This is fairly readable (high-level) post on word embeddings: http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-07-NLP-RNNs-Representation...
http://mccormickml.com/2016/04/19/word2vec-tutorial-the-skip...
I know understand what word vectors are and how they are useful (which, btw, allows me to make way more sense of the output of the program in this HN post :D ), plus more generalities about the field.
Anyone in the same position than me (wanting to learn the basics) should read this.