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There are so many presumptions in your comment (and your comment below) that I don't know where to start, but I find it very amusing :)

My original comment was based on the reading of the title of this thread and the first few sentences in the referenced article both of which mention the word learn. I would call all five mentioned books a poor choice to learn CS/programming from. The book by Sedgewick is an especially bad one (he has a few in this line of mixing algorithms with a programming language, and I despise all of them, and would never recommend to anyone for learning anything).

Now your comment is typically something I wouldn't respond to, but in a public forum it's different, so I am taking time to write this.

Calm down, control your emotions, and don't divine too much into the motives behind what people write when you don't take time to even read what is written.

"Ana Bell, lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chooses the best books to learn computer science and programming."

Her recommendations are poor. You dont read books on software development methodologies when "learning to program". Nor would you learn type theory. That's like suggesting to someone who wants to learn to sail, the intricacies of weaving cloth fibers into a sail.

There's a huge tower of abstractions to deal with in learning any new discipline, and it's important to enter at an appropriate level, ie, one that engages the learner to continue because the relationship to the end goal is clear (to the learner).

I would suggest CLRS to someone mathematically mature for the best introduction to algorithms. I don't have a book suggestion for learning to program in some language, but I do consider this a far less difficult and important obstacle compared to learning to think algorithmically.

When the interest is piqued people will naturally dig deeper and eventually find out for themselves, other aspects in the tower, be it silicon doping or reinforcement learning.

Sorry but neither the article nor the subject can be said to pique "intellectual curiosity".

Working hard and winning an unheard of competition? Yeah very fascinating.

Understand that anyone can rewrite their past to draw out a cock and bull story of succeeding against all odds. Want to hear mine? This is fairly banal. A narrative like this is best reserved for people who succeed in affecting something bigger than themselves or are at the very top of their profession.

Why is this on HN? Irrelevant, poorly written, lacks credibility.

Have a goal in life. What do you want to achieve in the long term?

This is a very hard question. Most people don't think about this because they are too depleted in the short term addressing problems in the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy. Often these are very real, hard, if somewhat mundane and unfair problems that they must solve (unfair in the sense of inheriting those problems by virtue of where they are born or what standing their parents have in society, etc.)

Once you are past the point where your basic needs and material comforts (including reasonable employment, vacations, healthcare, disposable income, etc.) are satisfied you have fought for and struggled to come to a station in life where you can redefine yourself because you are past the point of fighting the system now.

But it is an illusion to think that this station in life is "comfortable" and that the choice to redefine yourself is a literal option. And this is where I think many people end up becoming depressed (no science, just based on my empirical observations). Rather it's important to realize that you have to redefine yourself now and set yourself a higher goal.

Again, what do you want to do with your life? Think about this really hard, look at what you enjoy doing, where your natural talents lie, and which pursuit will bring you the greatest satisfaction.

Once you decide what that is for yourself, you need to relentlessly prioritize progress on that goal for the rest of your life, in the present (aka, Time is the most valuable thing on your hands). This is hard, and there are ups and downs along the way, and many opportunities to "soft quit" (like being distracted by other goals which have greater allure in the moment), but if you stay the course it is guaranteed to bring you great satisfaction, and self esteem, the great barrier between you and depression. You will realize your true potential in running up against the wall between you and your goal everyday, and the recognition that you are capable of such perseverance, and the continual progress you make in the long run will become a great source of satisfaction.

Jesus, can you be more melodramatic, self-congratulatory and pointless all at the same time?

The problem is that most people conflate social media with the predominant mode of social media use, i.e., smartphones. Many of the jedi mind tricks that the mobile apps play to keep us addicted don't really work that well on a computer.

For example, here is a TED Talk by a very smart person on "Why you should quit social media": https://www.ted.com/talks/cal_newport_why_you_should_quit_so... but listen to his arguments and you see that most of his objections are to the mode of social media use in the present day, i.e., smartphones.

In my opinion people should not quit social media, rather they should quit using smartphones and find out what their friends are up to on a weekly/monthly basis by logging in to their facebook account on a computer. This is a healthy way to use social media.

Let me not get into the obvious rebuttal "but, how do I quit smartphones! they're so useful!". Personally, I use a Nokia 105 and I am very happy.

