archmaster

Three things -

https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page is quite good or at least a starting place. It's very x86-centric, though, and doesn't have a lot of coverage. Also, a decent portion is out of date. I used it a decent amount as at least a component of my research for You in CPU.

Agree that modern systems are even more terribly documented than systems in general. So many of the resources I found, even recent ones, were referring to stuff from the original x86 that had long changed. Almost everything I found about ELF or memory layout assumed the memory space was 4 GiB.

Finally, I hope Putting the "You" in CPU gets well-SEOed if only so people like me Googling for modern answers to these questions will find at least something. I tried to make everything as relevant to modern day tech as possible, and to link to up-to-date resources.

I knew I wanted my personal site to have some sort of interactive gimmick, seems like the tile grid worked out. Glad you enjoyed it!

LMK what you think!

Not gonna get involved in the Hacker Newsmare occurring in the comments here, but still_grokking: great point about the disclaimer and I was definitely intending to put something similar in. Article is still in WIP status!

*she and whoops, yep, I think that's supposed to say 32-bit. Good catch.

Thanks! Glad you liked it — let me know if you have any feedback later on.

This is still a WIP and I kinda wasn't expecting HN-level attention yet! I was definitely gonna make a 1-pager version, especially for offline reading (ie. public transit). Also had some people asking for PDF/EPUB.

There are a lot of rabbit holes to go down and not enough time in my day! I cannot say in good conscience that I have gone down this one, although I've picked up a lot of factoids. I've read a couple books on the history of computing, but I'm not sure how much I actually remember — likely because I didn't go on many research tangents. Occasionally I also just get curious and Google something. So, definitely picked lots of tech-history things up, but not an expert by far. Perhaps some day I will be.

(Author here:) I strongly agree! It should not require an understanding of the kernel's execution logic to be able to understand the limitations of shebangs. I think this is stupid design and I perhaps should've highlighted it even more as such.

A couple years ago someone attempted a patch to the kernel that would at least fail loudly in the case of oversized shebangs. This ended up causing problems for NixOS which, being Nix, already was using oversized shebangs with lots of long nix-store paths. They were previously being silently truncated but still working, and suddenly all those scripts failing caused a lapse in backwards compatibility! So the patch had to be undone and we haven't gotten anything similar since.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/779997/ for more info.

My article is, indeed, targeted towards folks who did not do undergrad in CS! Self-taught people need better resources to understand more low level things. I have never taken a CS class, undergrad, high school, middle school, or otherwise.

Oh, thank you so much, and whoops :)

Fixed the code example and merged!

Hi! I'm the person who made this thing!

Thanks for reading and thanks for all the corrections, in glorious Hacker News fashion. It's definitely a pleasant surprise to see my project here. Putting the "You" in CPU is still very much a work in progress — I was hoping to polish it a lot more and even add some more content before posting on HN later next week :)

Some backstory on me: I'm 17 and left high school a year ago to work full-time at Hack Club (https://hackclub.com/). I've been programming for as long as I can remember, and started homeschooling about 6 years ago to focus more on that (and my other interests).

Since I'm entirely self-taught, I haven't taken any college systems classes — and while I had picked up a lot, I wasn't happy with my answer to "what happens when you run a thing." So I let myself spend a shit ton of time actually learning as much as possible. What I found was that:

1. Operating systems and hardware are really fun to learn about!

2. Wow, online resources on this stuff are terrible.

A decent portion of my research ended up at PDFs of lecture slides from 2014, or StackOverflow answers that were, in fact, incorrect or vastly oversimplified.

So, I wrote Putting the "You" in CPU to hopefully provide a better resource to people who wanted to start teaching themselves all this stuff! While I don't provide perfect coverage (still need to write a couple paragraphs on SMP), it's a lot better than most of what I've seen. I also had fun drawing and making diagrams for the first time, I think I definitely got progressively better and I'm really proud of some of the drawings in the latter few chapters.

P.S. The whole thing is open source on GitHub if you want to look under the hood: https://github.com/hackclub/putting-the-you-in-cpu

Hack Club | Tech Lead, Events Designer, and 2 other roles | https://hackclub.com

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Be on the ground floor of something reaching a lot of people:

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- A teenager into tech :)

i mean in general i think nfts are stupid but this looks vaguely cool

Hey, developer of Water.css here - I'll take a look!

This is amazing, so glad it finally came!

It does!

You can! In fact, I've found that it actually works the best with Node.js

Repl.it is an amazing cloud-based IDE, and I'm super excited that they just launched a Git GUI and GitHub integration! Now it's possible to import almost any repository from GitHub in the click of a button and get it running with a very minimal amount of configuration.

There are still a few kinks to work out, but I can see this being very useful.

Josh and I made WonderMap in 48 hours for Node Knockout. It's kinda a Google Keep and Evernote hybrid, but with key/value pairs and rich types. We'll continue adding more features!

Please leave us a vote if it looks cool :) https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/105-wondermap/vote

Repl.it is a super useful site for prototyping and running code in the browser. One of the best features is the package manager workflow, and I love being able to just import packages and have them be automatically installed.

I'm super excited that they released their package manager to the public! I've honestly been missing this workflow, I might work on a vscode plugin to implement similar package install functionality to Repl.it's online IDE.

Thanks, team :)

So glad the new multiplayer is finally released! I've been using it in beta for a while and it drastically improves working with other people.

Thank you for making such an amazing product.

I've been considering doing something like this on r/iama, but I'm worried it's too egotistical.

A pull request fixed the mixed content thing - not sure what you mean about no light theme?

I'd love to start a CDN! Wanna buy me a domain subscription?

Thanks for the feedback, although I would like to make the point: Water.css does style structured websites and doesn't involve any floats or div tags anywhere. If not for semantic html Water.css wouldn't work at all because that's what enables the classless approach.

And I'm purposely not including support for navbars and such as this is meant more for article pages and tiny demos and the sorts. If you're interested in adding a footer, though, I'm accepting PRs :)

Hmm, interesting... wanna make a pull request with suggested changes?

Why?

I make a bunch of tiny static websites for API demos and such, and always run against the same problem: I hate the browser's default styles but don't want to spend time writing my own stylesheet for such a tiny app.

Now I can just include Water.css in my `<head>` and forget about it. The demo app will still work, it'll look good, and I won't have spent any time making a stylesheet.

Who?

Let me quote the GitHub repository:

> You might want to use Water.css if you're making a simple static or demo website that you don't want to spend time styling.

> You probably don't want to use it for a production app or something that has more than a simple document. Rule of thumb: if your site has a navbar, don't use Water.css. It's just not meant for that kind of content.

Water.css has a dark theme by default, but some users wanted a light theme so I added one. Think it's ugly? Feel free to create a pull request :D

Even I can't tell if it is :D

Also, you don't have to type in the url if it's a bookmark ;) But same with Wikipedia But then it makes it as easy to remember