I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time • Hacker News Board

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#111

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

airhead969 wrote: post #102

nightowl_games wrote: post #25

Andreas is the best part about this project. He's just _nice_. He's a good person. It makes me want to contribute and work with him because I feel like I'll learn from him. Too many elite programmers are total jerks!

OMG. That reminds me of the Xen dude, of a potential hire at a startup who demanded "make it a big number" salary, and countless people who know some about one domain assuming their ex-food doesn't emanate odor. Also, there's the sociological fallacy of assuming the biggest jerk must be the most talented, when it may well be a façade to impress people. There are some talented jerks, but all the talent in the world do…

[deleted]

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#112

Post by leg100 » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

Windows NT/9x/2000 represented the high point for aesthetics.

Light grey, rectilinear, clear delineation, all contributed to being easy on the eye and functional.

Glad to see it make a comeback.

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#113

Post by jeofken » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #54

tachyonbeam wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it kind of is. You can make a basic browser, sure, but you'll have a hard time implementing video playback, canvas, JavaScript and everything else, while also delivering good performance and rendering everything accurately. Yes, I know his browser has JS support, but the performance is likely at least an order of magnitude slower than V8 or Firefox... And then there's CSS, and the fact that HTML, JS and CSS k…

Like telecomm, wifi, and USB standards, web browsing protocol standards are deliberately overcomplicated as a way to legally fend off competition. Anytime a big corporation gets its hooks into a Standard, one can expect its complexity to grow forever unless an individual at said corporation prevents it.

Truly, while the web also now being better than at the time of activex and flash etc. I’d wager the only rescue for a new free non-WebKit would be simple ways to use external programs - maybe yet a challenge for language design.

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#114

Post by dang » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

Looks like the main relevant past threads are:

SerenityOS: Writing a Full Chain Exploit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26115141 - Feb 2021 (9 comments)

Introduction to SerenityOS Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479132 - March 2020 (43 comments)

Pledge() and Unveil() in SerenityOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116914 - Jan 2020 (28 comments)

SerenityOS: From Zero to HTML in a Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21212294 - Oct 2019 (52 comments)

SerenityOS – a graphical Unix-like OS for x86, with 90s aesthetics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986126 - May 2019 (179 comments)

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#115

Post by dang » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

o_p wrote: post #4

>I chose the name SerenityOS because I wanted to always remember the Serenity Prayer. Whats with operating systems and religion

Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: unfortunately it looks like that's basically all you've been posting to HN. We ban such accounts, so I've banned this one. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#116

Post by dang » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

phaemon wrote: post #8

o_p wrote: post #4

>I chose the name SerenityOS because I wanted to always remember the Serenity Prayer. Whats with operating systems and religion

You need to be pretty smart to write an OS, and only dumb people and smart people are religious. Atheism is the belief for mediocre minds. ;)

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, let alone religious flamewar god help us.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#117

Post by dang » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

jagger27 wrote: post #101

phaemon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's appropriate because it will improve your thinking to consider that I might just be right. Edit: I happened to see your response since deleted. Don't worry, I'm not offended. I will say that HN at its best invites intellectual exploration. Take all your comments in this thread and look at them. What thoughts did you provoke? What did you add?

I'm sorry, do you think you're being "intellectually explorative" with unsubstantiated statements like "atheism is for the mediocre mind"?.

Please do not respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#118

Post by krapp » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #22

nwsm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you have 1 other example. How many can you come up with that have nothing to do with religion?

The one other example is obviously either FreeBSD, whose mascot is a demon, or OSX, which itself is a religion. ;)

Also, for better or worse, TempleOS.

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#119

Post by dpbriggs » Fri, May 28, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

I highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel [0]. He's an _incredibly_ thoughtful person and provides good lessons in staying focused and keeping scope down.

I consider him a mentor and his approach to software is something I really resonate with. He has a keen focus on software quality but understands he can't make everything perfect in one sitting. This approach helped me get away from decision paralysis in my projects and at work.

This isn't even mentioning how much I've learned about software in general from his videos. Whether it's debugging kernel bootstrap assembly, porting doom, writing a live feedback GUI editor, implementing syscalls, to messing around with the dynamic loader. He's really got a video for it all.

And he tackles each video with such clarity and careful consideration. I really can't speak higher of the man.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/videos

Re: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

#120

Post by mythz » Fri, May 28, 2021, 8:11 PM UTC

Thrilled Andreas has managed to receive enough community support to be able to take this big step and is able to focus on Serenity OS fulltime.

SerenityOS is an inspiring from scratch grassroots OS effort which plans to build the entire POSIX OS, Kernel and core Apps from scratch, one of the Apps their is their LibWeb browser engine complete with their own LibJS JS VM which already passes the ECMAScript test suite. One of its USPs is that the entire OS is contained within its single source tree where anyone can make changes to its code-base and instantly reboot the OS in seconds with the changes, never seen this done for an OS before, the turn around time allows for some impressive dev iteration speed.

A good preview of this hackability is in his Diablo port, whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in 1 sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port:

https://youtu.be/ZOzZ8R4gphE

Andreas videos on developing LibWeb/LibJS is one of the best resources I've found explaining how to implement a multi-process web browser, e.g. in this video he goes through the HTML Specs which have enough info in them to develop a HTML spec parser whose behavior is the same across all browser engines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdKlyXV2vw

It's been awesome to see LibWeb/LibJS evolve over time, every time he sits down it gets a bit more capable. Typically it's to implement features for rendering a different website. Here's a nice example where LibWeb gains missing JS APIs (including eval) to render "Canvas Cycle" JS demos:

https://youtu.be/b3a5V45LLss which he optimizes in his next video https://youtu.be/tGmaO8agfY4

With full control over the entire OS, Kernel, GUI, etc. It's got lots of tightly integrated innovative features like its GUI GML language for creating native UIs where he creates a GML Playground in this video https://youtu.be/1QYBvTy9QKE then uses it to be build the OS's new Font UI Picker dialog in the next https://youtu.be/Fa9SwYfH2NI which is now so sophisticated that the WidgetGallery has been converted to using it https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/5741

Since Andreas is so productive he's the only developer who I'm able to watch live coding which makes for an inspirational background score whilst coding, his commentary explaining his thoughts whilst he codes is so informative that they're basically HowTo's on how to implement each OS/App/Browser feature.