Soylent: Operations Update - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soylent.me/post/59466009067/operations-update

<comment><USER2> For the life of me, I can't understand why this is such a trendy topic on HN. If you walk into any grocery store or pharmacy, there are at least two aisles stocked with nothing but meal-replacement shakes.

One of the aisles is targeted at young people, with marketing themes around bodybuilding or triathlon training. The other aisle is targeted at senior citizens, with marketing themes around osteoporosis or longevity. There might be a third aisle, or a portion of one of the other two, targeting mostly women with themes of weight loss. However, it's pretty much the same stuff in the bottle on any aisle.

Soylent looks to be a online aisle, targeting the exact same stuff to tech- savvy hipsters, with themes of lifehacking and and classic sci-fi cinema.

I'm sure that _your_ particular Brawndo is special because it has electrolytes, or whatever, but I don't understand why the underlying concept of a meal-replacement shake warrants so much coverage. This concept isn't the least bit novel.

<comment><USER3> You gave the reason yourself: The existing market is segmented, and none of those markets shouts 'average HN user'.

Compare the marketing/segmentation of the existing products:

Senior citizens: For old people / a worse replacement for regular meals / medical.

Women losing weight: I'm fat / unhealthy / a worse replacement for regular meals / temporary, once I've lost the weight I'll switch back.

Bodybuilders: DUDE, CHECK OUT MY LATS. I ALWAYS DO 10 x 10 DP SETS AND THEN SLAM DOWN A PROTEIN SHAKE. DUUUUUDE.

Soylent: For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost.

Now which of these is going to attract, and which is going to repel, the stereotypical HN user?

Of course these are stereotypes, but this is marketing, and segmenting often uses stereotypes to push people into making different purchasing decisions: As an average HN user, I'm going to feel weird/wrong buying a women's weight loss shake, or a senior citizens medical food, or a gym expert's protein shake, but I'm going to feel great buying Soylent, because I fit into the marketing.

My point is that none of the existing products on the market market all these points: * An equal replacement for food, instead of a worse substitute on one axis or another (at least nutritionally); * An all the time replacement, not just for a specific purpose; * Market direct to the consumer (this seems to be the issue with some of the replacements used in hospitals).

Now, whether Soylent actually meets these claims, or whether the stereotypes are actually relevant to the contents of the products themselves, is largely irrelevant at this point. This is marketing, and HN users are gullible to it like everyone else. (Personally, I'm rooting for Soylent)

Re the name, which a bunch of people who seriously fail to see why that name: because it is rebellious in exactly the way average HN users are suckers for.

<comment><USER4> > _This is marketing, and HN users are gullible to it like everyone else._

Exactly, and here's another example: What's the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero?

Answer: Diet Coke is popular with women, so some men won't drink it. Hence, introduce the more masculine Coke Zero, but basically the same thing. But make some tiny little tweaks to caffeine content and sweetness to create plausible deniability about it being identical.

Reference: [http://foodwatch.com.au/mailbag/item/q-what-s-the- difference...](http://foodwatch.com.au/mailbag/item/q-what-s-the-difference- between-diet-coke-and-coke-zero-2.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I literally cannot fathom how this is 1. interesting to people 2. new and novel and 3. always trending on HN.

People can and have lived on liquid food for quite a long time. This isn't new, this isn't particularly interesting or groundbreaking in anyway.

Why the fascination on HN? Can someone explain it to me?

<comment><USER6> I'm starting to think this has to be a viral marketing campaign / social experiment.

It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals, who lack the resources to employ qualified individuals, simply for an extra hour everyday.

<comment><USER7> > It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health > to unqualified individuals

I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.

> simply for an extra hour everyday

An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.

<comment><USER6> > I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.

If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree. You entrust those bodies and the qualified individuals within them because they ensure what you purchase is what it says it is. Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.

> An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.

If Soylent works completely as advertised yes you gain time. Should it lead to any kind of health problems it's more than likely you lose time.

<comment><USER8> >If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree

Soylent has to adhere to all those same standards.

<comment><USER5> No it won't, in the US at least. It will likely not need FDA approval just like most sports supplement don't.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_food_and_dietary_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_food_and_dietary_supplements_by_the_U.S._Food_and_Drug_Administration#Dietary_supplements)

<comment><USER8> Did you even read that? It says you are wrong.

>The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 mandated that the FDA regulate dietary supplements as foods

Soylent has to adhere to the exact same standards as all the other food you buy right now.

<comment><USER5> You either needed to read more or more closely. According to wikipedia linked:

"Like other food substances, dietary supplements are not subject to the safety and efficacy testing requirements imposed on drugs, and unlike drugs they do not require prior approval by the FDA; however, they are subject to the FDA regulations regarding adulteration and misbranding. The FDA can take action against dietary supplements only after they are proven to be unsafe. "

<comment><USER8> No, you need to read more closely. It says exactly what I said. Soylent is covered under the exact same requirements as all other foods. This is very simple to understand, and I honestly can't imagine how you can possibly be having difficulty with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How on Earth is ten days enough to test anything in regards to diet? Pretty sure humans don't notice much change in that time, let alone enough to measure? Day to day numbers fluctuate by a lot, so wouldn't it have to be tested over a longer period for it to be valid?

<comment><USER10> They're at the point of making changes to "taste, texture, and smell" \- the dietary side of the formula is nailed down already, and I am willing to believe was tested more rigorously.

<comment><USER11> > I am willing to believe was tested more rigorously.

Really? Their site launched with a FAQ on safety that essentially read "well, we haven't died yet..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's an interesting analysis of Soylent: [http://www.priceplow.com/blog/soylent- subterfuge](http://www.priceplow.com/blog/soylent-subterfuge)

I would think twice before committing to a soylent-only diet.

</comment><comment><USER13> My uncle was born with a digestive tract defect that was not detected until he was of middle age. (The only sign that he had any health problem at all was that he was of only average height, in a family in which all his five brothers were tall.) He was on total parenteral nutrition

[http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a601166.htm...](http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a601166.html)

for something like twenty years before dying last week at the age of ninety- one. It's basic medical background knowledge that keeps me from being impressed by the Soylent shot in the dark, and it is reflecting that human nutrition is both

a) mostly a hard problem, and

b) mostly a SOLVED problem

that keeps me from making gee-whiz comments about the Soylent project here on HN. The great thing about a free-enterprise economy with minimal regulation is that if you like this kind of thing, you can spend your hard-earned money to buy Soylent. If your eating behavior includes experiential or social outcomes better met by eating a variety of foods you cook and chew, you can join me in eating a little of this and a little of that over the course of a year. The Soylent company is YC-invested, as I recall, so press releases from the company will continue to be posted here, but meanwhile I will pursue a variety of micronutrients and a variety of pleasant experiences by eating a varied diet with my family and friends.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know how many different formulas they'll make in the future, but I'd love one with some sort of crushed up powdered oats mix instead of maltodextrin or other not-so-great carb sources. There are very few meal replacements in the supplement market that aren't filled with maltodextrin or sugar alcohols. I'd love something that's the equivalent of a meal I could put in a blender (e.g. banana, natural peanut butter, oats, and maybe some protein powder) without all the added chemicals.

<comment><USER15> My DIY blend uses oat flour. There are a lot of soylent recipes out there - the hacker school soylent recipe [1] is a nice oat-flour based one with a decent default nutritional profile.

1: [http://www.cookingfor20.com/2013/06/18/hacker-school- soylent...](http://www.cookingfor20.com/2013/06/18/hacker-school-soylent- recipe/)

edit: also note, the only synthesised 'chemicals' most recipes include are potassium gluconate and calcium citrate. Everything else is a food or food extract.

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I'll check it out. And when I was referring to chemicals I was talking about the broader meal replacement supplement market, not Soylent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone remember the early post from this guy where he said that he just wanted to stop spending so much of his time and energy on food? Now it's all he does. He "wakes up every day thinking about it."

Now _that 's_ ironic.

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone published a post about their experience with Soylent where they didn't use it to replace all their meals, but just maybe one or two of them a day? That's the use case I'm interested in.

<comment><USER18> I agree completely, I would think that's the exact use case most of us are interested in. It sounds like the perfect breakfast drink or quick on the go lunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find this project interesting, especially since it seems to be able to lower my cost of living (currently I buy for around 300 EUR a month of food, using Soylent should be able to lower this to ~220 EUR from what I understand). Yet, at the same time I worry how healthy it would be on the long term. For example, research has shown that vitamin pills are often detrimental to ones health and could even increase the chance of getting cancer. I wonder if Soylent uses much the same ingredients of vitamin pills.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can we get a Keto version of this?

