Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#81

Post by mettamage » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 8:24 AM UTC

Binary and Malware Analysis (x64, ida pro)

Hardware security (implementing rowhammer in JS powered by WebGL)

At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

These were by far my hardest courses. One course that comes somewhat close is a course in Buddhism (meditatie en paychologie - meditation and psychology). The issue is that I didn’t have prerequisite knowledge. The psych part was easy. Reading a 1000 year old Burmese text on Buddhism/meditation at that time had so many crazy traps that it was just fascinating how wrong I interpreted that text.

Easiest course that I took: social psychology

Best course that I took: a teacher that said “I am too lazy to teach. Just make a cool project.” I taught myself iOS development and made an iPhone app that led to a job for a year creating an iPad app

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#82

Post by melvinroest » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 8:27 AM UTC

Binary and Malware Analysis (x64, ida pro)

Hardware security (implementing rowhammer in JS powered by WebGL)

These were by far my hardest courses. One course that comes somewhat close is a course in Buddhism (meditatie en paychologie - meditation and psychology). The issue is that I didn’t have prerequisite knowledge. The psych part was easy. Reading a 1000 year old Burmese text on Buddhism/meditation at that time had so many crazy traps that it was just fascinating how wrong I interpreted that text.

Easiest course that I took: social psychology

Best course that I took: a teacher that said “I am too lazy to teach. Just make a cool project.” I taught myself iOS development and made an iPhone app that led to a job for a year creating an iPad app

All at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Most fun course: technology & games. Creating a game with unity3d and publishing a paper, that was fun. This was at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. The course doesn’t exist anymore sadly

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#83

Post by dysoco » Fri, Jun 28, 2024, 11:18 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #79

dysoco wrote: post #75

Programming wise, we had a class where we had to write some image filters in pure x86_64 assembly using SIMD, it was quite hard to wrap your head around the model of vectorized operations, and more so to debug your code either with GDB or visually (sometimes you messed up slightly and the whole image was borked, sometimes the image looked perfect but it was slightly off-by-one and the tests wouldn't pass). This was j…

The SIMD and kernel ones sound promising. Does the course have a website? Thanks.

Sadly no, they moved all courses to a private platform, but we used a lot of external resources not too much of our own except the exercises.

The kernel development one was pretty much what you can find in the Intel Manuals + osdev wiki [1] or some of the many osdev tutorials [2].

For SIMD I'm not aware of good tutorials or books, we did use again Intel manuals for reference and also [3]. For the image filters I assume you can search algorithms for basic filters such as pixelate, edges, etc. expressed as matrix operations and see how you can write that as SIMD ops.

[1]: https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page [2]: https://os.phil-opp.com/ [3]: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/