You claimed a contradiction but didn't present it. And you go on to assert exactly the things that I said. I am saying that the system failed the students by forcing them to prepare relentlessly for these exams, which the students come to realize is really the only path to success, robbing them of some of the aspects of a normal childhood.

If the system / economy were capable of providing a more varied set of jobs like acting opportunities, regular gigs for bands, apprenticeships in various blue collar jobs, etc. then people will be able to choose professions that better match their interests and skill sets. Why force someone who likes to work with wood into a degree in engineering or science. This is largely what is happening in India.

I am not saying that there are no actors or bands or bike mechanics in India. Rather, it is assumed that everyone needs a degree from college and even if this is an entirely ridiculous proposition for many people (based on their interests) and they endure four years in college doing something they don't enjoy in some of the formative years of their life.

So the people who might have benefited from an apprenticeship or taking a year or two off from this career sprint suffer the most, and the final allocation of people to jobs is dismal (the fact that hundreds of thousands of Indians work at call centers is a symptom). The system fails by not providing such kinds of alternate opportunities at the scale that is necessary for a country so huge.

Finally, all middle income Indian parents will continue to pick some career in a STEM discipline for their kids very early on, preventing any investment of time in discovering their interests, keeping this carousel spinning.

The people referenced in the article, who attend several years specialized coaching preparing for these exams, paying large sums of money in the process, are hardly doing so in "a desperate attempt to escape poverty."

They are simply trying to prepare better than the competition.

Also you seem to get wrong some basic facts about how well the global economy is providing for and improving the state of people around the world. There are no billions that are attempting to escape poverty in the light of some shrinking funnel.

The answer is a bit nuanced and I am suggesting that it is the case, perhaps about the same instead of being exactly the same. You can argue that the apparent cost of not studying hard in is wildly different in these two countries (basic welfare support vs complete lack thereof). Yes, I agree that when you look at providing for basic material comforts in dire circumstances it obvious which country a person ought to choose, when presented with this hypothetical choice.

But that simply fails to capture the stresses of everyday life. The average person on welfare checks can hardly be assumed to happy and is probably facing intense, if subtle, negative societal feedback for the choices he is forced to make. Do you think this person is happy to eat at McDonalds and wear cheap clothes when everyone around him is upgrading their smartphones. That's why I say that providing for basic material comforts hardly does much to improve the mental well-being. The pressure to succeed is present everywhere, and failing to do so is stressful in all such circumstances, and I would imagine that it would be roughly the same.

Again this is an article on suicides and it is the most extreme form of pressure that anyone can face. The extent to which we can compare the stress on people that aren't doing well (by societal norms) is hard to pin down exactly, and I don't want to make any bold claims there that the stresses must be exactly the same. But I do see that there is a basic similarity here.

The pressure to succeed is immense everywhere, this is hardly a notable feature of Indian society. Others have mentioned this already on this thread but let me paraphrase, basically no one is satisfied with some objective notion of success (like a high standard of living), rather success means to do better than those around you. So if you have three cars parked in your garage in the USA and are living an impossibly comfortable life, materially, by all measures, it is nevertheless almost surely the case that you feel the "pressure to succeed".

Without a doubt all the years of exam preparation in the teenage years come at a steep cost. For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India.

In that sense I would say it is unfair to claim that Indian students graduating from an IIT can't do this or that; it is actually an achievement in and of itself that they managed to get there and out without turning out to be entirely dysfunctional. While I would not argue that competition in India (in the context of these national examinations) is much higher than the competition in the West in various spheres (sports, sciences, tech, etc.), the reality is that the breadth of options to a good place in life is extremely limited, and the competition is rather concentrated to a few possibilities. You cannot opt to become a YouTuber, pro basketball player or a digital nomad if you're born Indian. There is essentially a bunch of careers in science, engineering and medicine, and a few top institutions for each of these ends, whose pedigree can get you very far, and failing that, there is much uncertainty to be faced. And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly.

This is a pretty inane article for placing too much emphasis on a stupid gimmick like anti-suicide ceiling fans, when the underlying issue is a serious mental health issue of extraordinarily stressed students.

