2161
How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
When Japan broke up its national railway in 1987, the new companies agreed on one thing to keep the same.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
2162
I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool
I set all of Vim's configuration options, and I still feel far from mastery. But I did learn that it used to be called Vi IMitation...
2163
2164
Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
Starting at Engine brought back the urge to prove myself quickly, and the difficulty of knowing what to change before I understood the context.
2165
The Self-Cancelling Subscription
When family TV show night became systems debugging night.
2166
A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)
I wrote a specification for a new terminal escape sequence: OSC 7501, the Program Status Protocol . It lets any program tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting on the user, finished, or failed, and why.
2167
2168
AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing
The AI boom is more likely a marker of the end of the 50-year digital boom than the start of a new wave of innovation.
2169
I stopped following the news
A personal reflection on the decision to stop following daily news and its impact on my well-being.
2170
Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
2171
Windows Server 2025 Runs Better on ARM
My personal website and blog
2172
Bubblewrap: A nimble way to prevent agents from accessing your .env files
Last week I wrote a thing about how to run Claude Code when you don’t trust Claude Code. I proposed the creation of a dedicated user account & standard unix access controls. The objective was to stop Claude from dancing through your .env files, eating your secrets. There are some usability problems with that guide- I…
2173
Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider
Against dependency cooldowns as a response to supply chain attacks
2174
I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs
I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.
2175
The Hierarchy of Money
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
2176
Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more
How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions.
2177
I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck
Archiving 104K files into tar.gz reduced I/O time by 43x and total processing time by 2.3x. The bottleneck was not disk speed, it was syscall overhead.
2178
PHP session.upload_progress heap UAF (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)
FINAL STATUS (2026-10-21): the CVE-2026-109618 / CVE-2026-109619 memory-corruption class shipped patches 2026-10-21. On the patch, that class is closed: the cached-pointer chain dies at the addref and the serialize-state path is a memory-safety bug, not code execution. Two session-handling flaws survive on…
2179
Tracing HTTP Requests with Go's net/HTTP/httptrace
net/http/httptrace has been in the standard library since Go 1.7 and most Go developers I talk to have never used it. It exposes hooks for the points in an outgoing HTTP request that you usually cannot see from outside the transport: DNS resolution, connection acquisition, TLS handshake, the moment bytes go on the…
2180
Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post
So, my latest post went viral. And with virality, you get a ton of comments that you must reply to. I don't want to reply in HN/Reddit/Whatever to prev...
2181
I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
2182
2183
TLS certificates for internal services done right
No self-signing headaches, no TLS erros.
2184
Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era
[This is a guest post by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] This is a good time for mathemat…
2185
To grieve, or not to grieve?
Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen befo…
2186
Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
I’ve been surprised by - and enjoy - one aspect of using large language models more than any other. They often put into words things I have long understood, but could not write down clearly. When that happens, it feels less like learning something new and more like recognition. A kind of “ok, yeah" moment.…
2187
Job loss and cortisone mania
On the morning of 18th August, I got invited at short notice into a 1:1 meeting by my manager, which was unusual . I think I knew what was coming, and I was right: The company is restructuring, and I’m being let go (among a lot of other people). I had time until lunch to say my goodbyes to my colleagues as I would be…
2188
Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch
Lotus Notes had encryption, rich text, and read receipts before email did. Why it still failed, and the dangers of starting software from scratch.
2189
Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk
what's a few systemd services in initramfs between friends?
2190
Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
Selling snake oil to the United States Congress is an ancient American craft, and the frontier artificial intelligence industry is currently attempting the most audacious hustle in modern corporate history.