Hacker News: halfer53

New comment by halfer53 in "Show HN: My from-scratch OS kernel that runs DOOM"

halfer53 — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 06:37:52 +0000

Nice work!!!

New comment by halfer53 in "Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died"

halfer53 — Thu, 02 May 2024 05:20:40 +0000

Another one damn

New comment by halfer53 in "Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'"

halfer53 — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 23:11:23 +0000

The contract has been signed already. How do they even end the software ip purchased from weta?

New comment by halfer53 in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

halfer53 — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 10:00:24 +0000

hypothetically if the board faced enormous pressure from the public/investor and decided to reverse their decision, is this theoretically possible?

of course its highly unlikely that board would do that, but I'm just asking if this is theoretically possible?

New comment by halfer53 in "McDonalds Event Driven Architecture"

halfer53 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 10:41:20 +0000

backend of McDonald's app is handled by a third party new Zealand company plexure

https://www.plexure.com/

not sure what their architecture is

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 23:00:43 +0000

Thanks for sharing this, that's very insightful.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:43:25 +0000

Thanks for the info, good to know that it's easy to implement from kernel's perspective

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:02:27 +0000

Oops, typo :p

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 11:46:34 +0000

It's certainly plausible

It's currently using wcc to compile the kernel https://github.com/wandwramp/wcc. We can swap it with gcc for sure, but require bit of work, especially the output format and backend.

Winix assumes the output file is in srec format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SREC_(file_format), so we would need to tweak gcc to support this header format and add backend support for WRAMP architecture.

ELF is quite complicated, if I have to do this, I probably just copy some codes from linux.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 09:14:59 +0000

True, agree NZ is a great place to work. In fact, I quite enjoy my lockdown-free life in NZ.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 09:14:02 +0000

Linus is a genius, I don't think I could ever reach his level

Yeah it was a side gig for me, I did spend major of my days for the duration of 2 months last year to work on this.

In fact, I paused on the development of this project for 1-2 year.

But most of the time, it's just 1-2 hour per week side projects on average.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 06:17:34 +0000

Wow, I didn't know WAND had a github page. I'll get my fork merged with the main repo in that case.

The custom fork basically adds a extra button "Quick Load", since the srec file can be quite large to transfer through serial port to load, so I just implemented extra button to read srec file directly into memory.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 04:59:30 +0000

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 04:27:24 +0000

Depends on the audience

I did struggle to explain the significance of this project when I was applying for graduate roles, especially to HR people who only look for keywards in CV.

But there are people who appreciate my work.

I got my internship at AWS because my interviewer who had technical background was very impressed with my work, hence the reason I got hired.

Sometimes you just have to find the right audience.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 04:18:08 +0000

OP here, Yeha I did study in Waikato.

NZ is a very small market compared to the rest of the world, so there is a lot less opportunities here in NZ in terms of number of startups and number of tech firms. The salary is also lower compared to other developed countries. Any software engineer in NZ can easily get a 30-50% salary raise by going to Australia. A lot of talents ran away from NZ because of this.

There are still some exiting companies, for instance, Serko whom I am currently working for is expanding into the international market to seize the post-pandemic opportunities. But overall it's bit stagnant compared to other OECD countries.

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 04:03:24 +0000

That's a very smart way of debugging concurrency. I did a lot of logging as well when I was doing debugging concurrency. Overtime once you got familar with the projects, I started to develope instincts on how everything fits together. That's when reading code line by line, making educated gusses start to become viable way of debugging concurrency.

But for complex projects, reading code or relying on instincts may not work alone as brain power run out of capacity. That's why logging helps a lot

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 02:33:55 +0000

Thanks will do

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 02:14:08 +0000

Lol, I like your description of the project, sounds much more promising than mine

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 01:38:01 +0000

Yeah they are still using to teach computer systems and operating system course

New comment by halfer53 in "I spent 5 years writing my own operating system"

halfer53 — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 01:26:50 +0000

Thanks. The OS is roughly 90% compliant with POSIX.1, but there's still a lot of work to make it fully compliant. That would probably be my next goal. This is a hobby project, I will probably spend 1-4 horus every other week to work on this. I am working on optimising memory usage of the file system which is almost completed in a separate branch.