αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/ape.html

by Pneumaticat • 6 years ago

671 286 6 years ago

justine.storage.googleapis.com

schoen• 6 years ago

The source code equivalent of this is a polyglot program:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)

Apparently people on Stack Exchange have been working together on a single polyglot program for four years and have gotten a single codebase up to validity in nearly 300 languages.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/102370/add-a-la...

Edit: also, Yusuke Endoh is a master at this art form

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

and has even written a book about it

http://uguu.org/words/2015_10_01.html

which I would still love to have available in English!

chrisdalke• 6 years ago

+1 for the mention of Endoh's work -- Yusuke Endoh's YouTube channel with many of his quines is really fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/c/YusukeEndoh/videos

A quine that prints itself as scrolling text in an AVI file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMlJy5He-Tk

A self-similar quine that behaves like a fractal zooming out infinitely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J7u2G52scc

A quine with source code that contains sheet music to a Bach song in comments and plays it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OryXKUgRVOg

logicallee• 6 years ago

Apparently people on Stack Exchange have been working together on a single polyglot program for four years and have gotten a single codebase up to validity in nearly 300 languages.

Wow, what a link. I submitted it just now as a separate HN post using your phrasing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24257630

jaclaz• 6 years ago

Classical examples of chimera/polyglots are:

PoC||GTFO International Journal of Proof-of-Concept or ... https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

Corkami: https://github.com/corkami

Rebelgecko2• 6 years ago

This is incredible and also very frightening. Has anyone tried to distribute one of these binaries in a real context?

userbinator3• 6 years ago

I think the closest to that would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar and I've seen ones that were both valid shell scripts and Windows batch files. Of course, the actual polyglot part is tiny and serves only to direct execution to continue with the appropriate platform-specific binary.

bigiain• 6 years ago

How about most issues of PoC||GTFO?

From issue 2:

"A careful reader may have noticed that a bootable OS image was hidden in the last issue of PoC‖GTFO,as one of the files in its dual PDF/ZIP structure (if you haven’t, download and extract it now!). This time, though, let’s hide it in plain sight. You will find by running ‘qemu-system-i386 -fda pocorgtfo02.pdf’ that the PDF file you are reading is also a bootable disk image."

IgorPartola• 6 years ago

This is perverse in the best way possible.

armitron• 6 years ago

No, this is perverse in the worst way possible.

It's incompatible with modern debuggers.

It's incompatible with shared libraries.

It's limited to a feature-poor "unified" API (that might as well be seen as a crippled VM).

It's complex in both interface and implementation. The bad aspects of Unix made even worse.

The justifications make no sense whatsoever. It wants to do future-proofing but invents an adhoc "VM" with hardcoded OS interfaces that are meant to be treated as private. For macOS, I doubt binaries will work in the next release or two, nevermind 10 years.

It's a fun toy or troll, but if you're looking at this for serious work I suggest you steer well clear.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

It's incompatible with modern debuggers.

Any debugger that can't debug this binary is broken and should be treated as such.

DoreenMichele3• 6 years ago

Why does the title font look pseudo Greek?

PCChris• 6 years ago

Because that's the name of the post/"format"...

I started a project which called Cosmopolitan which implements the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε format. I chose the name because I like the idea of having the freedom to write software without restrictions that transcends traditional boundaries.

knolax3• 6 years ago

I hate it when people do that. It looks tacky and it's super annoying when they (mis)use a script you can read.

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

"My Big Fat GRSSK Wedding" was a big offender there.

dorkwood• 6 years ago

It also plays havoc with screen readers! I feel sorry for any blind people scrolling down the home page at the moment.

DoreenMichele3• 6 years ago

It's especially annoying if you took two quarters of Greek like 35 years ago and recognize it just well enough to have trouble seeing it as weird English lettering.

nvader• 6 years ago

aCtmaLLg rdRtaBLe exeCmtaBLe

DoreenMichele3• 6 years ago

Yeah.

My eyesight is terrible and my recollection of Greek is lousy, but I was going "Aren't those Ms?? Isn't that a D?"

Thank you for that.

voltagex_• 6 years ago

Similar to how the Super Mario Bros ROM has managed to survive all these years without needing a GitHub issue tracker.

Well yeah, but that might be more a function of it existing before git and github.

https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Super_Mario_Bros._glitches

krackers2• 6 years ago

Can someone eli5 how this works? I sort of get that you can create one big binary file with all the necessary file headers for each platform and the actual x86 code being shared, but what about stuff like syscalls? The post also lost me when it started mentioning the need for shell scripts and emulators.

Mathnerd314• 6 years ago

He talks about it a bit as the "magic numbers". You can see the big table: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/c91b3c50068224929c...

I guess there's also syscall emulation stubs for Windows but since he only supports "stdio and sockets" maybe not.

reallyeli• 6 years ago

The author is a "she": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_Tunney

ChrisSD8• 6 years ago

You can read more in the libc source. The readme gives an overview.

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/libc

tbodt• 6 years ago

It turns out to be impossible to create a file that is simultaneously a valid ELF and Windows PE. The solution to this is to make a file that is simultaneously a valid PE and shell script, and have the shell script overwrite the start of the file with an ELF header and re-exec itself.

krackers2• 6 years ago

Ah thank you. And I presume the qemu part is optional, used only when the target platform is non x86?