Bonus points for a Paleo friendly version.

As it is now, I would never get close to that carbohydrate-based drink.

</comment><comment><USER21> Even though it isn't for me (I actually _like_ food, finding it one of the greatest pleasures in life), the Soylent story still presents an interesting storyline to me. But I've always wondered: Why the name _Soylent_? Aren't there some negative connotations to that? Is it...made of people?

An aspect of Soylent that I don't get is the assumption that it gets you out of the drudgery of eating, for those people for whom it is such a chore: the idea of chugging multiple cups of gray, sludgy drink daily sounds like an enormous burden that would grow tiring really quickly. It sounds like something that would make you dread the passing of the day, as another cup of slurry draws ever closer.

I speak at least a bit from experience, as one stage in my life had me working out daily, starting each with a big protein drink. Over time I realized that I was dreading, if not even skipping, the workout because of the protein drink that went with it.

<comment><USER22> I love food too. If I weren't a programmer I would be a chef. But just like sex, I want to have it when I feel like it, not in a rigorous schedule determined by society.

In fact, not eating food as often makes you appreciate it more when you have it. Go three months without eating pizza and then have some, how did it taste? Now eat pizza every day for three months and then have some more, how did it taste?

I currently eat once a day and I would gladly replace some of my meals with this drink. That would allow me to eat, say three times a week, enjoying the food that I really crave. As a food lover, this is the perfect product for me.

<comment><USER21> _not in a rigorous schedule determined by society_

Why don't you just eat when you want to? As an adult you do what you feel like doing. This is neither here nor there in the discussion regarding Soylent.

 _In fact, not eating food as often makes you appreciate it more when you have it._

I fully understand and practice the idea of self-deprivation for heightened experiences (I've followed the consumption habits of Ramadan despite being an agnostic, for example). However this product doesn't deprive you of nutrition or liquids, obviously, and while it does deprive you of taste (or at least good taste), the benefit of real food is that the variety is _enormous_. You mention pizza, for instance, yet again it isn't the choice of pizza every day or Soylent and then the monthly pizza -- many people with good diets already have pizza so infrequently that it is an enormous treat. The same with a grilled burger. Or a steak. Or a lobster. Or a fresh fish. Or sushi. Or Chinese. Some butter chicken. A turkey sandwich on fresh Rye. Or even, dare I say it, the occasional Big Mac. It goes on forever and ever and ever, such that if I ever lose that delight with food, I'm doing something wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In my country this is called a meal replacement. I live in the future..</comment>


Microsoft Opening Three-Headed Search Technology Center in Europe to Challenge Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/10/02/microsoft-opening-three-headed-search-technology-center-in-europe-to-challenge-google/

<comment><USER2> They must have read the Spiegel article about how the US had lost its dominant economic role.</comment>


Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/23/559582380/stephen-hawkings-ph-d-thesis-crashes-cambridge-site-after-it-s-posted-online <comment><USER2> Ok I am confused, 60k hits in a day? What broght down the website? 72MB of size, network congestion, or 60k hits? Even with authentication for download what can bring the system down? I have handled more traffic on a RPi with 100MBps connection. I really don't get it.

<comment><USER2> Here I made a quick copy and a quick domain, almost 10 LoC and it will be more reliable than what Cambridge had [http://hawking.sibte.ml/](http://hawking.sibte.ml/)

<comment><USER3> Love the irony on that! Which makes me wonder how much valuable content and research in locked away on technologically ancient servers in Cambridge and Oxford.

<comment><USER4> More modern and up to date than you'd think :) Some departments here in Oxford have a server life-cycle of 3-5 years. It's just that nobody bothers for higher than expected volume of traffic unfortunately (a practice that can be extrapolated to many things in academia).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What percent of downloads will actually be read I wonder.

I'm guilt of downloading and hoarding things that seems interesting and never getting round to even opening them. "When I'm retired", I tell myself.

<comment><USER6> Guilty as charged, as well. I download just about any programming manual/book that's free in PDF or similar form and I've probably read maybe 10% of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad NPR used this headline, another news site said it "broke the internet". Journalism!(tm)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is an ipfs link to it: [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4R...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4Rgce4rLp)

<comment><USER9> Thanks a lot, and pinning it to help to seed :) `ipfs pin add /ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4Rgce4rLp`

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The PDF is just a scan of actual book printed pages. No wonder it is a monstrous size.

<comment><USER11> So a man who uses a machine for synthesis into text for speech, wrote a book which was then printed, scanned, and uploaded.

I wonder if they faxed it at some point too?

<comment><USER12> In 1966?

HN's guidelines say that one shouldn't ask if one has read the posted link, but I'm tempted to all the time.

<comment><USER13> It would seem to be a joke.

But even so, while 1966 was indeed early for "regular" use of fax - the first "user friendly" Xerox fax machines hit the market around then -, the first transmission of facsimiles of images dates to the 1840's, and the first fax that used similar methods to "modern" fax machines of scanning line by line (the "scanning phototelegraph") dates to 1880. Commercial fax machines have been around since around 1900.

So it would indeed be possible.

One weird and wonderful product of early faxes (fax over radio predates "wired" fax machines): Finch Facsimile's [1] were used to transmit "newspapers" via AM radio in the '30's, that was then printed on thermal paper at the home of the subscriber.

From [1]: "Six hours overnight was enough time to print a six page two column news bulletin, delivered in time for breakfast."

[1]: [http://www.theradiohistorian.org/Radiofax/newspaper_of_the_a...](http://www.theradiohistorian.org/Radiofax/newspaper_of_the_air1.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like a perfect use for a torrent. Is there a tracker link?

<comment><USER15> "I've watched everything"

"What do you mean everything?"

"TV shows. Movies. Even the japanese ones."

"How about older stuff"

"I've gone through early Chaplin work. I've seen Metropolis 17 times."

"I'm sure there's something"

(grabs his friend)

"You don't understand, Paul. I've been reading Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. I've run _out_. I've taken to begging strangers for a fix."

"That bad?"

(Guilty), "I just... " (resigned) "I just asked someone to put up a torrent of Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. thesis..."

<comment><USER16> > Movies. Even the japanese ones.

Even the Eastern European ones. And all of Ingmar Bergman.

(shudders)

<comment><USER17> That's the good stuff! I recommend Satantango, and all of Bergman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to thesis: [http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR- PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pd...](http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR- PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf)

<comment><USER18> It would have been more helpful to post _mirror site_ addresses rather than exacerbate the problem.

Anybody know of mirror sites? A basic web search doesn't show any, and archive.org doesn't show it.

<comment><USER19> Mirror: [http://web.archive.org/web/20171024005153/http://schema.lib....](http://web.archive.org/web/20171024005153/http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR- PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just have to ask why this is news? Is this really something newsworthy?

Cambridge's network probably isn't as hardened to spikes in traffic since they don't get much traffic. But still, it isn't 1995. They should have some form of load balancing or distributed/clustered web/data/file systems to handle temporary spikes in traffic and data requests. Serving simple static data isn't something that should "crash the site".

<comment><USER21> The technology behind the repository itself is not _great_. (DSpace[1]), add to that the factor that it is not actually build to handle this many requests and scaling quickly is out of the question too because of the server set up.

Even without issues, it often felt a bit sluggish when serving locally. The pages are quite large, and the whole pipeline from content -> webpage is rather tedious.(Java, XSLT -> html)

It shouldn't have happened - but I assumed it would.

disclaimer: I am a former contributor to the project [1]: [https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace](https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Suggestions on getting this in audio form? I guess it requires transcribing the handwritten parts. The Chrome OCR fails there. Is there a better one?

Sample:

This implies that the universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic since there is no direction defined in the 3- space orthogonal to Ua. In this universe we consider small perturbations of the motion of tl1e fluid and of the '.ifeyl tensore 1 Ne neglect products of small quantities and perform derivatives with respect to the undisturbed metric. Since all the quantities we are interested in with the exception of the scalars, µ, ~' e have unperturbed value zero, we avoid perturbations that merely represent coordinate transformation and have no physical significance. To the first order the equations (1) - (4) and (7) - (9) are

</comment><comment><USER23> Article has a typo in the quote should be Olber not Older who described what's now known as Olbers paradox.

</comment><comment><USER24> This points to challenges of digital information.

Stephen Hawking and his dissertation are high-profile as these things go. The NPR mentions other _popular_ items generating 100s of requests per month. I've run across items with _lifetime_ request counts in the double or triple digits frequently (and suspect I doubled the count on one particular item).

More often, though, the truth is that this material _simply isn 't available online._ There are several thesis repositories (either Michigan State or University of Michigan are one, as I recall), and I can _frequently_ turn up a shelf reference via WorldCat ... somewhere.

