Thanks for that, and a tip of my hat to the HN community. Love this place.

Having written the aforementioned, I thought maybe y'all would be interested in a very very lightweight version of same done w/ my assembler of choice (only because it reminds me of Turbo Assembler from way back in the day).

  format ELF64 executable
  _start:
  	mov	eax, 1		; syscall # = write
  	mov	edi, 1		; man 2 write arg1 == our fd, stdout
  	mov	esi, .msg	; "" arg2 == const void *buf
  	mov	edx, .msglen	; "" arg3 == size_t count
  	syscall
  	mov	eax, 60		; syscall # = exit
  	xor	edi, edi	; man 2 exit arg1 == status
  	syscall
  .msg:
  	db	'Greetings, HackerNews!',10
  .msglen = $ - .msg

I don't think it gets much clearer or simpler than that, and more so that "man 2 xxx" provides all of the information you need for syscall goods anyway, it really isn't that bad :-)

if you compile this with fasm (http://www.flatassembler.net/) it produces a 174 byte ELF64 (and if we wanted to have some fun, we could lower that number by quite a bit still).

Cheers!

Edit: leading spaces for code