StavrosK3• 6 years ago

That means you can't copy the executable after executing once and have it run on Windows, correct?

ocdtrekkie• 6 years ago

Is hosting web URLs at storage.googleapis.com a thing? After finding a persistent phishing campaign using it, I ended up restricting it from being loaded in the web browser in my environment. (Embedded images from it, like on blog.google, still work.)

This is the first time I've seen a legitimate website with one of these URLs.

sdan• 6 years ago

Haha yeah, I have the same question... normally Google Buckets are hosted under storage.googleapis.com/[your bucket] not under a subdomain...

renewiltord• 6 years ago

To get https don't you have to put a paid load balancer in front of it? At that point it's both more effort and costly than Netlify.

tzot2• 6 years ago

Perhaps it's not that costly (or you can circumvent costs) if you work at Google, like Justine does IIUC.

modeless6• 6 years ago

I believe that scripts without a shebang line cannot be executed by execve. They will only run if the shell sees them before the kernel does. It's an annoying limitation of this approach and it wasn't clear to me whether this technique includes a workaround for this. Also the push for code signing everywhere is going to make this harder in the future as well. (I heard a rumor that the workaround to run unsigned executables on macOS no longer works when running on Apple Silicon.) Otherwise, I love it!

My approach was slightly different; I created a polyglot script header you can paste at the beginning of a C source file to make it essentially a C script which is just-in-time compiled when it is executed. Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac as long as a C compiler is installed. https://gist.github.com/jdarpinian/6860ddfd92b5b458a20ab6055...

ChrisSD8• 6 years ago

C compiler is installed

It's a great idea but that part is a big ask for any Windows user who doesn't develop desktop applications.

modeless6• 6 years ago

True. I'm imagining this as useful mostly for build scripts or other developer tools. To the extent that it's useful at all.

int_19h3• 6 years ago

On Windows, though, there's C# compiler out of the box on every OS since Vista. And C# has a bunch of rarely-used syntax for things like raw pointers, that can work on more or less the same level as C, and even look pretty similar. It might be possible to do something with that.

JoshTriplett2• 6 years ago

I believe that scripts without a shebang line cannot be executed by execve.

This was once true on old systems, but current ones (including Linux) have native support for scripts starting with #!. See fs/binfmt_script.c in Linux, which has existed for several decades.

modeless6• 6 years ago

I'm talking about scripts without the shebang (#!) line.

FeepingCreature3• 6 years ago

Yes, that is the aforementioned shebang line.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

the workaround to run unsigned executables

Was there ever a workaround for this? I thought you just ran them…

modeless6• 6 years ago

Downloaded unsigned executables will not run by default on macOS and the error dialog provides no affordance to override this. You just have to know that if you option-click and select "Open", which is always identical to double-clicking except in this special case, you get a different dialog that allows you to override the block.

jart10• 6 years ago

Author here. I considered doing that. Then I learned about things like how MSVC 2017 would wrap the main() function of C programs with telemetry. The push for code signing, retpoline, aslr, etc. worries me too, from a software freedom standpoint, and the same goes for how difficult it's become to build native software from scratch, thanks to the shift from autotools to a whole new set of competitors like bazel, cmake, ninja, gin, etc. Secure boot is another red flag. By 2018 it almost felt like we were entering a world in which, for all practical purposes, we couldn't share native software easily in either source or binary forms. If PC platforms ever do manage to get consumers to accept the iPhone App Store restriction model, it'll likely stay that way. Best way to prevent that from happening is to use Actually Portable Executable. The more people who continue to depend directly on canonical long-standing stock platform abis, the more impossible it becomes for platforms to re-imagine them every few years. I'll take UNIX+WIN32 over things like XUL any day, since I don't want to fall into the JS dev trap of having to rewrite my app with each passing moon.

Also note that the execve() shebang thing is a one-time cost. The printf statement in the header will overwrite the first 64-bytes of the executable, the first time it's invoked, so it becomes a canonical ELF or Mach-O executable for subsequent invocations. The one-time cost is also cheap. The shell script only needs three system calls (open, write, and execve) to patch the binary appropriately. The generation of this header is also abstracted by the GNU ld script, which made it easy for me to encode the ELF header relocations as octal printf codes!

modeless6• 6 years ago

The printf statement in the header will overwrite the first 64-bytes of the executable

This is cool but also a problem for subsequent sharing of the executable. I thought about doing this as well but decided against having the file mutate into a version that wouldn't work on other systems.

Again, super cool project! I love this kind of thing.

2bitencryption• 6 years ago

The printf statement in the header will overwrite the first 64-bytes of the executable, the first time it's invoked

Is this a problem for anti-virus/other security measures? My understanding is, executables that manipulate themselves is something any security software will look for.

Though perhaps the answer is "don't rely upon security software to police your system; do it yourself"

throwaway894345• 6 years ago

the same goes for how difficult it's become to build native software from scratch, thanks to the shift from autotools to a whole new set of competitors like bazel, cmake, ninja, gin, etc.

What's the issue specifically? I've never had a good Autotools experience (granted, I wouldn't reach for Bazel or CMake either--the whole build tool ecosystem is in desperate need of innovation IMO and probably the nicest things are Nix or Guix).

nitrogen• 6 years ago

Then I learned about things like how MSVC 2017 would wrap the main() function of C programs with telemetry.

