[0x12]

I'd be more inclined to sympathize if it had actually worked. As it stands it is a perfect example of how little knowledge of what goes on under the hood is present with the current generation of programmers. That's sad, because even if you never use that knowledge in your 'day job' I think that such knowledge does make you a better programmer.

If you write a blog post about something like this at least finish the damn thing rather than to leave a bunch of obviously wrong snippets laying around to confuse whoever lands on that page.

There are plenty of good pages on introductory assembler on the web, this isn't one of those and I'm really surprised to see it this high on the homepage. Maybe it shows how much the HN crowd would like to get a little bit of insight of what actually powers their computers, the error is mine in assuming that such knowledge would be commonplace here.

[scott_s]

I upvoted it because if the reader reads through it, they will leave with more understanding of the system stack than they started with. As someone who has been deeply involved with teaching a systems class, that's near-and-dear to my heart. I think it succeeds in that goal. I'm far less concerned that it doesn't actually emit "hello, world".

That it fails at being an introduction to assembly is, I think, missing the point. It doesn't try to be. It's just trying to demystify some of the system stack.

As for HN itself, I've known for a while now that there's a pretty wide range of people here. While I think the percentage of people will almost no systems experience is more than it was a few years ago, the number wasn't zero a few years ago, either.

[rhizome31]

You're right about the current generation of programmers, but there might be more to it than "kids are lazy these days". Those programmers don't know much about system programming and assembly but they know about Java/C#, Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Unix command line tools, Windows, maybe a GUI toolkit or two, etc. The software world has been building layers of abstractions over the years to accelerate development of richer applications and it's just natural that we find more people working at higher level of abstractions today than before.