HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

rmasters

no profile record

Submissions

When Are Lexer Modes Useful? (2017)

oilshell.org
2 points·by rmasters·há 2 anos·0 comments

Show HN: A 3K Posix bootstrap kernel written in hex

github.com
5 points·by rmasters·há 4 anos·1 comments

comments

rmasters
·há 2 anos·discuss
That ruling was overturned on appeal.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/citigroup-wins-appeal-ove...
rmasters
·há 3 anos·discuss
I found this video to be quite informative and addresses a relationship between the information incorporated into a chemical process and its function.

Nobel laureate Jack Szostak from University of Chicago delivered the Eyring General Lecture on March 17, 2023 at Arizona State University.

"The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLzyco3Q_Rg
rmasters
·há 3 anos·discuss
This kind of ambiguity is rampant in technical writing. Example: "There are situations where developers do X instead of Y which is the wrong thing to do." Wait, is X wrong or Y?! You go ahead and assume X is wrong and then figure out later they meant Y is wrong or vice versa. Argh!
rmasters
·há 3 anos·discuss
If this is a Severance reference, it's doubly hilarious.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
> Also why not just go 10 days in a row and pull out 1k?

In the US, this could be considered "structuring" to avoid reporting requirements which is a federal crime with a sentence of up to 5 years in prison.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
I'm not the person you asked, but if I rephrase your question to "Then why do some places with low crime have less police?", then the answer just seems to be common sense.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
In some encodings? One zero is sufficient for UTF-8.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
Thank you. This is pretty much the comment that I was going to write but you saved me the time.

There are judges in Seattle that appear to disagree with the notion that serious violent criminals should be punished with serious jail time. However, what I can't figure out is, why doesn't the Seattle Times name the judges that are releasing violent criminals? It's just a nameless "judiciary" or "the judge". Why no interest in holding them accountable?

City Prosecutor Pete Holmes was voted out for not prosecuting but the judges are getting a pass because nobody knows who they are. (Yes I should look this up myself - I've resolved to do something - but the journalists could help.)
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
Brings back memories. I was a MS support engineer on CompuServe around 1989. I supported Windows/286 and 386, Excel, and Word for Windows. I posted around 25 to 30 messages a day. I had a partner named Bassam, if I recall correctly. It was just the two of us, and there was a period of time when it was only me.

Many times I wondered "if they only knew MS Windows support on CompuServe relies on one intern working out of a frat house (at the UW)." I used a US Robotics modem running at 300 or 1500 baud without error correction. I had to write my responses in notepad and paste it in due to line noise.

Helping so many people every day was very satisfying and I am still proud of that work.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
This project compliments the stage0 project (featured on the HN front page earlier today) which builds a C compiler using an assembler that is bootstrapped from hex. However, those bootstraps require an existing kernel. You are required to provide your own. I decided, as a challenge, to build a tiny purpose-built x86 32-bit kernel which can run the stage0-posix shells and compilers all the way to the M2-Planet compiler, which is a subset of C. I learned (after starting) that they plan on writing a bootstrap kernel themselves, so I hope this helps in some way. It took three months of very tedious and error-prone work because I avoided, on principle, using an assembler except to check the encoding of individual opcodes. (All jump offsets were hand calculated.) Please see github.com/ironmeld/builder-hex0 for it's history.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
I appreciate the extra context. For what it's worth, I was not aware of the previous discussion and I just thought it was an interesting post. (I really don't have any feelings about golang one way or another.)

I can appreciate your point about having limited resources to moderate posts that have a track record of generating big flamewars. But I didn't get the impression from the comments (many being ad-hominem) that the post was flagged for that reason and my use of the word "shameful" was directed at those comments.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
Are those issues really so egregious? There is a tremendous amount of content geared towards "informing the reader" and I'd prefer to draw my own conclusions about the author's intent rather than having a censor (who is assuming bad-faith) try to protect me from a rather mild rant (in my opinion).
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
Flagging this post strikes me as shameful censorship of an unpopular opinion.

You may say it's the snark/anger/frustration that got flagged, but I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different.

Presuming the author is making bad-faith arguments for internet blog points goes against the spirit of HN. I prefer to draw my own conclusions, thank you. I normally expect HN to take the higher ground with calm and reasoned counter arguments of the content but not today I guess.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
Yeah, I'm avoiding modern interfaces due to my peculiar bootstrapping requirements (e.g. must run on old HW; no SW dependencies). virtio is probably a better choice for anyone trying to build something practical. On the other hand, it looks like using virtio would need a lot more code than accessing the BIOS and I couldn't easily find examples in assembly.
rmasters
·há 4 anos·discuss
From the PDF: "It is true: in our quest to make full use of the CPU, we must abandon all of those helpful routines provided by BIOS. As we will see when we look in more detail at the 32-bit protected mode switch-over, BIOS routines, having been coded to work only in 16-bit real mode, are no longer valid in 32-bit protected mode; indeed, attempting to use them would likely crash the machine.

"So what this means is that a 32-bit operating system must provide its own drivers for all hardware of the machine (e.g. the keybaord, screen, disk drives, mouse, etc). Actually, it is possible for a 32-bit protected mode operating system to switch temporarily back into 16-bit mode whereupon it may utilise BIOS, but this teachnique can be more trouble than it is worth, especially in terms of performance."

--

In the toy 32-bit OS I am currently writing, having easy disk access and text output was more important to me than performance, so I decided to implement this technique to access the disk and screen via the BIOS instead of writing an ATA disk driver.

Although I could not find any minimal yet complete working examples of dropping to 16 bit and later resuming 32 bit mode, I was able to piece it together and write assembly functions called enter_16bit_real and resume_32bit_mode. See https://github.com/ironmeld/builder-hex0/blob/main/builder-h.... Those routines are working well but beware the project is a volatile work in progress and is coded in hex for bootstrapping reasons.
rmasters
·há 5 anos·discuss
I worked with Nick's brother Paul for many years at F5. Several years ago I asked him if Nick was Satoshi and he said Nick denied being Satoshi and Paul also added that it wouldn't make sense because "He still owes me money!". Pretty funny. But I guess he could have fooled his own brother.