I'm Indian and I remember the summer of my 12th grade exams back in 2007 just like yesterday because of some latent awareness that something very important is happening here. I sat in so many exams that summer. First was the CBSE boards aka AISSCE (which was the all-important failsafe), then AIEEE (for admission to the NITs), then BITSAT (for admission to BITS), and finally the IITJEE (for admission to the IITs). All these exams are fairly long, and you compete at the national level.

Already back then the competition was fierce with kids enrolling in tuition centers half a decade even before their first attempt at any of these exams (it was quite common for people to try a few times). I could write a very long essay about the depth of preparation that goes into attempting these exams. It is quite natural that the competitive pressures has worsened over the years with students attempting to out-prepare one another by even bigger margins.

In a country so huge, of course not all students attempt this route, but landing a seat in the small list of prestigious institutions is the only ticket to a good career in India for the most part. This is not unlike American students who take AP level courses, demonstrate exceptional talent in sports or music, or volunteer their time in different ways to stand out in the application process at one of the big name schools. So in that sense, this is describing a very relatable struggle among students across nations, though the means are substantially different.

Eloquently formulated case against the blind acceptance of digital devices into our lives, and outsourcing ever more of what makes us human to algorithms. While we have always been talking of splintering of our attention, and the constant background anxiety resulting from frequent social media use, this article furthers the concerns in the direction of complex hard-to-understand algorithms mediating human communications using the signals harvested from sensors on smartphones.

I don't know when the time will come when we just say enough. No more wondrous technological conveniences that purport to make our lives simpler and easier with little thought or understanding of the great opportunity costs borne by the users. One terrific example is the plainly obvious alienating effect of this 21st century world of instant messaging from every corner of the globe, only to find the crushing effect it has on actual phone conversations even between close friends. The author nails this collective, global loss of empathy here with this example. Did any of the brilliant "technologists" envision this would happen? No. "Connect the world! Saturate it in social media. Good things ought to happen. Right?"

My fear is that that the widespread use of these attention hoarding devices and platforms is so oppressive that the thoughtfulness and awarness it takes to even formulate such questions will never come for the greater public. And so in this quasi-zombie state of tech consumption, harmful and poorly understood inventions will continue to reign supreme.

Dystopia? No, just look around you. The grip of tech companies (I work for one) is huge and I don't like the endless (and I hope involuntary) dehumanizing aspects of some of these technologies.

I cant be the only one who wants a world where people reach for their phones to talk to friends, or educate themselves about the world by reading books, instead of whatever poorly conceived alternatives we have today.

I haven't read the book but I wonder.. as a billionaire he clearly stands to gain a lot from spreading a message of optimism and collective progress over the last century presumably to maintain status quo when an equally factual but completely opposite perspective on the world (unprecedented levels of inequality, our global lack of response to climate change, etc.) is also there for us to see.

I find it very hard to believe that his motives are so pure.

Yes that is in essence all that needs to be said. Work is just one manifestation of competition between individuals driving us to outdo others.

Of course if we weren't occupied by work all day then we'll find something else to compete in and "stress" ourselves about. And don't we already do this to some extent through innumerable athletic/mental feats like climbing mountains, and other ways that are essentially displays of wealth like a vacation in Haiti and so on. This is a simplification, one can successfully argue that many of these activities have "inherent" benefit besides signaling but that aspect is usually not spoken of at all so I emphasize it more here.

So the stressors of everyday life (whether they come from work or other means of competition) are an inescapable fact of human life. Too bad if you don't like it.

I see people downvoting my comment, but honestly if you think this is anything but hilarious then you may be too deep in this speculative bubble!

Hahahahaha this is hilarious, where are all the bitcoin fanatics now hmmm? Does this confirm its singular status as a vehicle of enormous speculation or do we have to wait till people finally agree it is worth precisely zero US dollars...

It is not a currency today, just a source of endless speculation that is bound to end badly for many. Let's not forget that above all it's just a horribly inefficient way to trade value.

I suppose all the people who think Bitcoin is bs just wait and watch this ponzi scheme unfold while the others who have invested in it heavily defend each such article in the comments here.