But there's work from surprisingly prominent names in numerous fields that simply isn't available in electronic format. The worst case is for materials from rougly 1924 - 1980: to late to be out of copyright, and too early to have been composed, or converted to, digital formats (and 1980 is an early cut-off date for that, though it's when material seems to start appearing in bulk).

This includes PhD dissertations, Masters theses, and numerous academic or other writings, _often including government documents not under copyright._ Thankfully with Sci-Hub, actual published academic journal articles can be found, freely, with a very high success rate. Particularly painful for me are popular magazine and newspaper items, _for which even the indices are very frequently locked behind site-restricted or affiliate-only access._

The time-and-effort differential of being able to look something up online, vs. travelling many miles to a facility for access, is tremendous. And it absolutely stops a great many incidential queries dead.

See Rick Falkvinge's excellent rant about how the KRACK vulnerability was blocked behind corporate-only paywalls for over a decade:

[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/10/the- recen...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/10/the-recent- catastrophic-wi-fi-vulnerability-was-in-plain-sight-for-13-years-behind-a- corporate-paywall/)

Note that the issues here are twofold. One element is the task of scanning and making available documents, and organising the results in a manner useful for search.

But much the harm is the direct consequence of the present regime of copyright and paid access to information, AS WELL AS the perverse incentives of advertising-backed media and media manipulation have created a media regime that is actively harmful to society.

I'd really like to see the elements of this addressed.

</comment><comment><USER25> 99% chance someone used apache's default configuration.

<comment><USER26> What is the limitation in that default configuration?

<comment><USER27> KeepAlive, probably: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a- memo...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memory- constrained-vps/)</comment></comment></comment>


jQuery Spellchecker - For Bootstrap-wysihtml, MarkItUp, Redactor, TinyMCE & More - <AUTHOR> http://jquery-spellchecker.badsyntax.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> via: [http://www.functionn.in/2012/12/jquery-spellchecker- plugin-t...](http://www.functionn.in/2012/12/jquery-spellchecker-plugin-to- check.html)

It has support for multiple PHP back-end drivers (Enchant, PSpell, Google). It has demos for many popular editors including Boostrap support and Markdown support.</comment>


About rel=noopener - <AUTHOR> https://mathiasbynens.github.io/rel-noopener/?target=_blank <comment><USER2> > Note that this also works when index.html and malicious.html are on > different origins — window.opener.location is accessible across origins!

... Why. Why would anyone (not maliciously) consider this desirable behaviour?

<comment><USER3> Agreed. But what's more intriguing to me is that the proposed "solution" is to add yet another hack on top of that (rel=noopener), instead of doing something to fix the broken behavior of target=_blank.

I doubt that many sites rely on this broken behavior. And even if they do, browsers could still block it and show some warning to the user "Hey, this tab that just opened wants to change the URL of this other tab [allow, always, nope, never]", just like they do for popup windows or sites with broken SSL certs.

Does someone with more experience in these kind of issues know why it was decided to put the responsibility of fixing this on individual websites (rel=noopener) instead of browsers (blocking the URL changing or showing a warning)?

<comment><USER4> > I doubt that many sites rely on this broken behavior.

Any web based system where a pop up dialog is opened to allow the user to select something that is then inserted into the original page?

<comment><USER3> Good call! I guess i haven't seen any of those. But i've seen some internal web based systems that relied too heavily on popup windows and started breaking when tabbed browsing became a thing and brosers started blocking popup windows by default, so i don't doubt that there are probably systems out there relying on this weird behavior of target=_blank.

For those systems, though, i'd imagine most of them would have these popup windows on the same origin, right? So having browsers prevent child windows changing their parent's location _if they are cross-origin_ seems like a sensible idea, or am i missing something else?

<comment><USER5> There are more than 1 billion websites. If just 0.1% of sites use target=_blank like that, you'd be breaking a million sites with your change. You can't use arguments like "I haven't seen any of those" or it "seems like a sensible idea" when making decisions like this.

<comment><USER3> The "I haven't seen any of those" was just as a comment on why i couldn't think of possible uses for this target=_blank behavior, not a justification for the proposed change (what a lame justification that would be! :)

That being said, i don't see how the proposal of browsers blocking popup windows from redirecting the parent window (if it's cross-origin) by default is any different from, for instance, them blocking popup windows from opening unless it was a user action that triggered them, which all browsers started doing by default quite some time ago. Could you elaborate on why this wouldn't be a sensible solution?

<comment><USER5> It does seem like a sensible solution, but the web isn't exactly a sensible place. People use terribly-written web sites for all sorts of things that are important to them in their life. Changes that potentially break these sites shouldn't be taken lightly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the new pop-under. Sites trying to serve as many ads as possible will open links with target=_blank and redirect the old window to an ad.

<comment><USER7> So that's what's happening! With uBlock, all I see is a flicker on the browser's tab bar, and my history is gone. It's still annoyingly retarded.

<comment><USER8> I did try to provide a fix for the history-lost case for when a popunder is blocked, but in the end I had to give up because there was no way to make it work reliably (using current extensions API).

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1028](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/1028)

<comment><USER7> Ha, no worries, I wouldn't have expected an ad blocker to know that for me, the dead tab and this new tab are semantically one. I'm just glad that the bad tab is dead. It's the ad that I was calling retarded :p

Awesome work btw, it runs like greased lightning in FF nightly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ths is a problem for Browsers, not developers. target=_blank is too embedded into the web.

<comment><USER10> developers can fix the problem for their users.

<comment><USER9> It's more expensive for a web dev to fix this than a browser to prevent it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the correct way to force a link to open in a new tab, then?

Unfortunately "let the user decide" is not the best answer if you want to link to something like "terms and conditions" in the middle of a sign up flow or something. If the user doesn't know how to open it in a new tab on their own, this can be extremely frustrating I'd imagine.

<comment><USER12> > What is the correct way to force a link to open in a new tab, then?

What is the correct way to stalk, hunt, kill, stuff and mount the user?

Answer: there is no correct way to do something which is fundamentally incorrect.

> Unfortunately "let the user decide" is not the best answer if you want to > link to something like "terms and conditions" in the middle of a sign up > flow or something. If the user doesn't know how to open it in a new tab on > their own, this can be extremely frustrating I'd imagine.

Abusing _my_ browser is extremely frustrating for me. If I want to open a link (a link, see, not some horrid piece of JavaScript) in a different tab, I middle-click and get on with life. You don't need to do that for me, any more than you need to offer me a typing widget when I have a perfectly functional keyboard, or fake a link when I have a browser perfectly capable of understand the <a> tag, or check my (correct) email address with an incorrect regular expression.

Please don't break the Internet.

<comment><USER13> On the other hand, I almost never want to have a link open in the same tab. There's nothing more frustrating than being halfway down a page, forget to hold down ctrl when I click on a link, and have all of my state on the old page blown away and replaced with the new one.

Probably this is a result of the internet _already_ being broken, since the worst of it is in infite-scrolling type things where my confidence that I can get back to where I was originally after going back is very, very low.

<comment><USER14> If you have a middle mouse button, you can middle click a link to open it in a new tab. Of course, that's if you didn't reprogram the middle button to do something else.

<comment><USER15> Reprogramming the meat behind the keyboard is often harder than reprogramming the machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well I just had an "Oh sh*t" moment thinking about all the websites I built over the years at my old company that had target=_blank to commentors sites... Aw crap.

Not my problem anymore, but I never even considered this.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you could send them a note? Do you know anybody who's still working on the project?

<comment><USER16> It's a complicated situation. They owe me a bit of money and don't reply to any of my emails.

<comment><USER18> Can't you sue them then? Or at the least threaten to sue?

<comment><USER16> If you see my story which I commented on a different post in the hierarchy, it's VERY complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a practical reason that a reference to the opener window is given to the opened window? That seems like something we could do without.

<comment><USER20> Example: Google Slides where one tab has the presentation and another tab has the speaker notes. You want those to be in sync.

<comment><USER21> There are plenty of other ways to do this e.g. web sockets or localStorage.

<comment><USER22> Now, yes, but a lot of precedent was set before then. Even now both of the technologies you mentioned would add significant complexity – needing to start running an otherwise unnecessary WebSocket server, having to debug and workaround client bugs or network issues like large organizations blocking WebSockets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a pretty old bug, I think I reported it a few years ago to Google.

EDIT: 2013 to be exact.

<comment><USER24> FYI, the article links to a Chromium issue from 2013:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=168988](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=168988)

which links to another issue from 2012.