Could you provide a link to learn more? This seems bad.

zelly4• 6 years ago

from a software freedom standpoint, and the same goes for how difficult it's become to build native software from scratch, thanks to the shift from autotools to a whole new set of competitors like bazel, cmake, ninja, gin, etc.

Every single one of those programs you listed is FOSS licensed.

Autotools was originally developed as a compatibility layer to compile code on proprietary UNIXes.

notaplumber• 6 years ago

I believe the best chance we have of doing that, is by gluing together the binary interfaces that've already achieved a decades-long consensus, and ignoring the APIs.

Yeah, this isn't going to fly for OpenBSD, which doesn't have ABI stability, programs are expected to use libc. Program for the API, not the ABI. The author is clever, but misguided.

ChrisSD8• 6 years ago

I believe the claim is that there exists a stable subset:

Bell System Five is the umbrella term we use to describe Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X which all have nearly-identical application binary interfaces that stood the test of time, having definitions nearly the same as those of AT&T back in the 1980's.

However, only Linux guarantees stability at this level so I too am very sceptical that this will "stand the test of time". And of course this completely excludes Windows.

FeepingCreature3• 6 years ago

Isn't Windows also known for being committed to both API and ABI stability?

trasz2• 6 years ago

FreeBSD guarantees syscall ABI stability too.

angrygoat• 6 years ago

Interesting point about the x86-64 patents expiring and the possibility of third parties making chips for that instruction set. Is it just so big and clunky that the energy is with ARM / RISC-V?

ekianjo• 6 years ago

there are more recent patents involving extensions on x86_64 which are essential for more modern processors, I believe.

sgerenser2• 6 years ago

Yes, being x64 compatible but not supporting SSE4 or AVX is basically useless.

snarfy• 6 years ago

Back when all you had was minicom dialing a BBS, there was a chicken and egg problem where you needed uudecode to decode any executable you downloaded. If you did not have uudecode you were stuck. If you are unfamiliar, unencoding a file allows you to send binary data through text transmission.

Then a clever version of a DOS .COM file was posted which implemented uudecode, but it only used x86 instructions that were also ASCII characters. You could copy/paste between the --cut here-- lines into a file, save it as uudecode.com, and then get your other binaries like pkzip.

userbinator3• 6 years ago

but it only used x86 instructions that were also ASCII characters

That was a somewhat common approach back then. It's hard to find references to that technique now, but here's something I did find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312562

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

This is still quite useful when working on constrained shellcode, specifically the kind of shellcode you'd enter through a text input field.

zwegner• 6 years ago

There's also this compiler (with accompanying paper/video), that compiles C89 to x86 with the output executable restricted even further, to only printable ASCII bytes: http://tom7.org/abc/

GuB-422• 6 years ago

Another common one is the EICAR anti-virus test file.

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

It is a com executable that prints EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE! It recognized by most virus scanners.

latchkey• 6 years ago

I remember that. Then in the early 90's it was .sit and .hqx on a Mac.

ourcat• 6 years ago

Not forgetting NNTP Usenet binaries and the evolution from UUEncoded files to YEnc-oded files.

Truly magical days.

aasasd2• 6 years ago

I ran into that conundrum just recently with emulating old MacOS for gaming purposes. Software on abandonware sites is distributed as images for a proprietary program. :thonk:

InafuSabi• 6 years ago

Great memories you brought back. Minicom times were so simple, the BBS sysop dialed upr2.clu.net for us so we had a nice UUCP connection and got our mails pushed out.

I had to undergo the same chicken egg situation with uudecode

lostmyoldone• 6 years ago

Hmm, I might have used that, or at least something very similar. Don't know exactly why, but then, it was a while ago...

fouc• 6 years ago

Finally, you can produce a single cross-platform executable in C.

we've basically reconfigured the stock compiler on Linux so it outputs binaries that'll run on MacOS, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD too. They also boot on bare metal

edgyquant• 6 years ago

But it doesn't work on Linux?

ComputerGuru3• 6 years ago

It does for me. Make sure to execute via/prefix with sh, you can’t invoke it directly even after chmod +x

alganet• 6 years ago

Oh, I love a great retrospecification work. This is awesome.

naikrovek2• 6 years ago

I bet the name of this thing sends screen readers straight into the abyss.

"Need cred or accessibility? Nerd cred! Screw you if your eyes don't work!"

stavros2• 6 years ago

Or people who can read Greek. I can only imagine how Russians feel towards the frequent misuse of their alphabet.

quickthrower2• 6 years ago

"Actually Portable Executable"

Incase anyone searches on hn.aloglia in future!

0823498723498722• 6 years ago

"Όντως φορητό εκτελέσιμο" ?

NKosmatos• 6 years ago

IMHO a better meaning would be "Πραγματικά φορητό εκτελέσιμο", but yours is also pretty close ;-) Having being involved with translation of software into Greek it's the small differences that bring the meaning as close to real usage as possible and not the transliteration that makes a great translation.

frio• 6 years ago

... or uses a screenreader.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

As expected, macOS Big Sur refuses to run the resulting executable:

  $ ./program.com 
  -bash: ./program.com: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
  $ sh ./program.com
  ./program.com: ./program.com: cannot execute binary file

It's quite finicky in what it will accept ;)

comex• 6 years ago

On my Big Sur machine, `bash ./hello.com` works the first time, but then it overwrites itself(!) with a Mach-O, so further executions have to be `./hello.com`.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

Yup, that matches my experience running the example (I also had to put it in $PATH for the command -v in the header to work). I built program.com myself and it seems to be missing the DOS header for some reason, so it just doesn't execute at all…I'd file a bug, but I have no idea if she is interested in supporting it or if I can provide any useful information besides "it doesn't work".

celrod• 6 years ago

the x86_64 patents should expire this year. Apple could have probably made their own x86 chip without paying royalties. The free/open architecture that we've always dreamed of, might turn out to be the one we're already using.

