5 ms·

Good job. Some constructive criticism: There's quite a big difficulty spike so to speak in the later section as you go towards the code examples. The beginning

Good job. Some constructive criticism: There's quite a big difficulty spike so to speak in the later section as you go towards the code examples. The beginning explains relatively simple concepts like binary, then basically jmps into an instruction table which won't make sense to anyone who hasn't done some form of programming (they would know binary then, right?). The tone is also a bit off putting, although I might be out of touch with today's teenagers. When I was learning asm as a teen I learned it from grungy 1337 h4x0r sites (well, they didn't actually use 1337speak except ironically, much like today) which were at least a great deal.. meaner? less nice?.. than the tone of the article. From what I wrote I gather my main criticism is that it doesn't know its audience. However, it seemingly _was_ produced by an actual group of teenager as per the author's HN comment: > Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened. Although it probably means a trained adult was lightly helped by some teenagers in producing it. I hope this didn't sound too harsh, the effort is very good and so are the illustrations. It needs some fleshing and perhaps a little less "yay!!". Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun.

mhh__ 4y ago
- parafactual 4y ago
  What do you mean by "pronoun-hedonism"?
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    There is a style of hedonistic lifestyle/culture that usually comes with an anime profile picture and pronouns in the twitter bio. If that is someone's true "form" then go for it, but when its fake yuck.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      Gratuitous anime pictures are also common in 4chan tech culture, where folks just don't pay much attention to Twitter or to the pronouns fad. So you can see that either way, it just suggests a kind of non-serious/poser hedonism all around. BBS/early web culture was a lot more focused than that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bowsamic 4y ago
Yeah I miss when programming felt cool and badass rather than like I was in a HR training seminar
mrandish 4y ago
> Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun. As a teen, I taught myself assembler circa 1982 on my Radio Shack Color Computer (with 4k of RAM!). It was indeed painfully challenging, especially due to the complete lack of information available and the fact I didn't know anyone else who knew anything about it. The only reason I persisted was that the BASIC interpreter in ROM was too slow to write any really cool games. The other thing that kept me going was that assembler was arcane hidden knowledge which bestowed power on those who could figure it out. I didn't want to "learn" assembler, I just wanted to use it and that required knowing how it worked. I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. Due to my complete lack of background in computers or electronics, the manual was pretty cryptic but that quick reference card was my constant companion that entire Summer as I used the BASIC PEEK and POKE commands to write programs. I ordered a "Monitor Program" from a small ad in the back of a garage-published computer magazine. When that cassette tape arrived it allowed me to actually read and write assembler mnemonics into memory, set breakpoints and look at registers. The next breakthrough was realizing I could use it to examine the ROM assembler code. When I finally convinced my parents to buy a dot matrix printer, I printed the entire 8k of the BASIC on fan-fold paper and went through it, commenting by hand. To your point, the fact that it was so hard combined with it being arcane knowledge was perhaps what kept me going. That and the reality it was the only way forward to get the computer to do more cool stuff.
- quackduck 4y ago
  > I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. lol that is such a nice story
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Moto and the other large semi vendors back then had data departments that would send you any datasheet on request. My teenage self made many such requests, but in writing in order to not reval my age (in snail mail, everyone's an adult).
Dracophoenix 4y ago
> When I was learning asm as a teen I learned it from grungy 1337 h4x0r sites (well, they didn't actually use 1337speak except ironically, much like today) which were at least a great deal.. meaner? less nice?.. than the tone of the article. Which ones?
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  Phrack & hackthissite mostly

mhh__ 4y ago

parafactual 4y ago
What do you mean by "pronoun-hedonism"?
- mhh__ 4y ago
  There is a style of hedonistic lifestyle/culture that usually comes with an anime profile picture and pronouns in the twitter bio. If that is someone's true "form" then go for it, but when its fake yuck.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Gratuitous anime pictures are also common in 4chan tech culture, where folks just don't pay much attention to Twitter or to the pronouns fad. So you can see that either way, it just suggests a kind of non-serious/poser hedonism all around. BBS/early web culture was a lot more focused than that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bowsamic 4y ago

Yeah I miss when programming felt cool and badass rather than like I was in a HR training seminar

mrandish 4y ago

> Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun. As a teen, I taught myself assembler circa 1982 on my Radio Shack Color Computer (with 4k of RAM!). It was indeed painfully challenging, especially due to the complete lack of information available and the fact I didn't know anyone else who knew anything about it. The only reason I persisted was that the BASIC interpreter in ROM was too slow to write any really cool games. The other thing that kept me going was that assembler was arcane hidden knowledge which bestowed power on those who could figure it out. I didn't want to "learn" assembler, I just wanted to use it and that required knowing how it worked. I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. Due to my complete lack of background in computers or electronics, the manual was pretty cryptic but that quick reference card was my constant companion that entire Summer as I used the BASIC PEEK and POKE commands to write programs. I ordered a "Monitor Program" from a small ad in the back of a garage-published computer magazine. When that cassette tape arrived it allowed me to actually read and write assembler mnemonics into memory, set breakpoints and look at registers. The next breakthrough was realizing I could use it to examine the ROM assembler code. When I finally convinced my parents to buy a dot matrix printer, I printed the entire 8k of the BASIC on fan-fold paper and went through it, commenting by hand. To your point, the fact that it was so hard combined with it being arcane knowledge was perhaps what kept me going. That and the reality it was the only way forward to get the computer to do more cool stuff.

quackduck 4y ago
> I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. lol that is such a nice story
- dboreham 4y ago
  Moto and the other large semi vendors back then had data departments that would send you any datasheet on request. My teenage self made many such requests, but in writing in order to not reval my age (in snail mail, everyone's an adult).

Dracophoenix 4y ago

> When I was learning asm as a teen I learned it from grungy 1337 h4x0r sites (well, they didn't actually use 1337speak except ironically, much like today) which were at least a great deal.. meaner? less nice?.. than the tone of the article. Which ones?

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
Phrack & hackthissite mostly