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I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

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Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#131

Post by topaz0 »

simonw wrote: post #88
bobboies wrote: post #15

The only thing is I hate titles like this—the title is bragging a bit too much. Maybe a title more like: “How I’m helping my high school peers learn about CPUs”. That way it implies you’re young, smart, and care about others—all of which I imagine are true :)

Hacker News automatically removes the word "How" from the beginning of submissions (and then Title Cases them for good measure) - so I believe submitting that title would instead result in this: I'm Helping My High School Peers Learn About CPUs I might be wrong though, it might only do this with "How to ...".

Good to hear I'm not the only one who finds that form of title unpalatable. IMO one of the most annoying headline trends of the clickbait era.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#132

Post by unethical_ban »

js2 wrote: post #23

Congrats on completing this guide. > There aren't many comprehensive systems resources if you aren't going to college, so I had to sift through tons of different sources of varying quality and sometimes conflicting information. The absolutely best resource you will find is Charles Petzold's Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software . The 2nd edition was just released. https://codehiddenlanguage.com/

Yes! I was reminded of this book looking at the website.

I bought it 15 years ago and my eyes glossed over the CPU arch section, but maybe I am ready now. I bought 2e recently.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#133

Post by GuestHNUser »

OP, you should take a look at Casey Muratori's course at computerenhance.com

The first part of the course's homework creates a simulator of the 1978 intel 8086 (which modern x86_64 assembly still closely resembles). You will learn a lot of things about computers that are really difficult to find elsewhere.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#134

Post by fhools »

archmaster wrote: post #14

Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…

Hey great work you did there. I'd also like to recommend nand2tetris and its companion book Elements of Computing Systems. If you'd like to dig deep into how a cpu is actually elemented via HDL.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#135

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #16
ggambetta wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's always obvious to ourselves when we have. We humans are amazing at denial and telling ourselves whatever story we want to believe in. I'm not picking on you. If there's one thing I'm terrified of, it's blind spots.

In my experience, it's an unknown-unknown problem (don't know what we don't know). Is it important you can recite cache eviction algorithms from memory? No. Is it important you know there are such things as caches and roughly how they work? Yes. Because then you can quickly look up the details when/if you need them.

Is it important that you understand cache eviction algorithms well enough that you can look at a description of an algorithm and see how it applies to your system? Yes. And if memorising is the way you gain that ability, then memorising is what you need to do.

And what is it important for? Why, for making sure that your software makes efficient use of system resources. This is essential if you're writing application software that's used by other people – but if you're writing server-side code, or some one-a-month business-logic data-processing scripts, or code that's only ever going to run on five specific machines, it's not that big of a deal. I haven't needed this skill yet.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#136

Post by firebirdn99 »

skizm wrote: post #18

Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…

This is very impressive at 17, and her Github activity. So age definitely qualifies. We were fascinated with Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates at their ages, so this isn't anything new. Doing anything remarkable at a young age is impressive and worthy to be noted.

This is a young person making strides in a hard field, and quite different from majority of peers at their age, but especially today with short attention spans, and TikTok, gaming, other distractions.

Another point is many high schools tend to coddle their students even for very little accomplishments. I was surprised by the attention one 16 yr old student got for making an interesting yet simple science explainer about the sleep cycle. She won the award in the Breakthrough challenge competition, got a 250K scholarship, and given feedback to the tune that she would cure cancer.

There's also a huge competitive gap between US High schools today on average, than many other countries. It would be great for the US system to challenge HS students again and reward real accomplishment.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#137

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dghughes wrote: post #128

Going down the Rabbit Hole is fun for any subject you learn a lot. For electronics I went down the hole power, current and voltage, EMF, magnetism, ferromagnetic metals, domains (as in magnetic area no networking i.e. electron alignment), virtual electrons, physics, quantum mechanics... Similar for computers you see the high level stuff but then you can go right down to the wire level where bits are voltages +5/-5/0V…

> when all they needed to do was reboot.

That's not fixing the problem: that's ignoring it. Which might be the right decision if you need the computer to work now, but fixing it would mean it never happens again.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#138

Post by shever73 »

kriro wrote: post #79
archmaster wrote: post #14

Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…

I only browsed this but it seems like a pretty cool primer. Loving the style as well. It's also a very good idea to write these types of resources when you teach yourself something new because it clarifies your thought process and helps you identify parts that are still unclear even though you initially thought you understadn them etc. I also liked this at the end: """ I talked to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 a decent amount wh…

>It's also a very good idea to write these types of resources when you teach yourself something new because it clarifies your thought process and helps you identify parts that are still unclear even though you initially thought you understadn them etc.

Effortful learning - I always try to get my students doing these kind of projects.

I think this one is very cool. It's like a more approachable version of Modern Operating Systems.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#139

Post by bdavbdav »

ggambetta wrote: post #4

Very nicely written, and congrats on doing such a deep dive on this kind of topic. These days 17 year olds can get away with "programming" by gluing things they don't understand, but I think they'll eventually hit a ceiling. So what you're doing is super valuable, not for yourself, but for everyone else who will learn from your materials. Well done :) EDIT: now go write an emulator if you haven't already, it's a ton…

I got away with this for a long time then realised it was probably better to manage people who really understand what they’re doing, while having a really good feel for what is technically possible, but not necessarily the best on the finer implementation points.

Re: I'm 17 and wrote this guide on how CPUs run programs

#140

Post by jonhohle »

archmaster wrote: post #14

Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…

If you haven’t looked, older game consoles (Genesis, Game Boy, etc.) can provide a very good introduction to how systems are built - how devices are mapped to memory addresses, how CPUs initialize and get different entry points for the program, interrupt handlers, etc.
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