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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

28 pointstosh8 comments

This is hard to pull off in 12 weeks of full-time work for someone who is already a CS grad, absolutely impossible for anyone who doesn't already have that (or equivalent) experience.

Building a C compiler alone can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 20 years, depending on your acceptance criteria.

Why are we coding in so many different languages? Write the compiler in Haskell, why?

Also, why does this link to a half-finished attempt at solving the challenge, rather than the challenge itself? [1]

[1]: https://github.com/geohot/fromthetransistor

It's cute, but I say: why the lack of ambition? Make it: from the transistor to the LLM, in 13 weeks. Week 13 is for building a GPU, learning linear algebra, creating a large text corpus, implementing tensor flow, and training the model. Optionally an extra day for building a company around it, getting it funded and the IPO.

Or: it's rather unlikely someone untrained can build an OS from scratch in 3 weeks, let alone an OS plus an MMU, a driver, a file system and the basic command line.

Yeah, this is super weird. Just saying this is only one part of one section that "takes" 1 week:

  Building an FPGA board -- Board design, FPGA BGA reflow, FPGA flash, a 50mhz clock, a USB JTAG port and flasher(no special hardware, a little cypress usb mcu to do jtag), a few leds, a reset button, a serial port(USB-FTDI) also powering via USB, an sd card, expansion connector(ide cable?), and an ethernet port. Optional, expansion board, host USB port, NTSC TV out, an ISA port, and PS/2 connector on the board to taunt you. We provide a toaster oven and a multimeter thermometer to do reflow.

You could spend weeks or months on board design. Or days just on reflow (or even more if you've never done any soldering).

2 word answer: George Hotz

In that same spirit, I can highly recommend the book "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" and its associated course "From NAND to Tetris": https://www.nand2tetris.org/

This seems interest, but why do these kind of posts get a lot of likes here so fast?

When it is a book, it is understandable because you can assume a good portion of the upvoters actually read the book, but do people who upvote this kinda of “course” content even opened the link?

Every single one of these sections sounds like it should take 3x as long

Book recommendation on topic:

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software [Petzold]

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