I've never seen anyone mention this before. Is this really in the cards? Or are all the extensions patented as well, so that a hypothetical Apple (or whoever else takes it on) x86 wouldn't be able to use x86 without licensing it?

rkv• 6 years ago

https://www.blopeur.com/2020/04/08/Intel-x86-patent-never-en...

zozbot234• 6 years ago

The TL;DR seems to be that if you restrict yourself to implementing an ISA from 20 years ago, your chip can indeed be patent free, but that isn't going to run modern software - maybe not even modern x86 32-bit software!

jart10• 6 years ago

Transmeta tried it and failed

Author has clearly not heard about NexGen! They implemented a RISC architecture that code morphed x86 i586 design. They were then bought out by AMD who shortly thereafter adopted the design for their own architecture. Then Intel had no choice but to adopt NexGen architecture as well lool. We all use NexGen Architecture now. The most famous microprocessor no one's heard of. I only know because NexGen was based in Milpitas and that's where I live, so Milpitas Architecture is like hometown pride.

As for patents, Xed is tiny (only ~4kb) and it allows us to distinguish the which instructions belong to which microarchitectures, e.g. k8, sse3, sse4, avx. That gives us a clear accurate picture of the intellectual property rolloff, thereby enabling a fabless chip or emulator to simply ignore the encumbered parts of the encoding space. The tradeoff is you can't patent troll Intel (due to Xed being licensed Apache 2.0) and I think that's fair.

whereistimbo• 6 years ago

2026. Six years to go.

rkangel2• 6 years ago

Even if the patent on the instruction set expired, that's only half the battle (if that). When you licence ARM you're getting both the instruction set design AND the implementation.

simias6• 6 years ago

AFAIK Apple mostly only licenses the ISA and then runs a completely custom implementation, so in this case that's not relevant.

I think the sibling comment is more accurate: while the core of the ISA might effectively be public domain soon, there are plenty of extensions in common use that aren't. If you implement a custom x86 design without those a lot of software won't be able to run or it will run with significantly worse performance.

tgb2• 6 years ago

So ISAs are patentable? Even if you reimplement them from scratch, it's covered? Can anyone ELI5 that in the light of the Oracle vs Google "APIs are not copyrightable" battle? Seems like an ISA (sans implementation) is comparable to an API, so is the difference patents versus copyright? Are APIs patentable?

a13692099932• 6 years ago

I haven't investigated it in detail personally, but my understanding is that Intel has or had troll patents on the obvious (and therefore not legitimately patentable) way to go about implementing various x86 features. So if you reimplement it from scratch, the way you naturally go about implementing it will just happen to match 'Intel's' supposed 'inventions' which they have patents on. (Eg, I think they had a patent on register renaming at one point.)

bdowling• 6 years ago

Or are all the extensions patented as well

Yes. So, if you want to reimplement a CPU from 1999, you will probably be fine without any kind of license. If you want to add features or use new methods, however, you may run into infringement issues.

axegon_2• 6 years ago

People... Please stop using foreign alphabets like that! It's a nightmare for those of us who know the alphabets. It took me a good 20 seconds to read the title. And it's magnitudes worse when someone uses cyrillic for instance and it's native to me.

danilocesar• 6 years ago

not to mention people using screen readers...

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

This is a massive issue on Twitter when people use "vanity" display names as well.

blindm2• 6 years ago

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/118149/can-screen-rea...

ben_w• 6 years ago

Agreed. It’s not even a particularly good example of the style, given υ could have been used instead of μ, ο instead of δ.

amelius• 6 years ago

And use lambda and pi.

mastazi4• 6 years ago

"actmally rdrtable execmtable" that's more or less how it reads to someone who knows the Greek alphabet :-D

(I might be partially wrong because I've studied Greek many years ago and my memory is not good)

hvenev• 6 years ago

It's somehow worse than "toys ya us".

hellectronic• 6 years ago

Γορ μεμορι ις στιλλ γκουτ

Gerrish• 6 years ago

actmally r-thee-ta-blae execm-ta-blae

numerobis• 6 years ago

Really confusing that they use mu when upsilon is available...

StavrosK3• 6 years ago

That's an English p, not a Greek ρ.

nurettin2• 6 years ago

Foreign alphabet transliteration drama thread under the best hacking-grade article in years. Thanks, hn.

learnstats2• 6 years ago

Yep - if you want people to focus on what you actually wrote, don't do this. I couldn't get past the title.

p_l2• 6 years ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Shorel3• 6 years ago

Because it is not transliteration, at least in any correct sense of the word.

dang2• 6 years ago

If you (i.e. anyone) really wants to be helpful about things like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Downweighting off-topic subthreads that get upvoted to the top is one of the best interventions we can do for discussion quality. We do that whenever we see them, but we don't see them all.