Unless people solve the engineering problems underlying its inefficiencies there is absolutely zero chance it will become a currency, let alone a global one.

I am not romanticising the past. I am not advocating to stop using smartphones altogether. What I am saying is that people by and large don't seem to use it in a healthy way.

It seems many of the folks are using smartphones exactly in the way you describe- as an ill defined and uncertain but good enough means to plug some passing hole in your day. Is that good? I don't know. Are you losing out on using that time to prioritize what matters to you? Probably. The most damning thing about this is that you are constantly reaching for something with no fixed outcome planned in advance and allow that to temporarily occupy your mental space (if I wanted to exaggerate I'd say "hijack your mind"). This does not look like a good thing to me.

The way mobile phones are being used in the present day, by both children and adults alike, is unhealthy and at the very least it can be said that the potential ill effects are not very well understood. Much like how research into the ill effects of smoking were not properly understood during its heydays in the early 20th century when it was a sign of social sophistication and took many decades before a conclusive link (to lung cancer) was established.

One of the major changes it has caused in our societies is the splintering of attention and erosion of the ability to confront boredom (let alone the skill to turn it into something useful).

For example, if you reach for your mobile phone when your friend with whom you're having dinner excuses himself to go to the restroom, then that is a symptom. By itself, browsing some news websites or checking your social media feed is probably harmless in this context, but there is a huge opportunity cost in those missed moments where you could've profitably exploited that break to think about things that are important to you and to him.

Perhaps the ensuing conversation could've been steered in a deeper direction had you paused to think in those moments.

What OP is saying is if you invoke undefined behavior in your program (like the Heartbleed bug for example) it doesn't matter that in the end the compiler is correct. And this does account for the vast majority of bugs (programmer error compared to compiler error).

> Because only a vanishingly rare amount of the incorrectness in compiled C programs comes from a bug in the compiler.

True.

What I meant to say, but didn't, is, why aren't more people working on ensuring that this provability bubbles up from the compiler to the program itself. I come across a lot of work in specialized areas on this topic but haven't seen anyone have a go integrating formal proofs and a widely used programming language. At the moment this looks like a pipe dream because of the obvious objection (and I hope this disappears "soon") that currently it is too cumbersome to have to prove your programs, let alone write them in the first place.

Nice interview. What a tremendous achievement to formally prove the correctness of a C compiler! It boggles my mind why more people are not involved in this direction.

I hope to live to see the day when lots of commercial software will be written with formal proofs and zero tests. It may just be that we don't have the right tools at this point. If theorem provers could figure out details for themselves for the most part and the programmer has to only specify a few key invariants and rough sketches of the hypotheses and the end guarantees then I cannot begin to imagine how much more productive programming can become.

What an amazing result! Evaluating fewer (by a factor of 1000) positions AlphaZero still beats Stockfish.

In the figure on its preferred openings I find it very interesting that it doesn't like the Ruy Lopez very much over training time (there is a small bump but that is transient). I am hardly a chess expert but I know that it was very favored at the world championships so maybe the chess world will be turned upside down by this result now?

Positing that the chess world is bigger than the Go world (in terms of interest and finances) there is probably going to be a race to replicate these results "at home" and train yourself before your competitors :)

Amen. There are some truly mind bending puzzles there.

That's a good point. I noticed the spectacular bias in the comments on HN as well. Anything relating to Google is almost surely beaten down for no good reason at all.

One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc."

While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.

Wasteful as in we can do better. Did you see the link in my comment? One of the authors of that paper is actually a Turing award winner.

Ultimately we've reached a point where there are more efficient alternatives to having hundreds of people computing billions of hashes to reach consensus. To put this in perspective imagine a group of people sorting by randomly permuting and checking if it works, while stubbornly refusing to adopt near linear algorithms.

It's scary to see so much faith in bitcoin given it's horrendously wasteful proof-of-work scheme to avoid double spending.

There are better alternatives that minimize latency nearly a hundred-fold and avoid proof-of-work altogether. Example: Algorand (https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-...) Even if this new cryptocurrency is "just" a proof of concept there are many others like it that are much less wasteful than bitocin, and this should make people think twice before piling their faith on an important but ultimately flawed first attempt at a usable cryptocurrency.