Edit: My purpose was to confirm the bug has been "known" for awhile, not to take away credit for you reporting the bug years ago. Congrats for independently discovering it before many people (such as myself) became aware of it.

<comment><USER23> Well there you go, although I submitted it trough a different channel.

For sure, I think its a very important bug that hasn't had much attention for years now, especially since so many websites use _blank, GMail being one of them.

<comment><USER25> I get that linking from a "trusted site" to a "not trusted site" is probably of greater concern. But, this `noopener` does nothing to address a similar attack demonstrated here: [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/switch/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/switch/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you open a page of your own site that then redirects to the target (like some pages do, presumably to hide the exact source URL in the referer-header before there was a header for it), is the opener-reference broken?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm using Chromium and even the link with `rel=noopener` seems to be able to "hax" the first page. Am I reading it wrong or is `rel=noopener` supposed to protect against this?

<comment><USER28> It's a bit confusing if you didn't pay close attention to the article, because neither link actually show the `rel=noopener` fix.

Instead, the two links present two different angles to the same problem. The first link demonstrates the attack using a page within the same domain (reasonable), and the second demonstrates that it will continue to work even when the link points to a page ordinarily restricted by cross-origin policies (potentially surprising).

If you manually add `rel=noopener` to either link, the attack won't work. Try it with DevTools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Note that all the opened page has control over is closing and changing the address of the tab. You can't insert HTML into the page, for example. Phishing seems to be the only problem this creates, but no more.

</comment><comment><USER24> I built a quick userscript that treats rel="noopener" as default for links with target:"_blank".

It could be worth checking out if you want to avoid experiencing this security issue yourself (but I offer no warranties) or if you want to see if it would break any site you visit if browsers would enable the behavior by default.

[https://github.com/jaredsohn/noopener_by_default](https://github.com/jaredsohn/noopener_by_default)

</comment><comment><USER30> They ever heard of "security by default"? I guess no.

<comment><USER31> In the early to mid '90s, threat models on the web were quite a bit different from now.

<comment><USER30> I was implying "make it a default for everyone, now"

<comment><USER31> Right, but now you have 20 years worth of content which depends on the current behavior....

<comment><USER30> On this particular behavior unlikely

<comment><USER31> What makes you think this is unlikely? On the contrary, I think it's _very_ likely there are things depending on it. I don't expect there to be a huge number of them, but I also expect them to disproportionately be in things like intranet deployments where it's hard to even get measurements. :(

<comment><USER30> A link with _blank + expected to change/interact with opener? Maybe there's a few, but most cross domain transports would use window.open() manually.

<comment><USER31> Well, window.open() obviously has the same problem, with the same solution being proposed: the caller of window.open opts in to not allow the thing being opened to interact with it.

We could have different default behaviors for the two cases, of course: opt-in for links and opt-out for window.open.

But I still suspect that even just the link case is not as uncommon as one might wish. Happy to see data proving me wrong, though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> NoScript saves the day again.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, except breaking 99% of the modern Web.

NoScript has its place, for example in the Tor browser or in other high- security applications, but it's too much of a burden for everyday use.

<comment><USER34> If your website _breaks_ without Javascript, then it's the website's fault for not properly implementing progressive enhancement. Javascript is useful to _enhance_ the page with better features, but the page itself should work without it.

If you tools/framework make this hard or generate output that incompatible with progressive enhancement, then I suggest you find (or write) better tools.

<comment><USER35> I do wonder for how many sites does this actually make sense to do. Take the number of users who use NoScript and are not willing to turn it off when the site doesn't work without JS, and then take the subset from those who would actually be willing to pay for using the website. [1] Do these niche users really generate enough revenue to pay for the toolchain & work culture changes necessary to have this progressive enhancement? What's more, this group of users doesn't even receive the charity boost that some other niche groups like the visually impaired might receive, that would lead to changes even without direct financial sense.

[1] Being NoScript users, they most likely also run some sort of ad blocker, so ad revenue from them is likely zero.

<comment><USER34> > makes sense to do

Do you use the pointer that fopen(3) returns without checking for NULL? Progressive enhancement is mainly error checking and handing failures gracefully.

> not willing to turn it off when the site doesn't work without JS

Why are you willing to make your business look shoddy and unprofessional? Running without javascript has always been an option, and always will be. Anyone that doesn't run the javascript obviously isn't expecting fancy features, but you should still show any text/images (or a basic form if that is relevant), probably along a suggestion that turning on javascript will probably improve their experience.

> changes necessary to have this progressive enhancement

That's the point - this shouldn't cost a lot, unless your tools are unusually braindead. Rails made progressive enhancement almost entirely transparent a long time ago. I believe there are several prerender-the-first-load plugins for several popular frameworks. If your tools aren't doing this for you (either automagically or otherwise), then those tools are missing important features.

> work culture changes

It is probably a good idea to pay any technical debt sooner, instead of tying even more projects to bad tools.

> users who use NoScript

NoScript users are _NOT_ [1] the only group that will see your pages without Javascript. You don't control the client, which will always be unreliable.

Also, progressive enhancement isn't a boolean value; you should be checking for the availability of any feature you use. This may result in only partial support, which is probably better than _no_ support (or a javascript error) if someone loads your page in an old browser or something unusual. The web is inherently a fluid environment, which makes defensive programming even more important.

> direct financial sense

What is the direct financial impact of showing people a broken website? Do you even analyze the server logs to find out how many people are impacted?

[1] [http://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html](http://kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Some time ago I was surprised that my Google Search page was replaced by something else after I returned from some spammy page (opened in another tab).

As the browser I use, Opera 12, also treats all links manually opened in the new tab as if they had target="_blank", giving them opener access, I decided to remove the window.opener altogether by replacing the "opener" string with "opera" in the opera.dll. This way it gets overwritten by the normal window.opera variable and is essentially hidden. So far I haven't encountered a site legitimately relying on this behavior.

</comment><comment><USER37> wouldn't a simple solution be <base rel="noopener">

</comment><comment><USER38> In the right circumstances, which as far as I can tell are when crossing between security zones, Internet Explorer and Edge already seem to block this. I've never been able to pin down exactly what's happening, or to get Google login to work on our intranet sites with IE as a result.

</comment><comment><USER21> There should be an option in content security policy to prevent this on all links.

</comment><comment><USER39> _sigh_ This is a perfect example of a title that should _not_ have been changed. The original was objectively better than the current one. If you don't already know what rel=noopener is, you'd have no reason at all to click through on this. But the earlier title actually explained something _about_ the content on the other end of the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> HN submissions are kind of like startups. Often you have to break the rules to get off the ground. But once you have some lift, it's time to become boring and straighten out.

<comment><USER40> I have no idea what this submission is about. Why would I want rel=noopener?

<comment><USER41> The original title (and the point of the article) was about the security problems target=_blank has.

You want rel=noopener because the page it navigates to can't affect the content of the opening page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does this "work" for cross origin requests? If I plant a `target=_blank` in my website, user clicks it, goes to my second website, do I have control over the website the link came from? If not, I don't see the security issue. Of course you can XSS yourself, what have you.

<comment><USER43> To some extent.. Yes.

The attacker can replace the current page with his own phising page.

Of course, the hostname part of the url would change, but the user is unlikely to notice that.

<comment><USER18> Case in point: People still fall for things like `facebook.com.totallynotaphishingsite.com'

<comment><USER44> It's a huge difference between clicking on a random facebook.com.totallynotphishing.com link, and being on the legitimate facebook.com and having that tab automatically go to a phishing site while you're not looking.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Smartest Basketball Mind Outside the NBA - <AUTHOR> https://www.si.com/nba/2018/03/08/ben-falk-cleaning-the-glass-sam-hinkie-76ers-blazers-nba-statistics <comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I worked for Ben in Philadelphia.

I think it would be a really positive development if more independent authors can make a competitive income building their own platforms. As the author notes, this is not necessarily a reproducible example, but definitely a really encouraging story.</comment>


Show HN: Drawception. My browser-based drawing game (picture telephone) - <AUTHOR> http://drawception.com

<comment><USER2> This looks really nice! I will give it a try ASAP!

</comment><comment><USER3> very cool, but a little confusing and some tricky phrases to express visually! Great concept</comment>


A Hologram Shows How Space Could Pop into Existence - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/75/story/a-hologram-shows-how-space-could-pop-into-existence <comment><USER2> "What if the whole universe was just a hologram?"

Well, a hologram is a photograph of an interference pattern which, when suitably illuminated, produces a three-dimensional image.

Confusing the universe with a hologram is like confusing a photo of a car with an actual car.