There are a couple of users who email us regularly when they see things like that. This is one of the highest-leverage contributions anybody can make to HN, so we'd certainly appreciate hearing from more such users. Actually I only found out about this subthread because of such an email.

Supercilious complaints, on the other hand, just make the thread even worse. Please don't do that. The thing where some HN commenters use HN to posture over the rest of HN is tedious, and in poor taste. Let's just work together to make it better, to the extent possible.

danShumway2• 6 years ago

IMO this is not in the same category as people complaining about a website requiring Javascript or using the wrong font. It's an unreadable title for screenreaders. And unlike Javascript or CSS styling or trackers, needing a screenreader is not a personal choice, or a limitation that people can turn on and off.

I think it's fair to point out when a good article makes itself inaccessible due to a trivially correctable problem.

I'm not even saying that the author can't make the joke they're trying to make, but even a small title change like "αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (actually portable executable)" would basically solve the entire problem without sacrificing any of the meaning behind what the author wants to convey with their misuse of Unicode.

It is a good article, which is why the pointless pushback over accessibility is so frustrating. There would be no engineering effort or large compromise required to make the title of the submission readable. It wouldn't suddenly make the article bad, or not worth reading. It feels like it's being exclusionary just for the sake of being exclusionary.

boudin• 6 years ago

It's not great for accessibility neither.

yreg• 6 years ago

OPs compaints fall into the accessibility bucket. The site makes itself less accessible since some people (greek alphabet users) have trouble consuming the content.

pedroaraujo• 6 years ago

Not to mention it is terrible for searching.

pgtan• 6 years ago

Thanks a lot! It annoys me extremely every time I have to read such mess.

d__k• 6 years ago

1) актуалли портабле екзекутабле

2) αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

What is easier to comprehend?

marksomnian2• 6 years ago

3) Actually Portable Executable

There's a better option.

shakna• 6 years ago

My screenreader can pronounce Greek. Which means the first is far easier to comprehend.

zhenyakovalyov• 6 years ago

My contribution to your #1

астиа11у рогтаЬ1е ехеситаЬ1е

simias6• 6 years ago

I could ready #1 immediately and thought "hey, I can actually read faux-cyrillic a lot better that I thought" and then I realized that you used a semi-proper transliteration.

Case in point I guess.

grishka• 6 years ago

The 1) is simply transliteration of English into Russian/Cyrillic and it does look weird to me but it is easier to read than 2).

(Russian is my native language)

loxs2• 6 years ago

You need to see when me and my friends start chatting in English written in Cyrillic. It's epic and utterly frustrating for the first hours, then becomes like native ;)

axegon_2• 6 years ago

One of the other things that bugs the hell out of me is when in the late 90's during the boom of irc, here in Bulgaria everyone was writing in Bulgarian with latin script. And to make matters worse:

4 = ch

6 = sh

And some people keep on doing it. I can understand it when you have to switch between scripts every 2 seconds but most commonly that isn't the case and you are either having a conversation with someone or leaving it for later when you have time or when you feel like it...

lazyasciiart• 6 years ago

I'm really pleased to hear this, because I've kept scratch notes in english text written in the greek alphabet for decades, and every so often I wondered if it was more readable than I expected if someone who read greek happened to glance at it :) (It's not secrets - more like a habit of stream-of-consciousness writing while listening to someone talk, that would probably look bizarre).

murbard2• 6 years ago

It's cringe, but I don't find it hard to read, anymore than knowning numbers precludes me from reading "4c7u411y p0274813 3x3cu74813".

ehnto• 6 years ago

I guess I'm not as l33t as I thought I was, because I couldn't read that without having to figure out what each number was supposed to be individually.

vikramkr• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what precluded me from reading that, but I don't think not knowing numbers would have helped me figure out that portable is p0274813 without context clues. Might need a more readily parseable example there.

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

Fwiw, it’s significantly easier to read on the actual site than on Hacker News. Something about the font.

HN’s title should probably be changed.

blooalien• 6 years ago

It's horrible to some of us that don't know the foreign alphabet too. While I had no problem reading the title it still makes my eyes bleed and my brain hurt to see it. ;)

afarviral• 6 years ago

I personally think its kind of creative, and looks cool. Though the author might like to be aware of the discontent it causes certain individuals. This is mean but it comes accross as though you are just wanting to show off you knowledge of a different alphabet...a complainbrag. Seems unlikely you'd take the effort to bother but thats my perception.

Razengan2• 6 years ago

This is mean but it comes accross as though you are just wanting to show off you knowledge of a different alphabet

There are people whose native languages are in those alphabets.

Quick: How would you pronounce СССР?

Hint: It would be completely wrong, because it's not English.

Razengan2• 6 years ago

That is actually one of my hinderances in learning Russian, because I keep reading the identical Cyrillic letters as English.

jonathanstrange• 6 years ago

Ι ⅼіκе іτ аɴԁ аⅼѡауѕ геϲоⅿⅿеɴԁ τо реорⅼе τо τаκе ⅿоге аԁⅴаɴτаɡе оғ ⋃ɴіϲоԁе.

knolax3• 6 years ago

Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴀʀᴇ ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ᴅᴇᴅɪᴄᴀᴛᴇᴅ ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀs ғᴏʀ sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs

Shorel3• 6 years ago

Не ми харесба.

miki123211• 6 years ago

Also a nightmare for screen reader users, who can't read the title at all and need to click the article.

talamown• 6 years ago

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For me, it always takes some time to see it as face and still hard to understand what emotion this face presents.

airstrike• 6 years ago

shrug

OOPMan2• 6 years ago

Never mind the fact that it's just super pretentious

whiddershins• 6 years ago

I hear your pain.

