5 ms·

Jaw-droppingly impressive to have gone from nothing to a custom ISA, C compiler toolchain and a whole freaking OS with userland apps in six months! My favorite

Jaw-droppingly impressive to have gone from nothing to a custom ISA, C compiler toolchain and a whole freaking OS with userland apps in six months! My favorite detail was that having spent all this time on extra credit, they only managed to complete their primary task an hour before the presentation - an unmistakable mark of a true hacker if there ever was one.

unnouinceput 6y ago
They completed the primary task way before that. This was free time and they did it for fun. The fact that they re-implemented their initial task as a program in the OS itself was the cherry on top, to impress their teachers (and also to learn a heap load of stuff in the process).
- amelius 6y ago
  > to impress their teachers If I was that teacher, I would have flunked them for "doing something just because you can" and not using their capabilities for a more useful goal. And also because I'm tired of yet another toy CPU and toy OS that's just like all the others.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I suspect you’re failing to understand the goal of being a teacher, which is to nurture your students. Toy operating systems are a time-tested way to learn.
    - amelius 6y ago
      No, I would have taught them the valuable lesson of not trying to invent the wheel. These students are obviously smarter than the average student, and therefore I would expect more of them, like inventing new OS concepts instead of mimicking age-old designs.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - codegladiator 6y ago
        new doesn't come before knowing what exists and why, and to understand the latter making it is important. as a teacher if you fail to understand you should probably spend some time to read more why people study what exists in school and college for the better part of their life.
      - Kuinox 6y ago
        Yeah, a certain Linus should not have tried to invent the wheel.
      - NobodyNada 6y ago
        When I was 12 or so, I was fascinated by a video [0] visualizing the memory architecture of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I started researching the technical details of the console in order to try to make sense of what I was watching, and within a few hours I had decided to try to write a NES emulator. Now, the NES emulation scene is extremely mature, and so I quickly came across a number of warnings essentially saying "the world has too may NES emulators, please don't write another one." I decided to go ahead anyway, and after spending about 2 years' worth of afternoons and weekends, the result was just another bad emulator. It was slow, buggy, incomplete, and the code was a mess. By your standards, I wasted 2 years of my life making "yet another toy" emulator instead of "using [my] capabilities for a more useful goal." But I had a ton of fun, and the learning experience was absolutely invaluable. I learned in depth how a computer actually works at the hardware level (even though the NES is much simpler than a modern computer, the concepts and skills transferred over very quickly). As a result, my practical programming knowledge today is vastly improved over where it would have been had I not "wasted" all those afternoons. Many of the career opportunities available to me so far have been directly attributable to the skills I gained working on that emulator. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3xZAn7r2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3xZAn7r2A
        seisvelas 6y ago
        Link to your emulator? I don't care if it's buggy, I want to try playing a game on it!
  - ylyn 6y ago
    How ironic that you say this on Hacker News. That is one of the ideas at the very heart of hacker culture—doing things just because you can.
    - amelius 6y ago
      True, but these students were following an academic education, not "hacker university".
      - ylyn 6y ago
        Well, they also fulfilled the requirements for the credit (which was to get the raytracing program running bare-metal on their CPU), so if you want to be pedantic about them being in an academic course, then you should honour the original assignment requirements, right?
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        It was their free time. You get the idea behind that concept, yes? As in do whatever they want. And they wanted an OS! opposite of let's say drinking in bars trying to pick girls.
  - ryan93 6y ago
    Why do people even engage with this guy. Lol
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    Unbelievable, you understand that Unix is developed out of free time to play games and not as a requirement right? If you had a say you might point to Multics and shutdown the Unix project altogether, fortunately, you did not.
- danparsonson 6y ago
  > The original task of the CPU experiment was “Run the given ray-tracing program on your homebrew CPU”. Now that you’ve got an operating system running on your CPU, you know what you’re supposed to do, right? We decided to run the ray-tracing program “on the OS “on our own CPU. We had a few bugs, but we managed to finish it an hour before the final presentation.

unnouinceput 6y ago

They completed the primary task way before that. This was free time and they did it for fun. The fact that they re-implemented their initial task as a program in the OS itself was the cherry on top, to impress their teachers (and also to learn a heap load of stuff in the process).

amelius 6y ago
> to impress their teachers If I was that teacher, I would have flunked them for "doing something just because you can" and not using their capabilities for a more useful goal. And also because I'm tired of yet another toy CPU and toy OS that's just like all the others.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I suspect you’re failing to understand the goal of being a teacher, which is to nurture your students. Toy operating systems are a time-tested way to learn.
  - amelius 6y ago
    No, I would have taught them the valuable lesson of not trying to invent the wheel. These students are obviously smarter than the average student, and therefore I would expect more of them, like inventing new OS concepts instead of mimicking age-old designs.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - codegladiator 6y ago
      new doesn't come before knowing what exists and why, and to understand the latter making it is important. as a teacher if you fail to understand you should probably spend some time to read more why people study what exists in school and college for the better part of their life.
    - Kuinox 6y ago
      Yeah, a certain Linus should not have tried to invent the wheel.
    - NobodyNada 6y ago
      When I was 12 or so, I was fascinated by a video [0] visualizing the memory architecture of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I started researching the technical details of the console in order to try to make sense of what I was watching, and within a few hours I had decided to try to write a NES emulator. Now, the NES emulation scene is extremely mature, and so I quickly came across a number of warnings essentially saying "the world has too may NES emulators, please don't write another one." I decided to go ahead anyway, and after spending about 2 years' worth of afternoons and weekends, the result was just another bad emulator. It was slow, buggy, incomplete, and the code was a mess. By your standards, I wasted 2 years of my life making "yet another toy" emulator instead of "using [my] capabilities for a more useful goal." But I had a ton of fun, and the learning experience was absolutely invaluable. I learned in depth how a computer actually works at the hardware level (even though the NES is much simpler than a modern computer, the concepts and skills transferred over very quickly). As a result, my practical programming knowledge today is vastly improved over where it would have been had I not "wasted" all those afternoons. Many of the career opportunities available to me so far have been directly attributable to the skills I gained working on that emulator. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3xZAn7r2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3xZAn7r2A
      - seisvelas 6y ago
        Link to your emulator? I don't care if it's buggy, I want to try playing a game on it!
- ylyn 6y ago
  How ironic that you say this on Hacker News. That is one of the ideas at the very heart of hacker culture—doing things just because you can.
  - amelius 6y ago
    True, but these students were following an academic education, not "hacker university".
    - ylyn 6y ago
      Well, they also fulfilled the requirements for the credit (which was to get the raytracing program running bare-metal on their CPU), so if you want to be pedantic about them being in an academic course, then you should honour the original assignment requirements, right?
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      It was their free time. You get the idea behind that concept, yes? As in do whatever they want. And they wanted an OS! opposite of let's say drinking in bars trying to pick girls.
- ryan93 6y ago
  Why do people even engage with this guy. Lol
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Unbelievable, you understand that Unix is developed out of free time to play games and not as a requirement right? If you had a say you might point to Multics and shutdown the Unix project altogether, fortunately, you did not.
danparsonson 6y ago
> The original task of the CPU experiment was “Run the given ray-tracing program on your homebrew CPU”. Now that you’ve got an operating system running on your CPU, you know what you’re supposed to do, right? We decided to run the ray-tracing program “on the OS “on our own CPU. We had a few bugs, but we managed to finish it an hour before the final presentation.