgery interacting with computers; it never even occurs to them to seek an easier way. But if you can teach the students to be "lazy" when it comes to that kind of repetitive drudgery, they'll be set for life.

I think the problem is more a lack of imagination. They just keep doing things the way they always have. I seem to have a surplus both of "there has to be a better way"-itis, and some skill in finding such ways.

It starts with the self-perception of ones work as pure drugery. From there it moves into all fields. Monotonous drugery is preferable to attentionneeding drudgery.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#120

Post by mannykoum »

We had a similar course at Columbia (half semester, 1 credit). The professor was good and the information pretty useful; very similar material to this one. The paradox was that for the ones who knew the significance of such a course, well, we had already learned most of these things the hard way. Maybe our other CS profs should have advertised the course as an optional requirement to get people interested early instead of their junior/senior year.
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