I wish this wasn’t the top voted comment.

Things that are subversive, clever, mind bending, tongue in cheek ... tend to get criticized around these parts for not being simple, plain, and literal.

remram2• 6 years ago

It's not even that, why does this headline deserve to stick out from others on the HN front page? What's the next step, make your title bold or twenty lines long for an unfair click advantage?

𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞

I'd rather see submissions stand out for their content.

IE6• 6 years ago

I guess for HN OP should have refactored the title to be "Actually Portable Executable" but I thought the whole point of the title was that it's something we can interpret that has been "written in something else" which is fitting given what the article discusses? It's a direct copy/paste from the source and I don't think OP was trying to stand out in any unfair way.

piyush_soni• 6 years ago

FWIW, the title stands out, but at least for me it's not working in the favor of the article. Unless it was for the content ("actually portable executable"), I would actually stay away from articles with such strange fonts.

phlummox2• 6 years ago

What's the next step, make your title bold or twenty lines long for an unfair click advantage?

Hm. Not a bad idea.

Files away as an Unethical LifeHack

You can expect a bold, Cyrillic, ZALGO!͇̺̫̞̤͇̼͋̆̂-fied post about my next paper shortly.

dang2• 6 years ago

People have of course been pulling such tricks for years. We don't allow it generally, and in fact are pretty strict about that. But all such rules have exceptions.

The quality of this post is so high that it doesn't feel right to override any aspect of what the author created, including quirks like the title. There may be a superficial similarity to garden-variety title pimping, but as someone who bathes in spam every day I can tell you how rarely such gimmicks come attached to first-class feats of hacking prowess. Respect for content requires looking closely enough to detect truly unusual cases, pick them out of the mud, and give them a special place.

Another principle applies here too: it's good for readers to have to work a little (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). If a title like that appears at #1 on HN, there are two possibilities: (1) this is dreck that somehow managed to evade all of the standard moderation; or (2) something's happening here and you don't know what it is. Actually, either possibility is rather interesting, and it's not hard for any HN reader to do the bit of work to figure it out. Even if it takes 20 seconds.

ljm• 6 years ago

I've learned some degree of Russian (and certainly enough to roughly read Greek) and even that's enough for me to have to take a few passes to parse it as English.

The only boundary this transcends is readability and is ironically not portable at all.

edit for readability:

тхе онлу боундары тхис трансцендс ис реадабилиты анд ис ироницаллы нот портабле ат алл.

Koshkin3• 6 years ago

И вхолехеартедлы агрее.

blindm2• 6 years ago

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/118149/can-screen-rea...

lnanek23• 6 years ago

It's a bad thing to do for attention, like hacker elite speak using numbers would be, but is that why the author did that? Did you read the article? It's about a file that can be read by all Unix, Windows, and MacOS. Part of how that happens is one OS mistakes some other text for executable code while the other OS doesn't.

Therefore the title of the article written in multiple language letters and somewhat readable in one language despite that is a good introduction.

scotu• 6 years ago

I would argue you could write an informative title, and reserve the problematic text for the article text, where you can explain why you are doing that. Just like the comment you were responding to I can't imagine screen reader users are super stoked by how "appropriate" this title is

pinkfoot• 6 years ago

Really? You didn't find it clever enough to muster a little smile?

The things that bother some people.

danShumway2• 6 years ago

To that note, would it be possible to change the title of the submission to "Actually Portable Executable"?

It would help people focus more on the content of the article, make the submission more accessible for non-English & blind readers, and feel less spammy and exploitative, all at the same time.

I doubt the author of this article or the submitter wants this to be the top thing people are discussing about their article anyway. And that is the title -- if you go to the library source code[0], its graphical banner is using the normal English letters. The unicode weirdness here is only being used typographically, the author isn't claiming that their title should be pronounced differently or something.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jart/cosmopolitan/46750430...

mattbee• 6 years ago

Bsuthuncs has a lot to answer for.

zelly4• 6 years ago

It's also not accessible whatsoever to screen readers.

iamthemalto• 6 years ago

What's the program being used to go through the machine code in the gif?

jcul• 6 years ago

I'm not sure exactly what debugger is used, but gdb dashboard can be set up in a similar way. It's just stepping through instructions and viewing the registers and some memory regions.

https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

Though any debugger should be able to give the same information (including just plain gdb).

jart10• 6 years ago

The program being used is https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/emulator.com with the -t flag passed for the tui gui. Please note that I've only tested it on Linux and it's only intended for static executables, not shared objects.

normanmatrix• 6 years ago

This girl is a true visionary engineer

Aeolun• 6 years ago

C programmers:

here’s how simple it is: (two lines of arcane gcc invocation)

I just don’t see how you can call that simple.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

I suggest you never look under the hood of the compiler frontend ;)

kokooo• 6 years ago

This is cool but this is from the source code...