Pretty impressive that these "scientists" have been researching this topic for over 10 years. Must be nice to have that kind of funding for researching dumb ideas.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpDHn8viX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpDHn8viX8)

<comment><USER4> What an amazing video, enough technical detail while maintaining high-level concepts - thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


The Concurrent 2-Trie - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@chrisvest/the-concurrent-2-trie-67deb2b57ba1 <comment><USER2> A few comments.

First of all, this is fine for a densely packed, growable "array" of things indexed by small integers. Think of things like a file descriptor table indexed by FD number and mapping to an open file handle. But this is not a generic hash table indexable by strings.

Second, the hard part here is that readers that have obtained an about-to-no- longer-be-current root need to be able to use it to completion, while writers of new roots need to be able to ensure the eventual freeing of old roots when no readers remain who have a live reference to an old root. This is particularly tricky to get right -- it's the sort of thing that in the Linux kernel gets done with RCU, but RCU in userland is not portable. That's not to say that there aren't solutions. I've implemented something like just that piece with a generic API in[0].

      [0] https://github.com/cryptonector/ctp

<comment><AUTHOR> The system they're describing is written in Java, so I think they trust the GC to take care of that.

<comment><USER2> Ah, yes, neo4j -- the 'j' means Java, and that's fair, but a concurrent GC is an assumption worth stating!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone point me to a glossary for the jargon "acquire, release, plain" access semantics?

[edit]

It does seem to be a general term, but given that TFA is about a Java program, see [http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/j9mm.html](http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/j9mm.html)

<comment> Avi-D-coder I have not yet read the article, but those terms usually refer to C11 memory ordering semantics. The Rust docs on atomic orderings are pretty readable. [https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/sync/atomic/enum.Ordering.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/sync/atomic/enum.Ordering.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that led me to: [https://doc.rust- lang.org/nomicon/atomics.html#acquire-relea...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/nomicon/atomics.html#acquire-release) which has an even better description.</comment></comment></comment>


Repairing the only known prototype of Nintendo PlayStation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh91IO9cV48 <comment><USER2> Based solely on this video, I feel sorry for this guy. First he doesn't bother to use a lab supply to current limit the input - nope, just plug it into a wall supply and let 'er rip.

Next, he doesn't have a microscope? Using a hand magnifier instead. Ok. Then he's clamping to the PCB for scope ground instead of soldering a fly lead for that purpose.

He doesn't want to use desoldering braid on this "one of a kind" board, so he's heating and levering the caps off. That's a recipe for a lifted trace for certain. Then there's the iron. That thing is way way too large for what he's trying to do.

I know, I know, he fixed it.

Before you yell at me, I've been doing this stuff for 30 years and I'm here to tell you I'm shocked that he doesn't have better equipment. The thing is, the guy is talented. If you coupled that with decent equipment, he'd be amazing.

<comment><USER3> HOW does he not have a bench supply? Looking around the rest of his shop at least gives the appearance of a functioning lab.

To any budding hardware hackers, a benchtop (or rackmount, because they can be had for very cheap if they're old) power supply is one of the FIRST thing you should buy, probably before you get an oscilloscope, and probably right after you get a soldering iron.

edit: Actually, at 3:00, isn't that a bench supply that is sitting in front of him?

edit2: And at about 7:34 you can actually see the terminals for it.

<comment><USER4> I've recently started to play around with hardware hacking, completely self taught. "Bench supply" isn't something I'm familiar with, are you able to explain a little more about what one is (I have looked online and still not entirely sure) and why I would need one?

<comment><USER5> The first result from googling "why do i need a bench supply?" seems informative.

[http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/does-a-hobbyist-need-a- ben...](http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/does-a-hobbyist-need-a-bench-power- supply/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related story - someone developed a game for it:

[http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/unreleased-snes- playstat...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/unreleased-snes-playstation- gets-first-homebrew-game/)

</comment><comment><USER7> For anyone who likes this video, you should also checkout Sega Saturn CD - Cracked After 20 Years[0].

[0] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E)

</comment><comment><USER8> The first part of the video[1] is also worth watching. It has the current owner explaining how he got it and some careful investigation of the device before the actual repair.

Ben Heck has some impressive videos in general, watching him work always makes me wish I was better at electronics.

[1] [https://youtu.be/ug-CyGXMabg](https://youtu.be/ug-CyGXMabg)

</comment><comment><USER9> My roommate and I really had a great time watching this over a couple of beers. We're not even especially gifted in the realm of solder and circuits, but it was fun speculating and marveling at the thorough breakdown.

</comment><comment><USER10> Let's hope some Sony engineer drops an anonymous archive online to try the CD features.

<comment><USER11> If anybody's even still got it. There is a _lot_ of missing stuff from that era of game development and earlier.

<comment><USER10> You never know what's stacking dust in peoples houses. A CD isn't something hard to take home or forget.

That said the system feels like a slightly pimped SNES (mosty the embedded ram in the cartridge), so there's not a lot to expect from it.

<comment><USER11> There were SNES carts with embedded RAM, AFAIK. It's hard to find an exhaustive list of SNES cart models like you can with NES carts (which definitely had RAM expanders), but IIRC many Super FX carts had their own embedded RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm surprised replacing the electrolytics wasn't the first thing he did. If you have a 30 year old piece of technology that isn't working, it's almost definitely the caps.

This is why so many console recapping services exist online.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if I should replace the electrolytics on my SEGA Master System. Everything works on it in standard mode, but a few games are glitchy in 60Hz and controls are sometimes very laggy in either. I would expect something more extreme, though.</comment></comment>


Hydraulic power in London - <AUTHOR> http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/h/hydraulic_power_in_london/ <comment><USER2> The delightful accumulator tower north of Tower Bridge (Royal Mint St) was demolished at the start of last year -- to make room for some exclusive, majestic luxury apartments. _spit_

Photo (not mine) of the doomed building here: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybertect/10944119093](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybertect/10944119093)</comment>


Synthesis of a Vocal Sound from a 3,000 year old Mummy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56316-y <comment><AUTHOR> The actual sound file, which is just a vowel sound ("ehh"), is below.

[https://static- content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...](https://static- content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-019-56316-y/MediaObjects/41598_2019_56316_MOESM2_ESM.wav)</comment>


On the dangers of Intel's frequency scaling - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequency-scaling/ <comment><USER2> This is unfortunate. It doesn't seem like any participant here is doing anything wrong in isolation-- Intel is running each core at the highest frequency it can to avoid meltdown, and the compiler is just using the instructions that are available-- but the net effect of them together is suboptimal.

I wonder if this can be solved by overprovisioning cooling for the chips. Does the dynamic frequency scaling kick in based on core temperature? Otherwise you might have to just do experiments to see how many cores to use to maximize the aggregate throughput.

<comment><USER3> Ok so what happens when I hop on a GCE 1 core VM and hammer AVX512 in a loop. Do I drop the entire box perf by half?</comment></comment>


The Voice of Casablanca - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/morocco-faradjallah-attarazat-addahabia-habibi-funk-album-review/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting that in Israel there's a big revival of Arabic music interpreted by 2nd 3rd generation Israelites, (who grow up with this music at home but had no other exposure in media, because of the complete dominance and mostly enforced Eastern European culture.)

The difference is that it's not a fusion of western and Arabic style, rather sort of traditional and popular Arabic music covered authentically, with a contemporary production quality, if I can say that.

Here's a great example:

Dhub Utfatar - Dudu Tassa& The Kuwaitis

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=ihKhPRt_lUE](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ihKhPRt_lUE)

From an album by Dudu Tassa which his own covers of Iraqi classics is getting very positive reviews from listeners familiar with the originals.</comment>


What happened to GE's stock price in 1988? - <AUTHOR> http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chdet=656366400000&chddm=379230&q=NYSE:GE&ntsp=0

<comment><USER2> Looks to me like there's a typo in the input data somewhere -- probably an extra digit accidentally got entered in the "# of shares outstanding on January 1st" field.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks like for exactly that year they split, and then returned to their previous level once the year ended.

Why did they do that?</comment>


Project Silk - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/01/project-silk/

<comment><USER2> Will this cause improvements that were reported by the Google Inbox devs (reported here, not sure if reported on Bugzilla)?

