A New Operating System | Hacker News Reader

A New Operating System

nickmudge.info

10 pointsmudge23 comments

Why would you post a link to your blog promoting the fact that you're thinking about writing an OS? That's like me posting a link to my blog promoting a startup I haven't thought of the idea for yet.

I'm beyond thinking of writing an OS. It's currently what I'm working on in my spare time. I'm interested in people's ideas and comments.

We'll have more constructive comments when you show us you've made some progress in terms of development.

I've been tinkering with operating system programming for a few years now (yikes, has it really been 5?) in my spare time. It's an interesting hobby, and I actually got a job partly because of it. :)

I'm interested in hearing more about this project of yours, and possibly contributing to it.

For anyone interested in OSes, I recommend the EROS, Sun Spring, Singularity, and Synthesis papers; they are signposts outside the well-explored Unix/VMS territory.

How about an exokernel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel

Yea, I've been thinking about that too.

"Yea, I've been thinking about that too"

perhaps a separate post for that? seeing as this post seems to be essentially a content free "I am thinking about ... " ?

Hey man, a lot of code comes from thinking about things for awhile.

the problem is not with thinking about stuff. But if I were to write blog posts about "I am thinking about X" and then submit those posts to news.YC.. well.

Let me not discourage you though. if you think your cogitations deserve the attention of the folks at news.YC, please, go ahead and submit one link per thought. News.YC is an essentially self correcting system, in my experience, and can probably handle such content free links just fine.

The problem is whoever voted it up. Would that we could unmask the bozos;-)

(What's with all the downvoting of a comment that... while it might not really add anything, certainly isn't blatantly offensive or a troll ?)

When people wish they could downvote a story but can't, often they take it out on innocuous comments made by the story submitter.

I've been working on an exokernel off and on for a few years now (haven't gotten very far...school and other projects keep interrupting) in C++.

Want to get to know your toolchain? Write a kernel in C++.

I realized recently that exokernels are basically the same thing as hypervisors. So maybe some lessons from the exokernel can be used in today's virtualized environments. Rails libOS, anyone?

Here's the basic problem: you're writing an operating system. Stop doing that. It's 2008.

Hey, it can be a good learning experience and just darn good hacker fun!

I agree -- but this is a pretty content-free YC news story. This would be notable if the guy actually gets anywhere -- writing "I'm going to write a new OS" on your blog is the trivial part.

Yea, I agree.

If you do agree, why did you post?

Because he felt like submitting. This is not a big deal. Consider it a discussion thread with an incidental link.

Well I think it is interesting. But I agree that it would be more particularly news worthy and notable if I had something more to show about it. I've been researching for 3 weeks and its going great.

Much like writing a text editor?

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