Skip to content
HomeVideos
AllLongsCategoriesPlaylists
BooksBlogsPodcasts
HistoryListsWatch laterLiked videosFollowing

The videos, books, blogs and podcasts Hacker News keeps recommending, all in one place.

VideosBooksBlogsPodcastsAboutPrivacySettings

Data from Hacker News, HackerTube, HackerBooks, HackerBlogs and Open Library. Credits · Not affiliated with Y Combinator.

HomeVideosBooksBlogsPodcasts
Ctrl K
    13 videos · 10 hr 42 min
    Playlists

    Computers from the transistor up

    Curated by HackerTube · 13 videos · 10 hr 42 min

    A bottom-up path through the whole machine, made of the explainers and talks Hacker News keeps pointing people to. It opens with Feynman's plain-language picture of what a computer is, then climbs from a single transistor through logic, chip fabrication, a working CPU, memory and caches, the operating system, and ends with lexers, compilers and an interpreter. Watch in order; each video assumes roughly what the ones before it covered.

    Play all on YouTube
    1. 1
      1:15:47

      Richard Feynman Computer Science Lecture - Hardware, Software and Heuristics

      Muon Ray · 979K views · 14 years ago

      The welcoming opener: Feynman builds a computer out of a very dumb, very fast filing clerk, the picture to keep in mind for every layer that follows.

    2. 2
      11:23

      How a transistor works

      Ben Eater · 847K views · 11 years ago

      The bottom layer, in eleven minutes: Ben Eater explains what a transistor actually does, and HN calls it the most enlightening starting point.

    3. 3
      13:02

      Making logic gates from transistors

      Ben Eater · 3.1M views · 11 years ago

      One step up, Eater wires transistors into logic gates, the moment switches turn into something that can compute.

    4. 4
      1:01:20

      Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips

      Andor Gafotas · 210K views · 14 years ago

      How billions of those transistors get onto a chip; HN repeatedly calls this HOPE talk the best in-depth introduction to IC manufacturing for any background.

    5. 5
      51:57

      27c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU (en)

      Christiaan008 · 477K views · 15 years ago

      Going the other way, from die photos back to a transistor-level simulation, shows what a real CPU looks like as a physical layout of gates.

    6. 6
      27:25

      “Hello, world” from scratch on a 6502 — Part 1

      Ben Eater · 5.9M views · 7 years ago

      That same 6502 on a breadboard: Eater gets a working computer to say hello, which HN calls the best hands-on way to understand a CPU from first principles.

    7. 7
      35:33

      How does Computer Memory Work? 💻🛠

      Branch Education · 5.5M views · 4 years ago

      Branch Education's animated tour of DRAM, from capacitor cells to how memory talks to the CPU, praised on HN for being detailed and still easy to follow.

    8. 8
      1:16:58

      code::dive conference 2014 - Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care

      NOKIA Technology Center Wrocław · 231K views · 11 years ago

      Between the CPU and that memory sit the caches, and Scott Meyers shows why they quietly decide how fast real programs run.

    9. 9
      27:27

      AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System

      AT&T Tech Channel · 2.2M views · 14 years ago

      Up to the operating system: Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie explain the kernel, the shell and pipes in a 1982 Bell Labs film HN calls incredibly clear.

    10. 10
      42:54

      Containers From Scratch • Liz Rice • GOTO 2018

      GOTO Conferences · 321K views · 8 years ago

      Liz Rice live-codes a container in a few lines of Go, a hands-on look at the kernel features (namespaces, cgroups) a modern OS gives programs.

    11. 11
      51:18

      Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike

      GoogleFOSSSydney · 162K views · 15 years ago

      The first step of any compiler, turning text into tokens, explained so elegantly by Rob Pike that HN says it is easy to follow with no parsing background.

    12. 12
      1:15:46

      CppCon 2017: Matt Godbolt “What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler's Lid”

      CppCon · 178K views · 9 years ago

      Matt Godbolt shows the assembly a compiler actually produces, tying the language layer back down to the CPU instructions from earlier in the list.

    13. 13
      1:31:06

      William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [PWL NYC]

      PapersWeLove · 367K views · 9 years ago

      The top of the stack: a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp, a fitting close where a language ends up describing itself.