</comment><comment><USER3> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8967918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8967918)

</comment><comment><USER4> But what about Amazon Silk? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk)

<comment><USER5> Yes, I have to think they won't be happy about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a repost from barely even a week ago....</comment>


Ask HN: What would it take to build a cpu from scratch - <AUTHOR> Lets say you had unlimited money and motivation, what would it take to build a modern cpu from scratch?  Is the knowledge and techniques needed to manufacture a cpu widely available, or are there trade secrets and things you would need to reinvent?  What about building something simpler like the Intel 4004, what sort of equipment would be needed? <comment><USER2> Here's a video on making your own transistor. [http://hackaday.com/2010/05/13/transistor-fabrication-so- sim...](http://hackaday.com/2010/05/13/transistor-fabrication-so-simple-a- child-can-do-it/)

Here's an link on having a custom chip made: [http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how- much...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it- cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made)

getting chip done cheap: [http://www.planetanalog.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id...](http://www.planetanalog.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id=559519)

computer built with transisters: [https://hackaday.io/project/665-4-bit- computer-built-from-di...](https://hackaday.io/project/665-4-bit-computer- built-from-discrete-transistors)

IC built from scratch: [http://hackaday.com/2010/03/10/jeri-makes-integrated- circuit...](http://hackaday.com/2010/03/10/jeri-makes-integrated-circuits/)

or with unlimited money buy one of these: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_integrated_circuit_man...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_integrated_circuit_manufacturers)

<comment><USER3> Regarding the transistor one, great comment by Tachikoma that really gets to the key issues:

"Hydrofluoric acid... 1000 degree oven... a child can do it..."

Lol. Yeah, I encourage using 3rd-party fabs on visually-inspectable processes for the individual components for a reason. Doing it by hand at transistor level can _friggin kill you_. Still neat stuff to learn, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's actually a combination of public knowledge and trade secrets. The public knowledge comes from what the chip-makers themselves describe in conferences, trade journals, etc. Those would get you really far in design, implementation, and verification. There are also trade secrets for optimizing both digital and analog components. They stay trade secrets for the obvious reason of slowing competition but also to reduce odds of patent suits given about everything you can think of will get patented in this field. Especially micro-architecture tricks within CPU's.

You can get much of the knowledge you need from books, CPU specs, academic papers, open-source CPU's in industry, and so on. The standard cell model is the easiest with the highest performers being full-custom designs. There are plenty of successful designs in former with good performance, though. So, that's you're best bet.

Here's a GPL one used in embedded (esp space) applications for you to start with that has good performance and extremely-high configurability:

[http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon3](http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon3)

Recent one for open ISA:

[https://github.com/ucb-bar/rocket](https://github.com/ucb-bar/rocket)

Lots of interesting things might be done with asynchronous logic that's not as explored and patented compared to synchronous techniques. The cutting-edge stuff is using it more and more. Whole chips have been done that way that were easier to fab right the first time plus with energy and performance benefits.

[http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/asap/](http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/asap/)

[http://www.achronix.com/technology/picopipe.html](http://www.achronix.com/technology/picopipe.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor)

</comment><comment><USER4> Define scratch.

Are you starting from beach sand, or do you have a fab and raw materials? There was an interesting video that showed what you had to do to make a pencil "from scratch".

<comment><USER5> The essay "I, Pencil" is what you're referring to. [http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)

The big surprise line is that there's no one on earth who knows how to make a pencil. (It therefore serves as testimony in favor of free enterprise and against the idea of a centrally planned economy.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Petzold's book "Code" explains how to build a simple CPU using macroscopic parts.

You could build a CPU with a copy of the book and a big box of transistors, wires, breadboards etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> The basics would be a very good start. Here's an educational book that helps you along in creating a computer out of NAND gates: [http://www.nand2tetris.org/book.php](http://www.nand2tetris.org/book.php)

I'm still working through the book, but I've learned a ton.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you did EE you had to write an entire CPU. It was implemented on an FPGA. It does not take too long. You can do it overnight or a few all nighters. It wasn't do complicated: a 2 or 3 stage pipeline, front end decoder, an PC counter, Registers etc. I don't think we did a MMU. Obviously it was trivial, but a good learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't speak to modern CPU design (Define modern!), but a 4004 would take more persistence than skill. When I was in school for EE, designing/building parts of a CPU like memory or adders was part of the lab and not considered a big deal. I actually had a friend who built his own CPU from logic gates when he was still in high school.

<comment><USER10> What would it take to build the 4004 at the size Intel first built it (Small)?

<comment><USER9> Assloads of cash

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Buy an FPGA and have loads of fun :)

Implement your own hardware, make a compiler for your own CPU , memory controller, and so on...

VHDL/Verilog and KIT goes a long way. I would vouch for de0 nano from altera.

</comment><comment><USER12> As part of a computer engineering degree, I made a fairly complex CPU (and also a GPU) on an FPGA. Also made a CPU out of NAND gates.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have heard a large amount of the cost would be in testing.</comment>


U.S. lawmakers unveil bold $100B plan to remake NSF - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-lawmakers-unveil-bold-100-billion-plan-remake-nsf <comment><USER2> Amazing step forward it seems, but not without it's issues.

I'm cautiously optimistic, but we need to see a finalized version of this bill before we get excited or disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who was often distracted from grad school research to work on grant applications this is great news. I would caution against making the NSF more like DARPA though. DARPA definitely breathes down your neck asking for monthly updates that hinders research/ideas that take longer to develop.

Federal research funding should be directed towards developing big, long-term ideas rather than short-term research tech companies can and do focus on.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not optimistic about an anti-science administration remaking the NSF

<comment><USER5> This is a proposed bill by 2 US senators. I'll worry about that if it passes Congress and the president has to decide whether to veto it (his 2020 budget proposal cut NSF's budget by 6-7%).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Many academic leaders are praising the legislation, which was spearheaded by the Senate's top Democrat, Chuck Schumer (NY), and co-sponsored by Senator Todd Young (R–IN) [...]_

The real news, I'd say.

<comment><USER7> The entire point of the Congress is compromise.

Whenever I see joint legislation like this it gives me hope that despite our hyper partisan climate, there is at least some collaboration still happening.

<comment><USER8> Me too, though I'm still stinging a bit from Bayh-Dole. Sometimes reaching across the aisle is a great way to produce something awful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I honestly like the sound of a technology directorate. I'd love to see some basic research into new computing technology, based on topological insulators or optics.</comment>


Brisk Table launches free record-keeping app for hospitality businesses - <AUTHOR> https://blog.briskcloudware.com/2020/07/free-covid-19-record-keeping-app-for.html <comment><AUTHOR> Brisk Table have launched a free record-keeping and contact tracing app for hospitality businesses to easily and securely collect customer contact details through a check-in form or through a QR code.</comment>


(Opinion)Android device is owned by Google Services and I don't like it anymore - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/Jd0AAGsG

<comment><USER3> So, the gist of this is that you use a product where you don't like any of the key features (Now, Play Music more recently Fit and Offline Youtube are the only things I use apart from Phone Calls - they are literally why I have an Android device), but then are annoyed that those headline features run without asking?

Even though they use negligible resources etc?

It's hard to understand this point of view - if you don't like Android, use a different OS? If you do like Android, but not the main features, just use a ROM with these disabled…

<comment><AUTHOR> >So, the gist of this is that you use a product where you don't like any of the key features

No, perhaps you got the wrong idea. The gist is that Google Services are running despite of opt-out (Google Now), being geographically unavailable (Music Key) or being installed (Fit).

>they are literally why I have an Android device

You could have an Android device for myriad of reasons. But why bother with the option for opt out then if the services will run disregarding that ? Imagine a desktop OS running all kinds of services and software disregarding you use them or not. Would that be a good practice ?

>Even though they use negligible resources etc

This is debatable, but most of technical Android users will share their observations with Google Services running havoc from time to time using battery with funny wake locks, a quick search on-line can bring this to the table.

>It's hard to understand this point of view - if you don't like Android, use a different OS

I like Android, as I've mentioned being an user for 5 years. What I lately stopped liking is that Google Service are using more and more resources - <USER2> if I don't use certain parts of it. Call it sloppy coding or product decision, it's bad. I cannot take their Android app development tips about performance and being a good citizen on the platform seriously, if they don't care about it in their own products. Same goes for design guidelines, but that's another topic.

>just use a ROM with these disabled

That was also addressed. Why give a company incentive for sloppy coding, by having to waste own time on the own device for something that wasn't on there at the time of purchase ? Even if you dive in the disabling of Services, it cause problems in the future (Services update automatically) and I'm left with broken support in apps.

Google Services were introduced as a good fix for update issues, but they need to behave responsibly with this kind of power.</comment></comment>


NHTSA proposes rule that cars must talk to each other with 2-4 year plan - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/13/technology/nhtsa-vehicle-to-vehicle-communication-rule/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_tech_pool <comment><AUTHOR> As an armchair observer of the driverless car trend, it seems that a regulation like this is what is needed to bring driverless car tech mainstream super fast, as fast as seatbelts perhaps.