- License is GPL2

- If you want to be able to distribute binaries in binary only form, then please send $1,000 to Justine Tunney jtunney@gmail.com on PayPal, for a license lasting 1 year.

If the goal of this project is to have something similar to cross platform web development this is the wrong way to go about it imo.

pjmlp• 6 years ago

I imagine that Justin Tunney has bills to pay.

Long term we will be back to the shareware days and we will have the anti-GPL task force to thank for.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

(Justine)

jart10• 6 years ago

Author here. I'm sorry you feel that way. If you'd rather it be licensed ISC/MIT/BSD/etc. then please encourage your favorite member of FAANG or some other huge company to acquire Actually Portable Executable and then make it freely available under those terms, for the sake of benevolence and commitment to serving public interest. I come included.

simias6• 6 years ago

It's a very cool hack and technically interesting, but I can't say that I share the author's "serious" rationale:

So I think it's really the best of times to be optimistic about systems engineering. We agree more on sharing things in common than we ever have. There are still outliers like the plans coming out of Apple and Microsoft we hear about in the news, where they've sought to pivot PCs towards ARM.

[...]

If a microprocessor architecture consensus finally exists, then I believe we should be focusing on building better tools that help software developers benefit from it

Considering ARM an outlier in a world were smartphones outnumber desktop PCs and where the x86 stronghold is under attack from several sides seems like a strange take to me.

Also, there's more to portability than managing to run a hello world from the same binary on Windows and Linux. I used to use FreeBSD a lot on the desktop, which usually involved using Linux binary compatibility to run Linux closed source binaries that weren't available on FreeBSD. It worked generally pretty well, but it wasn't without friction at times even though it was coded by very smart people and between two systems that were overall very similar.

These "compatibility" applications often end up as 2nd class citizen that don't integrate well with native applications, or at least not as easily. See Wine for instance, managing to run Windows applications on un*x is a huge undertaking.

One of the reasons why I love working with a lot of these old unsexy technologies, is that I want any software work I'm involved in to stand the test of time with minimal toil. Similar to how the Super Mario Bros ROM has managed to survive all these years without needing a GitHub issue tracker.

I love emulation, so I definitely understand where this is coming from, but I don't really see what that has to do with the rest. In particular if you're willing to go down the emulation route, why do you care about everybody running x86? Super Mario Bros was not written to run on a Celeron. Besides CPU emulation for something like a NES video game is only a tiny part of the story, you also have to emulate the GPU, sound chip etc...

I feel like there's a mishmash of interesting ideas in there, but it's a bit confusing to understand.

jdmichal• 6 years ago

Not to mention this one:

I couldn't resist the temptation of making it a reality, since it means that high-performance native code can be almost as pain-free as web apps.
Please note this is intended for people who don't care about desktop GUIs, and just want stdio and sockets without devops toil.

My understanding was that people are using web-apps and electron precisely to provide cross-platform GUIs. I feel like this is really missing the forest for the mountains...

jart10• 6 years ago

Author here. The intention behind the post is actually very simple. I want to be able to write stdio socket programs that run at native speed, and share them with my friends online. I don't want to have conversations like here's how you install steel bank common lisp and compile tensorflow and remove the toolbar that oracle bundled in the installer. I'm also not concerned about running software on telephones since doing so requires obtaining authorization from Google and Apple beforehand.

Before I built Actually Portable Executable, PCs behaved de facto similar to mobile development restrictions, where for example if you want to build for Apple you download XCode, and if you want to build for Windows you have to download MSVC. But it thankfully has never been a hard requirement for creating first class native programs. It simply required the will to ignore official tooling and encode binaries the hard way that directly talk to canonical stock kernel abis, so that we don't need things like jenkins to compile release binaries n times for the same microprocessor architecture.

I had enough free time to do it. I've also shared a tool that makes it easier for everyone else to do it too. Enjoy!

TimSchumann• 6 years ago

I wish more people had this mentality. Thanks for taking the time to share, both the content of the post, and posting here about your rationale.

lnanek23• 6 years ago

I'm also not concerned about running software on telephones since doing so requires obtaining authorization from Google

That's not actually true. Fortnite has an APK download many users download straight from the internet and run on their Android phones for example. There's no requirement to run Google authorized software as long as you are willing to check a checkbox in the phone settings.

simias6• 6 years ago

I hope I didn't come off as too negative, I think it's a really cool hack.

I guess the people I could see myself sharing binaries with are either too clueless to use the command line or savvy enough that installing a compiler/interpreter is not an issue.

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

What's the deal with the uncommon font of the post title? I saw it here on HN too and was wondering if it's just aestetics, of if there's something else.

zelly4• 6 years ago

The serious solution is to use Python, JVM or whatever interpreter is available on the device and use that to load/create the correct executable.

als0• 6 years ago

If a microprocessor architecture consensus finally exists

I don't think that's a good goal to have. Without competing architectures we'll enter a microprocessor dark age. Although the glory days of Alpha and IA64 are over, plenty of that experience was used to bolster today's instruction sets. Diversity is a good thing.

simias6• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I buy that, you can have a lot of competition on the same ISA. After all on the desktop/server x86 has been king for a while, and on embedded architectures ARM has all but taken over the competition. Yet there's significant competition on both fronts.

