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ossu
computer-science
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ossu / computer-science

computer-science

🎓 Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!

Learning & ReferenceScience & Engineering
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
81Distinct people
92Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
211KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

🎓 Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!

GitHub

Where it is used

  • Active Courses University (ACU) — Active Courses University uses the OSSU/computer-science curriculum to organize its categories and channels, mapping topics and course-specific channels to OSSU’s structure. Source

What people are saying

Whenever i have someone ask me where to get started on CS - i give them a few options tiered to try and ensure some stickiness/higher utility for them specifically. ~Some…

seven4 used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year92 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-10-04 02:17:57 UTC to 2025-09-21 10:29:23 UTC.

0510152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 7 submissions, 0 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 3 submissions, 4 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 5 submissions, 12 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 2 submissions, 8 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 3 submissions, 9 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC770
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC734
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17512
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1028
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1239
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211

What Hacker News says

92 sources
danielfalbo·Sep 21, 2025
I spent my high school afternoons on github.com/ossu/computer-science ; years later during my actual bachelor’s in computer science I just had a good time with the people around me. I’m grateful for the internet, life is good, universities are mostly for credential and the fun part is the best.
In Universities should be more than toll gates
purple-leafy·Dec 26, 2024
Well, for context I've worked as a frontend developer the past 2 years, but I want to dive much, much, much deeper into computing. Because most people I talk to in my career, present-self included, don't know anything about computers at a deep level, or networking, or graphics, or Electrical Engineering etc. I've had an epiphany where I realise I waste too much time on smartphones and social media, TV and media, my career and the pursuit of financial stability, and I don't really understand anything deeply. Nor do 99.9% of people, and I want to change that about myself. So - I've rid myself of all social media accounts (years ago - except HN), sold my TV and consoles (except switch - past year), blocked at a network level all news sites (recently), I've rid myself of a smart phone and now just use an old brick + a notebook to write though
Read the rest
ts in (past 3 months). I want to keep taking this process further. I've lost interest in web stuff, its not that interesting if you think about it, and its a very high level of abstraction. I've seen the light - there are amazing areas of computing out there if you look outside of career economics min maxing - Graphics, Emulation, Firmware/Embedded, Hand-written Assembly. With all my new found free time, and desire to peel away layers of abstraction: In Computing/ Electronics: ----- - Going to complete Nand2Tetris to fully understand computers from the ground up. Already 4 projects deep. - After the above, learn an HDL like VHDL or Verilog to emulate retro consoles via FPGA's, starting with chip emulation, then gradually moving to retro consoles. These old games were amazingly optimised. - Write at least 1 small program in an assembly language. Just want to see how hard/constrained it is compared to C. - Take Ben Eaters course to build an 8bit computer physically from scratch, or just try it myself without guidance. To crack into the Electronics side of things. - Keep working on my pseudo-3D terminal ASCII renderer written in C and ncurses (you can walk through fully detailed 3D ASCII forests etc, but the code is dogshit currently) - Take as many papers from OSSU [0] as I can reasonably fit into the year esp Mathematics and Graphics papers - Complete my content blocking browser extension - Continue modding old games, go deeper, like Fallout - Commit to extended "No LLM" periods (days/weeks/months) because its making people stupid, present self included. And what are LLM's but statistical averaging machines. Average in, average out. ----- In other areas of life: - I want to understand how the clothes I wear are made, from scratch. So you take a plant, process it for fiber, process the fibers? Then knit the fibers together to make an item? I want to run through that process with my own hands: everything except planting the plant itself. - Same with how our homes are made. Wood. Wood gets processed, you get timber, you get planks etc, you build a structure. I want to fell a tree and build a dog house, though realistically this wont happen next year. - I want to develop self control with food. I currently eat meat, but I wouldn't want to slaughter an animal by my own hand. So, in my own eyes, I am a pathetic person for eating meat and off-handing the slaughter and process step to a third party. So, I want to stop eating land based meats, because the result is not something I could produce by my own hand. I have tried to go pescatarian before, but it didn't stick forever. [0] - https://github.com/ossu/computer-science?tab=readme-ov-file#...
In Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2025?
syndicatedjelly·Jul 10, 2024
I think bootcamps were once effective at getting non-STEM folks a foot in the door, mainly in the modern web-dev space. I have only encountered bootcampers who work on modern web stacks. They tend to stay silo'd there, unless they are very motivated to do a lot of self-learning. A bootcamp is 6-9 months, but even an undergrad CS degree is 4 full years, and probably more intense than a bootcamp day-to-day. And even they are struggling to get entry-level jobs right now. So that's what you'd be competing with. I think you should save your money on the bootcamp and just self-learn computer science. There are so, so many free resources out there[^1]. It's easier than ever to make personal projects and post them to GitHub. Share what you're learning publicly - start a blog, and write. A diploma is a proxy for the knowledge you've supposedly acq
Read the rest
uired - without that, you need a way to show employers that you know things. [^1]: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
In Ask HN: Advice on coding bootcamps – still the best way to get a job?

Showing the 15 most recent of 92 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.

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