<comment><USER2> The cars have to work under the assumptions that they can't hear all the other cars, and that the information they receive may not be true. By the time they successfully handle both cases, the data won't be very useful to them.</comment></comment>


Automated coding test for front-end developers? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for an automated coding test for front-end developers.
Before we[1] bring developers on-site for an interview we like to make sure they have some real coding skills.  In the past we've used HackerRank, which has automated coding tests, but the problems (and languages) are not really appropriate for what a front-end developer does.  I want to see them manipulate the DOM, do some CSS, ideally do some AJAX.
Is there a service or site that solves this problem?  What do other companies in a similar situation do?
Bonus points if the site itself has a nice design, so people with design skills will take us seriously.
[1] http://BeakerNotebook.com, part of http://TwoSigma.com <comment><USER2> Have a look at [http://www.testdome.com](http://www.testdome.com)

We have approached creating our content to be as work-relevant as possible. Our front-end questions address all the areas you mentioned.

Disclaimer: I'm co-founder of TestDome.</comment>


Lessons learned from using Docker Swarm mode in production - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bugsnag.com/container-orchestration-with-docker-swarm-mode <comment><USER2> I am kind of surprised with negativity about Docker and Swarm. Both of them but UX first and technology second. This is the correct approach to get adoption (and also the reason why they are popular). Getting started with Docker and Swarm is really really simple and it's very hard to dislike simple things. Compared to that mesos and openstack and other tech stacks like that are garaguntan and imo have very bad UX.

<comment><USER3> Consider that they have different target audiences.

Docker itself is mostly targeted as a tool for _developers_ : you, the developer, _dockerize_ your application, resulting in a container-image. Sure, that container-image then has to get _deployed_ by someone (who isn't necessarily you), but the reason it's getting deployed at all is that a developer, at some point, made a decision to use Docker as part of the development process. Everyone else has to just deal with that.

Docker Swarm, meanwhile, is _infrastructure_ , pure and simple. Developers don't touch it; ops people do. And ops people have very different opinions on what makes for a good piece of software than developers do. "Good UX" comes second to things like "stable" and "low overhead" and "predictable failure modes" and "configurable from a central source of truth."

<comment><USER4> In big companies ops trumps devs, and it's correct because they develop for 6-12 months and then operate that sw for 6 or 12 years. Been there, saw that (a mobile phone operator). So if ops says that docker is no-no for deployment, the dev has to work with another technology or convince them that everybody is going to benefit from it.

Startups begin as small companies and small companies have a single team that decide how to develop and deploy. Usually developers deploy and take care of production too. What's convenient for development often trumps what's convenient for production, at least for the first months or years.

<comment><USER3> You're presuming that the same company develops and deploys the software. My company runs many third-party Docker container-images in production—precisely because a Docker container-image is the only format that software comes in.

<comment><USER4> I've seen ops accepting to run a couple of services on Windows and Linux at a time they were all HP-UX and Solaris. There were no good alternatives for those services so ops were not happy but had to learn how to operate those servers. Can I suppose you went through the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a broken record lately on here... Nomad is really awesome for avoiding configuration hell and having to manage multiple services for container orchestration. It's a single binary and very very easy to setup and run. I actually prefer it to Swarm but YMMV.

It uses Consul under the hood and has so far been bulletproof. (They all have their drawbacks / idiosyncrasies).

[https://www.nomadproject.io/](https://www.nomadproject.io/)

<comment><USER6> The one feature that to me seems to be essential but appears to be missing from all these container orchestrators is the ability to tie a remote volume (Ceph/Gluster/Lustre/etc) to a container so that if a container is scheduled to run on a certain node, the volume will automatically be mounted on the same node.

It seems from the mailing list that at least Nomad will have that at some point, but I have not seen much talk about it from Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.

<comment><AUTHOR> we tried using EFS for shared storage but quickly depleted our I/O bursting credits and our throughput dropped to a grinding halt, because our app's worklaod is both disk write and read intensive. No solutions yet

<comment><USER7> If you need more performance than EFS for your shared filesystem storage, you could give our ObjectiveFS ([https://objectivefs.com](https://objectivefs.com)) a try. We see significantly higher read/write performance, especially for smaller files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great write up, thanks for sharing the lessons learned.

I wonder if the open questions about instance management are solved by the "Docker for AWS" beta.

We are entering the commodity phase for orchestration software.

Blogs and HN comments are full of success stories on Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos, Nomad and ECS.

There are also a few warnings, like the routing issue in this review, but it's simply a matter of time before those get sorted.

What's really going on here is that we are all learning how to handle complexities of distributed systems in the cloud. These new foundations means we can run more sophisticated apps easier and more reliably.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nothing whose version ends in "-rc4" is used in "production". You're using it in a very hot beta test.

<comment><AUTHOR> We ran RC4 in production and we're running 1.12.1GA in production right now as well. We have been making money while running this and serving live customer traffic so we consider it production :)

<comment><USER10> I hope you have a plan for your paying users when it breaks in production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, you should try kubernetes. The experience is pretty much the same and the feature set is much more mature.

<comment><USER12> My experience with Kubernetes is limited, so take all this with a grain of salt. I've been using the integrated swarm since beta.

The new integrated swarm is a real game-changer in that it is much simpler to use compared to other solutions. With swarm, it's simply:

        docker swarm init
        docker swarm join --token <blah> <blah:2377>

That being said, I found that Kubernetes offers more granularity in the level of control over the cluster. That's not something that __I__ need necessarily, though obviously YMMV.

<comment><USER13> I've had the same great, simple experience with Flynn. The terminal commands you give are barely different from Flynn's. And I like Flynn's capabilities better, at least for now. They've already figured out the routing fabric (unlike Docker, per the article) and they have a great redundant DB capability, sorely missing from other PaaSes, even k8s.

I have no doubt that docker will _eventually_ catch up though.

<comment><USER12> That's cool. I've never looked at Flynn, but you've motivated me to give it a look!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The big takeaway for me is that first impressions matter. Although the bulk of the post is about hard-earned knowledge and workarounds for completely unreliable features, getting a proof of concept in twenty minutes sealed the deal.

</comment><comment><USER15> While we're on the topic can anyone recommend a system for rolling out (Java) applications across server farms that doesn't use containers? We have a bunch of shell scripts that are pretty horrible.

We could containerize, but we dont need that right now.

<comment><USER16> Ansible. It isn't perfect, but is far better than shell scripts for application deployment.

<comment><USER17> This is what I use. Other players include Puppet, Salt, and Chef

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _This might be a wishlist item (since we don't find ourselves doing it > frequently enough to merit an automated solution), but it would be very nice > to be able to simply bake a new AMI, the completion of which would trigger a > job that could swap out instances one or several at a time, such that we > would be able to perform zero-downtime upgrades automatically. This can > still be done, but right now it's by hand._

BOSH[0] does rolling deploys, with canaries, out of the box.

At Pivotal we completely upgrade Pivotal Web Services to the latest Cloud Foundry within about a day of it releasing. PWS is our dogfooding the hard way: with a flagship platform that some of our customers have sue-you-to-dust- if-it-fails support contracts for.

Thousands of apps, tens of thousands of containers, thousands of VMS.

None of whom know that we restarted the entire infrastructure beneath them.

Disclosure: I guess that to the degree that Docker Inc realises that platforms are where the money is, my employers at Pivotal are competitors. But BOSH is still a fit for what you want.

[0] [http://bosh.io/](http://bosh.io/)

<comment><USER8> I respectfully disagree.

When running on AWS you want CloudFormation controlling an AutoScaling Group for this.

<comment><USER18> OK, for disposable units, it will make sense. I'm less comfortable with entrusting highly stateful services to AWS alone.

As a footnote, BOSH works on AWS, OpenStack, vSphere, Azure, GCP and there are experimental CPIs for RackHD and Photon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As long as your willing to re-architect your app so that workers pull web requests from a queue rather than expecting to just... serve traffic normally.

Or did I misunderstand that section?

<comment><AUTHOR> Incorrect - that's what we're running currently but as soon as the routing mesh issues are resolved you can start running apps that listen on ports too

<comment><USER20> Docker have been copping some flack recently for releasing things that seem rushed and incomplete (the routing mesh being a good example) - doesn't it worry you that you're using a Release Candidate in Production? It seems risky considering their official releases are still pretty buggy.</comment></comment></comment>


Onfim - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim <comment><USER2> The page sort of underplays the importance of these artifacts. Bark notes are one of the few primary sources for study and reconstruction of the language of that time—as in, what little is known, we greatly owe to these notes. Meanwhile, afaik there are like a handful or two of places where notes were found, and the total number of notes is on the order of a thousand-and- something, often in ruinous state: if the letters are even discerned, still cracks in the notes sometimes interfere with the scratches of the writing. Children's learning notes are uniquely helpful because they lay out some of linguistic features right there: e.g. the alphabet. (It's possible that Onfim's are the only such notes—dunno for sure but I remember Zaliznyak saying they were a pleasant surprise.)

