Stanford CS Curriculum 2021 • Hacker News Board

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#21

Post by systemvoltage » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

jlos wrote: post #17

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

The best parts of education is not primarily the material you remember. It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying and the familiarity with a school of thought. For example, I studied Greek before software engineering. I've forgotten quite a bit, but theres an entirely different set of thought processes I have access to while doing software engineering because of it.

I’d say the best part of education is familiarizing yourself with the domain. You may forget the details but the familiarity and know how about what a Sobel edge filter is useful the next time you encounter such a thing in professional life.

Analytical thinking and pattern recognition is indeed also a key benefit of education.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#22

Post by izgzhen » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

Indeed most CS graduates will forget the content after the exams, but after the process of working through the courses, they are much faster in picking up the knowledge when needed later in their career (and they are also more confident and comfortable about the subject compared to those who are never exposed before)

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#23

Post by shagie » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

vincentmarle wrote: post #8

Does anyone know which of these courses are great to learn more about system design?

I'm a adherent to the idea that nothing teaches system design except experience and having to fix your own mistakes in sufficiently large systems.

In most software development courses, the student is learning how to make something (and then after that is done, its thrown away for the next homework assignment).

System design is often about writing the glue between different constraints - frequently through another constrained component... and then having to live with the consequences of that design for a year or more (possibly trying to fix it).

Take the "I've got a relational database here with mixed transactions and record updates and a document database there that I want to reflect the current state of an object in the relational database." And so you get to figure out how to use GoldenGate ( https://docs.oracle.com/goldengate/c1230/gg-winux/GGCON/intr... ) or Postgresql to amqp ( https://livebook.manning.com/book/rabbitmq-in-depth/chapter-... ) and then write something that consumes that and writes it into CouchDB or MongoDB (which do you chose? why?)

Once you've got that working... keep it working for a year or two.

That's how you learn system design.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#24

Post by okaram » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

I think it depends on what you mean by remember ... I think they would have an easier time if they need to re-learn it in the future

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#25

Post by bsder » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

> Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses?

Nobody forgets a compilers course.

A "compilers" course is probably the first CS course where debugging is real--and terrifyingly hard. A compilers course converts a programmer from a "null pointers are bad" person to a "null pointers are evil" zealot.

Compilers courses are probably the closest that a CS person will get to PTSD.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#26

Post by jimmyed » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

How many of these courses have video lectures? It's always a delight when you find the vids.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#27

Post by macromagnon » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

jlos wrote: post #17

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

The best parts of education is not primarily the material you remember. It's the effect on your thinking patterns as a result of studying and the familiarity with a school of thought. For example, I studied Greek before software engineering. I've forgotten quite a bit, but theres an entirely different set of thought processes I have access to while doing software engineering because of it.

Can you expand a bit on how Greek helps? Are you talking about Ancient Greek? I know a few latin derived languages but I never taught about the relation to computer languages.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#28

Post by bostonsre » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

lumost wrote: post #19

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

I switched into Software Engineering following a physics undergrad and had to self-teach the majority of what I know. 10 years in, I find that many individuals fall into a trap of having forgotten many concepts while also thinking that they weren't useful in practice and a bad memory of having to learn/crunch the topic. This was a significant difference from my experience where most concepts I only picked up as I fou…

Yea, I kind of took a similar route. I was so bored near the end of my business major and tacked on a comp sci minor at the end. Those few classes I took were amazingly interesting then and most are still with me now. I was lucky enough to have a business internship while in school where I was exposed to the tech side of things and that got me extremely interested in and motivated by computer science. I'm often curious about what a full degree would have given me or if I would have had a better career if I went the comp sci route from the start. At least for me, I feel like I've learned close to 99% of what I know now from work and from learning in my free time after school. I feel so lucky to genuinely enjoy my job and be interested in learning more and expanding on my skills even to this day.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#29

Post by addicted » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

The key point isn’t that CS grads need to remember the stuff they learnt. What they need to remember when facing a real life problem is that they had studied about something that was similar to the problem they were solving, and have the ability to look up and easily grok the solution they had studied a decade ago.

As someone who is not a CS grad, it’s often difficult to Know where to even start looking for a solution until many years of experience, something that CS grads I’ve worked with and mentored were able to do as interns.

Of course, there’s always the flip side that CS grads need to learn to not always apply the fanciest and “coolest” algorithm that they learnt in college because it isn’t always the best approach to a problem, but that’s a much easier skill that can be learned anywhere within months to a few years given the right mentors.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#30

Post by kamaal » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #14

as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…

Brain was designed to process information(mostly), not to store mass quantities of information. I mean it's more like a RAM/Cache than Amazon Glacier.

If you don't put knowledge into practice it all goes quickly.