Top all-time · #450
Ben Eater
Personal blog · eater.nethardwareprogrammingscience
Ben Eater's personal blog at eater.net covers hardware, programming and science. Since 2017, 126 different Hacker News readers have linked it 149 times, most often “Build an 8-Bit Computer from Scratch”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Often recommended · 23 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ben Eater's eater.net for his videos and interactive pages on building an 8-bit computer and a 6502 computer, and on quaternions.
- Recommended for · 23 comments
- Called phenomenal, fantastic and excellent teaching; one commenter says it made four topics click, another that it ignited a passion.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I create tutorial-style videos about electronics, computer architecture, networking, and various other technical subjects.
Most-linked posts?
- Build an 8-Bit Computer from Scratch24 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2017-05-31
- Build a 6502 Computer22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2019-09-14
- Build an 8-bit computer from scratch20 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2019-01-08
- Build an 8-bit computer from scratch (2016)17 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2017-07-30
- Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-10-26
- Let’s Build a Video Card12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-08-05
- /7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-05-21
- /shop3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-22
- Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-26
- Learn how the Internet works2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-26
What Hacker News says?
This is what I've started with, too. Make: Electronics, Make: More Electronics, and the 3-volume Encyclopedia of electronic components by Charles Platt are really great. The 8-Bit Computer video series by Ben Eater (reshared on HN recently, https://eater.net/8bit/ ) was the first thing I saw which ignited a passion for understanding the hardware underpinnings of computing. ElectroBoom, GreatScott, EEVBlog, Julian Il…
Comment linking /8bit/
on “Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?”Submitted Build an 8-bit computer from scratch as a story · 489 points
HN discussionBuilding an 8-bit computer from scratch [1]. Planning on building a quadruped [2] after. [1] https://eater.net/8bit [2] https://spotmicroai.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Comment linking /8bit
on “Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?”Submitted Build an 8-bit computer from scratch (2016) as a story · 398 points
HN discussionhttps://eater.net/6502 Started with just playing around with spare electronics/Arduino, but now I've gotten sucked into the wonderful world of retrocumputing via this kit from Ben Eater. I've already built the basic kit computer, and now exploring 6502.org and other websites for extending it.
Comment linking /6502
on “Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?”Submitted Build an 8-Bit Computer from Scratch as a story · 392 points
HN discussionI am somewhat unconvinced that quaternions are more challenging, or at least a worse way to think about the issue : https://eater.net/quaternions And speaking of Maxwell's Equation"s" : http://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell-ga.htm#sec-preview
Comment linking /quaternions
on “Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang”Submitted Build an 8-bit computer from scratch as a story · 341 points
HN discussionInteractive examples using Macromedia Flash or Java applets are straight in the "a decade or two" time frame. (The 3B1B one is of course also among the best : https://eater.net/quaternions ) And, while it was before my time, universities might have had some before the World Wide Web ? Video has been around for much longer than that too. I'm also not sure why "high production values" is supposed to matter, aren't Fey…
Comment linking /quaternions
on “How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]”Submitted Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series as a story · 297 points
HN discussionA few things I did in the past I would definitely recommend: * Make a Lisp https://github.com/kanaka/mal — tutorial on how to make a lisp language interpreter. * Make an 8 bit computer https://eater.net/8bit — tutorial on making a simple 8 bit computer out of a bunch of AND, OR, NAND chips. Really helps you understand how computers work, what microcode is, etc. Honestly, building it wasn't quite as much fun as I tho…
Comment linking /8bit
on “Challenging projects every programmer should try”Submitted Let’s Build a Video Card as a story · 267 points
HN discussionCheck out Ben Eater's series on the "world's worst video card". https://eater.net/vga
Comment linking /vga
on “1Hz CPU made in Minecraft running Minecraft at 0.1fps [video]”Submitted Let's Build a Video Card as a story · 264 points
HN discussionWhy bother building a contemporary computer kit on MOS6502 chips[1]? Because people want to. Who is anyone to be the arbiter of those desires, no matter the practical applications (which this has a ton of, as alluded to via the other repliers)? 1 - https://eater.net/6502
Comment linking /6502
on “Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1”Submitted Build a 6502 Computer as a story · 224 points
HN discussionA guy named Ben Eater is in the process of putting together a fantastic video series about building your own 6502, which was an extremely popular microprocessor that was used in dozens of popular electronics back in the 80s. You can buy a kit that contains all of the parts you need. Not quite the same format as the tutorials linked in this post but educational nonetheless. https://eater.net/6502
Comment linking /6502
on “Build Your Own X”Submitted Visualizing quaternions: an explorable video series (2018) as a story · 97 points
HN discussionFinally getting to doing Ben Eaters 8-bit computer build: https://eater.net/8bit .
Comment linking /8bit
on “Ask HN: What are you learning?”Submitted Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series (2018) as a story · 85 points
HN discussionI know you specifically asked for books, but I think these are too good to not mention. Ben Eater has a series of Youtube videos that explores how computers work, starting from first principles, and in the process you build an 8 bit computer (or a 6502 computer in a different series). He actually sells kits of the parts to build it yourself, or you can buy the parts yourself. It’s a deep dive into how computers work…
Comment linking /vga
on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?”Submitted Build an 8-bit CPU from scratch as a story · 54 points
HN discussionA few of mine: - https://www.windytan.com/ (windytan: signal processing) - https://www.righto.com/ (Ken Sheriff: IC reverse engineering, vintage computing, misc) - https://jvns.ca/ (Julie Evans: software development, particularly networking) And even though it's not a written blog, a special mention goes to Ben Eater's website, which links to his fantastic YouTube series on building an 8-bit CPU from logic chips, an…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Build an 8-bit computer from scratch as a story · 10 points
HN discussionYou should check out https://eater.net/ and https://www.nand2tetris.org/ . Both breakdown a lot of the complexity around building a homebrew computer using off the shelf components.
Comment linking /
on “ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop”Submitted Build a 6502 Computer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAs a software engineer, I was alway curious about how computers really work on electronics level and how code gets compiled and assembled and finally executed by the machine. I followed the free courses from Ben Eater about building a 8-bit computer from scratch https://eater.net/8bit and building a computer using the 6502 cpu https://eater.net/6502 . Following these 2 courses made 4 topics click.
Comment linking /6502
on “Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?”Submitted Exploring Quaternions (2018) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBen Eater has a really good video series explaining how computers "talk" to each other https://eater.net/inet
Comment linking /inet
on “Show HN: I'm writing a free book called Computer Networks from Scratch”Submitted Build a 6502 Computer as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
