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Why have I been sent here? Computability What is the difference between an algorithm, a language and a problem? Why nondeterminism? Are there minimum criteria for a programming language being Turin …

Why have I been sent here? Architecture How does a computer work? How does the computer determine whether a number is smaller or greater than another? Tag, index and offset of associative cache

Why have I been sent here? Formal Languages What is the difference between an algorithm, a language and a problem? Are there other ways to describe formal languages other than grammars? How to show …

Why have I been sent here? Algorithms What is the difference between an algorithm, a language and a problem? Is there a system behind the magic of algorithm analysis? How to come up with the runtim …

Why have I been sent here? Complexity Theory What is the difference between an algorithm, a language and a problem? How can we assume that basic operations on numbers take constant time? What is th …

Why have I been sent here? Asymptotics What does the "big O complexity" of a function mean? How does one know which notation of time complexity analysis to use? Sorting functions by asymptotic grow …

Why have I been sent here? Mathematics How do I write a proof using induction on the length of the input string? Provides a general introduction to induction. Solving or approximating recurrence re …

Language Language often is a matter of taste and many of us are non-natives. Therefore, we are bound to find "strange" language more often than not, but that is no reason to edit everything. On the …

I give a general introduction on what I consider good editing practice here. With respect to LaTeX, specifically, I have some thoughts. In titles: the less, the better. Not only do LaTeX-heavy titl …

References Rule of thumb: Provide references so that the work is uniquely identified and easily accessible for readers (in case of online resources). Academic resources References to books or paper …

You can enclose LaTeX math code in $...$ for inline math, and $$...$$ resp. for indented equations. MathJax supports essentially the commands native to $\LaTeX$ as well as those defined by amsmath and …

Tagging Tagging is an important feature of Stack Exchange for several reasons. Tags help searching. Tags are used to select "Related" questions for the site bar. Tags help disambiguate titles in qu …

Titles Titles are important: they represent the question on the main site, in search results and in RSS feeds. We want users to visit questions (and to answer them) and a good title may make just the …

Formatting Markdown Use the basic formatting provided by Markdown to structure posts: lists should be Markdown lists (nesting works!), links should use the [text](URL) syntax, emphasis should be pla …

Gutter Anything along the lines of "Hi everybody", "I'm only a beginner but I'm really, really hard-working" or "Thanks in advance, cheers" should be done away with immediately. While we can appr …