Meanwhile attempts at creating new ISAs over the past couple of decades has been met with relatively little success, or only in very specific niches. Itanium being an obvious example. People talk about RISC V a lot but in practice it's not really making a dent into the ARM market share yet.

These days competition appears to come mostly from companies reimplementing and extending existing ISAs with better performance.

dwrodri• 6 years ago

I would just like to add in that RISC-V is still a lot of talk because there are still some important standards that really need closer attention before we start mass-producing server CPUs. Specifically, the Platform-Level Interrupt Controller[1] and the Vector Instructions[2]. The former is super-important because we now know interrupts/traps can be used in Spectre/Meltdown style attacks, especially if your chip has something like a DSP/iGPU, which can be used in covert side channel attacks. The latter will be important for the same reason that SSE/AVX is important today.

Just my opinion, but SiFive has been a huge driving force in even giving RISC-V a shot at breaking into server space. Most other companies (Google, Nvidia, Western Digital) have invested in RISC-V with the apparent intent of focusing on building microcontrollers/embedded processors. AFAIK, there's only one player who is investing in building RISC-V server-class CPUs and that's SiFive.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken! I've been following RISC-V pretty closely for the last year or so and there's quite a lot to catch up on.

1 = https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec 2 = https://github.com/riscv/riscv-plic-spec

jart10• 6 years ago

Microarchitectures are the new architectures. The game these days is all about finding a way to make your code go fast on the latest and greatest AVX thing, while still maintaining compatibility for old machines via CPUID. Getting those 10x speedups (sometimes 50x w/ things like crc32 pclmul) is much more fun than caring about things like s390x (i.e. doing IBM's work for them), SH (i.e. folks emulating Sega Saturn on FPGAs for fun), MIPS (hacked home routers), etc.

hattori31• 6 years ago

Writing things like this reminds me of edgy teenager on the internet of early 2000s.

jfax• 6 years ago

I associate it with naive teenagehood, but I don't associate it with 'edginess'.

greyhair• 6 years ago

Is this actually portable x86 executable?

Bayart• 6 years ago

Actmallg rdrtable ekecmatable ?

Igorvelky• 6 years ago

inadvertently revealed NSA backdoor from 1997

Please note that zsh has a minor backwards compatibility glitch with Thompson Shell so try sh hello.com rather than ./hello.com.

gargalatas• 6 years ago

So here we go for the greek alphabet: - μ stands for m - δ stands for th - τ stands for t - ε stands for e

So I read this like: actmally pthrtable execmtable.

vpribish• 6 years ago

cute title; but not searchable, machine translatable, or screen-reader friendly.

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

Google found it in the first couple results: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=actually%20portable%20...

kreas• 6 years ago

As a person that speaks Greek, this hurts my delicate and beautiful soul. Please don't do that again.

dracodoc• 6 years ago

It's funny. In China there used to be a time when high school students like to use rarely used Chinese characters, which are only similar to the intentional character in shape instead of meaning.

They think that's cool. This style was called brain damaged style. https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/63502990

什庅bai湜焱暒妏？举些瑺鼡哋唎ふ。du 什庅湜悩残軆？举些瑺鼡哋唎ふ。什庅湜zhi悱炷蓅？举些瑺鼡哋唎ふ。莓兲想埝祢巳宬儰⒈种漝惯

Aachen• 6 years ago

To be clear, "intentional" should be "intended" right? Had to read this a few times (I'm also a non-native speaker, I wonder if that makes it easier or harder for me to understand a text with meaning-altering typos/mistakes) but I think it must be this.

checkyoursudo• 6 years ago

Intentional and intended are both adjectives. They both mean intended. They are synonyms, so they can be used mostly interchangeably. However, one or the other may be conceptually more clear in various cases. As a native English speaker, intentional character is understandable to me. I likely would have written intended character, but I don't think that intentional here is clearly incorrect.

aasasd2• 6 years ago

30und5 c1053 70 13375p34k.

dwighttk• 6 years ago

actmally pdrtable execmtable?

sagebird• 6 years ago

What's the challenges involved in making a actually portable executable that is a compiler that can create actually portable executables. Why muck with getting a gcc running on windows or whatever if you don't have to? If you only mess with c once a year or so, getting compilers set up is a pain.

jart10• 6 years ago

Right now I'm solving the problem by only doing my dev work on Linux. That works fine for me, since the output binaries run on other platforms too. But I'd love to support more flexibility for more people! Not everyone is accustomed to doing their coding via an SSH terminal. So the challenge is getting more eyeballs on the Cosmo source code so we can add features and iron out the long tail of bugs.

Earlier this year, I somehow managed to successfully compile an x86_64-linux-gnu toolchain under MinGW. Using that, pretty much 90% of the Cosmopolitan built fine under Windows without needing a Linux VM (which actually goes faster than native WIN32 due to how Make+GCC assumes processes work). I've tried and failed several times to compile GCC from source on Mac.

But I think compiling GCC is just so hard, that I'd probably rather embed the GNU/Linux compiler binaries in the PKZIP embedded file structure of EMULATOR.COM, since that should create a GPL boundary that's kosher per the GPLv3 and GCC RTEv3 terms.

badrabbit• 6 years ago

You don't always need a shebang if it is marked as executable,is this a cosmetic conformity thing?

saagarjha17• 6 years ago

You need a shebang if you're going to execute it directly.

sgammon• 6 years ago

lol sick ️

αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

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