Live data from Hacker News

I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time

awesomekling.github.io

251–260 of 264 posts

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

#251
post #31
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to only target very commonly ported and generally understood hardware, and not many things. 32bit Intel, no arm. Bochs VBE and Intel graphics, e1000 and rtl8192 nics. They're very sensible targets as they'll let you run with event performance on most virtual machine platforms as they're commonly emulated and mature.

It would be cool to have something similar but specifically targeting Raspberry Pi these days. There you don't have a lot of variability either, and it might even turn out useful relative to its "bigger" (or "bloated"?) competitors.

Sadly Pi has some significant IP blocks that don't have open manuals or permissive drivers to work from, so targeting it for a home brewed OS is extremely hard work.

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

#252

THIS IS SOOOOO INSPIRING. With all the FAANG and the Leetcodes and promotions and L6 - L7 TC and all of this nonsense, true hacker spirit and the fun of just building cool stuff with technology has gone from the hacker space. In fact, the hacker space is actually shrinking. Projects like these and people like Andreas Kling, are a beacon of hope and light during these troubled times. May more people be inspired with t…

Tbh I'm not super involved in CS, but I like learning about it and am working on a side project. Just curious - what have been the negative effects you've found of the hacker space shrinking? And what reasons do you think account for it shrinking?

Diversity and interesting things for one. It was just so much easier to find interesting things in the past, because everyone was trying to do something naughty in a good way.

Now you can't take a step without hearing people talk about how they are joining Slack or whatever with great comp as a Team Lead and building slow as hell software.

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

#253
post #225
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But FVWM(95) is also a love letter to Windows 95, isn't it?

FVWM95 was, certainly. Plain FVWM was very much not - it had a very distinctive look of its own. E.g. [1] is more typical of FVWM. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/~n6tadam/fvwm/screenshot.png

Ah, thank you for the screenshot. I didn't encounter any machines running classic FVWM.

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

#254
post #227

I'm unlikely to ever use this project, follow it closely or interact with the creator but it still makes me extremely happy to see someone working on a project like this, with the goals, motivations and context that Andreas discusses. Thank you for making the world a little bit better at a time when it feels so crazy.

The author seems to be against providing ISOs, which is a shame, I'd love to try this out.

He isn't against ISOs, the "there are no ISOs" is a Serenity-internal meme. The thing is that because SerenityOS moves so fast, it makes no sense to provide ISOs, they would be outdated within days. Also, Andreas and other top contributors have other things to worry about than keeping a nightly imaging system of some sort up and running. But if you (or me or anyone, even people inside the Serenity circle) were to make an ISO archive, nobody, including Andreas, would complain. It's just not a priority by any means.

Also, as mentioned previously, it's really not that hard to build it (even if you run Windows thanks to WSL 2). People are very willing to help you, and most of it is just waiting for the toolchain to compile (custom gcc and the likes).

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

#255
post #210
post #177

> I will pay $5 USD for exploitable bugs > Remote code execution. > Local privilege escalation. > ... How is it possible that someone who has the skill to find remote code execution exploits is in need of $5?

It’s clearly not about the money and more about the accomplishment. Serenity isn’t centered around commercial objectives, the entire project is about promoting the community hacker spirit for fun and exploration. Because SerenityOS’s single, young modern C++ code base is so hackable it’s a lot easier to understand how everything works. Here’s an interesting analysis by Live Overflow who discovered a kernel exploit wi…

So why pay anything at all and not just keep it merely about recognition, etc.?

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

#256
post #255
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s clearly not about the money and more about the accomplishment. Serenity isn’t centered around commercial objectives, the entire project is about promoting the community hacker spirit for fun and exploration. Because SerenityOS’s single, young modern C++ code base is so hackable it’s a lot easier to understand how everything works. Here’s an interesting analysis by Live Overflow who discovered a kernel exploit wi…

So why pay anything at all and not just keep it merely about recognition, etc.?

It’s just a token amount that qualifies as a bounty.

No one is doing it for the monetary value, it’s a token prize offered when succeeding in discovering a vulnerability. Did you watch the video? LiveOverflow is a YouTube channel dedicated in discovering security vulnerabilities who explain why SerenityOS’s code base is a great code base to study for this.

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

#257
post #228
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess maybe maglev ruby on the gemstone platform does move the needle a bit closer: For Ruby, "pry" gets you at least some of the way there with MRI. It's nowhere near the "full experience", but it has taken a lot of inspiration from Smalltalk, and it's just an entirely different world compared to IRB.

I should clarify; I specifically meant being able to do stuff like write a high level sketch of a module, then simply run it, and implement missing methods and classes as you go. Similar to writing a red/failing test - then filling in functionality. I suspect a image-like (as in lisp/smalltalk image) view of the code is needed for this to work well (hence the link to "persistent code" for maglev/gemstone). That said,…

Pry does allow that with some caution. You can dip into files from the pry prompt ("edit " opens the right file at the start of the method definition) to add methods and reload a class ("reload-code" or "reload-method"), and if you want to you can relatively easily rig things up so you're thrown into a pry prompt on method missing, implement the missing method, and reload the relevant file and retry the call.

Though I'll usually have a "boot" file that loads all pre-requisites and just call functionality from a pry prompt and edit/reload as needed rather than try to continue from a method missing or exception.

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

#258
post #256
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why pay anything at all and not just keep it merely about recognition, etc.?

It’s just a token amount that qualifies as a bounty. No one is doing it for the monetary value, it’s a token prize offered when succeeding in discovering a vulnerability. Did you watch the video? LiveOverflow is a YouTube channel dedicated in discovering security vulnerabilities who explain why SerenityOS’s code base is a great code base to study for this.

Thanks for explaining. Now the obvious question is why not just $1 then? With $5 increments you could never reach 1337 level!
Post reply on HN