Novgorod Republic was a Slavic state of its own, and IIRC the Novgorod dialect was one of the main dialects of Old East Slavic, informing the later differences between northern and southern dialects.

<comment><USER3> _underplays the importance of these artifacts_

That's a problem with Wikipedia articles. Historical and social topics tend toward beige deserts of insight. The neutral point of view discourages attempts towards writing bearing intellectual synthesis and insight.

Don't get me wrong, I love Wikipedia. It's rather Wikipedia is a dull read. Duller than it's sources typically and regularly duller than what a quick Google turns up.

Wikipedia is perhaps a minimum viable HN submission. But it doesn't bring expert opinion with it. Wikipedia articles are often 100x ideas with 0.01 execution.

<comment><USER4> I disagree, I appreciate the just-the-facts approach which leads to brevity and clarity. It may not lead to a complete understanding (such as the info provided by your parent comment), but chances are that following links in Wikipedia will find a lot of the same info.

I feel a lot of science writing appeals to emotion and has to overplay their subject matter to get readers, burying many interesting or relevant details deep in a long article. Wikipedia may be dry, but it avoids that.

Of course, different people like different styles, so some people learn better or enjoy narrative and story, others want dry facts. But it's not a problem with Wikipedia.

<comment><USER3> My critique of Wikipedia is as a primary source on Hacker News. This article is an example of 100x idea : 0.01 execution. It's little more than the official correct answer on the back side of a Trivial Pursuit card despite not being that kind of fact. It's the kind of fact where expertise provides context to an evocative subject.

To be clear, what is missing is not a treatment amenable to popular taste. What is missing is passionate geeking out by a person who's devoted months, years, or a lifetime to a slightly larger understanding of the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These kind of things capture my mind so much. It's so easy imagining being that boy drawing something, compared to many other great-men historical artefacts.

A similar, but much more recent example, is the graffitiesque engraving by (the young) Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in a stone pillar at the his local cathedral [0]/[1] in the end of the 1700's.

[0]: [https://old.liu.se/berzelius?l=sv](https://old.liu.se/berzelius?l=sv) [1]: [https://www.facebook.com/linkopingsdomkyrka/photos/a.4234860...](https://www.facebook.com/linkopingsdomkyrka/photos/a.423486007694250/894686973907482/?type=1&theater)

<comment><USER6> See also the Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia (apparently, the Byzantine Emperors liked to keep an elite guard of Viking warriors, known today as the Varangian Guard):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_So...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_Sophia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love how universal children's drawings are. when you're small, everyone looks like long legs with a head on top

<comment><USER8> And hands and feet with explicit fingers and toes that are large, too, at some point.

I've always wondered what the developmental psych is behind that. Maybe their perspective of adults?

<comment><USER9> I listened to a podcast that interviewed Barbara Tversky, a psychology researcher specializing in spatial reasoning.

She mentioned at one point an explanation of this is that your sensory/motor neurons are not evenly mapped across the surface of your body. That is, your brain devotes far more sensory neurons to your fingers than say, your back. The "resolution" is higher in certain important areas, and this might explain why kids' drawings almost universally have giant hands with fingers, and giant heads, and de-emphasize things like the torso.

<comment><USER10> That might be overthinking it. Hands are (infamously) tricky to draw. It's a natural mistake when drawing to make the things you spend most of your time drawing the largest. It's embarrassingly easy to spend a lot of time drawing someone's hand or face and zoom out to realize you've gotten it completely out of proportion. To me that's quite enough to explain why hands are often drawn out of proportion.

<comment><USER11> If it was hard to write it should be hard to read?

<comment><USER10> If you're insulting my writing, we'd both be better off if you were more explicit (I have to admit that second sentence is a bit of a mess). Otherwise I have no idea what you're on about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty similar to the graffiti on St. Sophia of Kyiv walls

[https://www.kaggle.com/yoctoman/graffiti-st-sophia- cathedral...](https://www.kaggle.com/yoctoman/graffiti-st-sophia-cathedral- kyiv)

<comment><USER13> These graffiti are in Ukrainian. I can read some of them without problem.

119: Се писал Манеш (This written by Manesh)

142: Господи поможи рабу своєму Івану Пере (Lord, help your slave Ivan Pere)

145: Господи поможи рабу своєму Константину і ізбав нас от всякої біди (Lord, help your slave Constantin and save us from everything bad).

<comment><USER14> Technically, they are not in Ukrainian (well, not in what we call Ukrainian today), but in Old Slavonic.

> Господи

Which is actually written as г҃и (but without a visible titlo in case of 142).

> всякої біди

More like "вьсѧкоѧ бѣдѣ" (but I'm not sure, that's just how it looks like to me)

But, yeah, anyway, most people who know modern Slavic languages that use Cyrillic scripts should be able to comprehend some of the writings. While the languages have evolved, lots of words (or, at least, their stems) are recognizable. Although there's always a danger of false cognates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite the artist.

<comment><USER16> I find it amusing that he couldn't manage to stay aligned with the edge of the "paper" on the left

(Also, pitchfork hands)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This sort of underlines how important writing is, even "trivial" writing. Want to help more people? Want to live forever? Write stuff down.

</comment><comment><USER18> At first I was going to laugh at Onfim's inconsistent amount of fingers, but I realize just now that he probably couldn't count very well.

</comment><comment><USER19> What is the rider doing to the figure on the ground? [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/%D0%9E%D...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/%D0%9E%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BC_%28200%29.gif)

<comment><USER20> This: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon#/media/File:S.George_\(Novgorod,_mid._14_c,_GTG\).jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems people in old Novgorod didn't speak a Slavic language, but something they picked up from the Varangians.

<comment><USER22> I thought the text looked almost legible. (I.e. Germanic.) But it was just an illusion because scratching in birch naturally will look rune like. Apparently Onfim used Cyrillic letters, but spoke a Germanic language. So my wrong guess was still sort of right but by accident. :-D

Edit:

but it _is_ Slavic?!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect)

Can you please say where you found it was a Varangian dialect?

Edit 2:

[https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus- vara...](https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-varangians- prince-oleg)

Maybe an (incorrect) assumption because "Vikings" ruled Rus for a long time.

<comment><USER23> It is Slavic. As a Russian speaker I can understand some phrases of the text.

<comment><USER12> oh really. Which phrases you understand?

<comment><USER24> The writing is crooked and childish, partly owing to the fact that it's scratched with a stylus on tree bark, but to anyone who reads Russian or another adjacent Slavic language, pieces of the text are immediately comprehensible. It's even easier to make progress if you've seen Church Slavonic writing and text abbreviations, which are ubiquitous on religious imagery present in basically every Eastern Orthodox church throughout Russia and other countries with Orthodox churches.

The "I am a beast" letter says the following:

(text box) ПОКОЛОNО ѿ ОNΘΗМА КО ДАNΗЛѢ (free-floating) Ѧ ЗВѢРЕ

After accounting for the mixture of letters from the modern Russian alphabet, the Greek alphabet, antiquated Slavic letters like Ѣ and Ѧ, and the unfamiliar orthographic abbreviation ѿ (which is a tau Τ planted on top of an omega ω), the first inscriptions say, using modernized orthography and syntax, "поклон от онфима к даниле" and "я зверь," or "greetings from Onfim to Danilo" and "I am a beast."

The remaining inscriptions are an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER12> so where are russian words?

What you wrote is mix of Cyrrilic alphabet, the Greek alphabet, early Cyrillic/Glagolitic letters like Ѣ and Ѧ.

And why you wrote Ѧ ЗВѢР'Е', while on the picture it's Ѧ ЗВѢРЄ? Does Russian alphabet have Є letter?

<comment><USER14> > Does Russian alphabet have Є letter?

This should resolve your confusion: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Ye#Old_Slavonic.2C_O...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Ye#Old_Slavonic.2C_Old_East_Slavic)

I believe, U+0415 ("E") is a valid character to use there. Sadly, there's no way to denote that the text is in Old Slavonic and should use different script so this "E" would be rendered visually similar to "Є".

While Unicode code points typically correspond to graphemes, that's not always true. Similar issues exist with Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, as Unicode (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Graphemes_vers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Graphemes_versus_glyphs) \- it has an example with Latin small letter "a")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting but Eastern orthodoxy is boring...</comment>