This week: 20 top links from Lobste.rs.

This Week on Lobste.rs

Trending topics: security vcs linux person zig

1. Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 person

submitted by lorddimwit — 263 points (+229 this week) — 6 comments

Margaret Hamilton, who led the Apollo software engineering team at MIT and died September 30 at 90, essentially invented the field by writing the code that got humans to the moon—and by insisting that software design deserved the same rigor as hardware engineering.

2. I got targeted: Trying to get your credentials via a git post-checkout hook security vcs

submitted by frankwiles — 129 points (+124 this week) — 39 comments

Someone created a fake project with a malicious git post-checkout hook, betting developers would clone it without inspecting the hook — which would then download and execute a remote binary. The attack is deceptively simple but effective because cloning is automatic for most engineers.

3. Zig 0.17.0 Release Notes zig

submitted by saccharin — 128 points (+98 this week) — 15 comments

The build system got a major overhaul with a new Build Server Protocol for faster incremental compilation, but the real news is the scope: 206 contributors, a native aarch64-openbsd CI pipeline, a faster ELF linker for SPARC, and support added for everything from Nintendo Switch to obscure architectures.

4. Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging programming

submitted by mtlynch — 126 points (+86 this week) — 50 comments

Software bloggers often bury their point under rambling setup and unexplained jargon — the fix is usually to kill the preamble and explain concepts inline rather than dumping readers into a maze of links.

5. Actual RFC1149 packet being auctioned networking

submitted by dsr — 94 points (+80 this week) — 10 comments

A physical packet from RFC 1149's famous 1990 April Fools' joke—the one about IP over avian carriers—actually got transmitted by pigeon over three miles in 2001 and is now up for auction at Christie's, complete with creases from the flight.

6. Email Self Hosters - what are you using? ask email

submitted by vetch — 86 points (+72 this week) — 80 comments

A thread full of real setups shows the mail-server paradox: OpenSMTPD + Dovecot + rspamd is the consensus winner for simplicity and reliability, yet nobody seems entirely happy — most complaints center on fighting Gmail's IP reputation gates and configuring spam filtering without greylisting delays (which now just wastes everyone's time anyway).

7. Why don’t more developers "use the platform"? web

submitted by nolan — 71 points (+70 this week) — 35 comments

The real friction isn't bad advice—it's that building from scratch feels better, and most people only learn platform APIs when pain forces them to. The irony: that's exactly how the people telling you to use platforms got good at it.

8. The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding practices vibecoding

submitted by guillego — 68 points (+67 this week) — 23 comments

The actual failure modes when you let an AI write your code: hallucinated APIs, cargo-culted patterns that happen to work once, and the slow erosion of understanding about what your own system does.

9. That Time I Worked With a Laptop Thief security

submitted by jeanthomas — 88 points (+66 this week) — 20 comments

A contractor walked out with six MacBooks, created fake repair tickets and forged FedEx labels to hide them—but registered them under his own name in Apple's system, which is how the author caught him.

10. Rust's derive often implies inline rust

submitted by yossarian — 69 points (+65 this week) — 15 comments

Derived trait implementations silently get #[inline] hints, which is fine for trivial cases but can bloat binary size when you're inlining large Debug implementations across deep error hierarchies—the uv project shrank its binary by 160KB by forcing #[inline(never)] on one Debug impl.

11. Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore compilers erlang gleam

submitted by novedevo — 135 points (+62 this week) — 19 comments

Gleam ditched Erlang source codegen for abstract forms, halving build times and fixing crash report line numbers—a pragmatic choice that avoids the maintenance burden of tracking BEAM bytecode changes across Erlang versions.

12. Janet on x32: 32-bit Pointers, 64-bit Speed, 25% Less RAM linux performance

submitted by veqq — 66 points (+61 this week) — 21 comments

x32 ABI cuts pointer size to 32 bits while keeping 64-bit instructions, giving Janet a 20% memory win on pointer-heavy workloads — but the feature is disabled by default on Debian and missing entirely from Arch, so most users never hear about it.

13. Waterfox 6.7.5 Adds a Built-in Feed Reader browsers release

submitted by chai — 63 points (+61 this week) — 20 comments

Waterfox built a full RSS system into the browser: feed manager, unread count, article saving, reader view. It's a deliberate bet that browsers should handle feeds natively instead of leaving that to read-it-later apps and algorithm-driven services.

14. Software developers are not okay philosophy

submitted by aloys — 104 points (+59 this week) — 81 comments

Developers aren't bailing on tech because coding got boring — they're leaving because the AI-as-savior narrative crashed into reality: same workload, fewer peers, and the loss of that absorbed state where you actually felt like you built something.

15. Iroh global content discovery distributed

submitted by sanqui — 66 points (+59 this week) — 10 comments

Iroh uses BitTorrent's Mainline DHT for content discovery instead of IPFS, leveraging its proven scalability (millisecond lookups, minimal per-node overhead) and adds a lightweight indexing layer to map between Mainline's IP addresses and Iroh's cryptographic identities.

16. The forgetful CPU (Linux on M4) hardware linux reversing

submitted by calvin — 64 points (+54 this week) — 1 comments

Starting Linux on M4 required reverse-engineering locked hardware: the RVBAR register couldn't be written, GXF was disabled, and a virtualization register triggered crashes until Apple unlocked it in a later iBoot version. The real monster was a CPU quirk where WFI instructions zero out registers in violation of the ARM64 spec, forcing a workaround using NOPs until the kernel gains a boot-time disable mechanism.

17. Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend nodejs

submitted by FedericoSchonborn — 59 points (+53 this week) — 48 comments

A pragmatic reassessment from someone who rode Deno from early enthusiasm to abandonment — Node's native TypeScript support, better file APIs, and actual reliability finally outweigh the friction of package management workarounds and the organizational decline that killed Deno's momentum.

18. Lobsters Interview with Sjamaan lisp

submitted by veqq — 57 points (+52 this week) — 6 comments

Peter Bex walks through his path from learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 to maintaining CHICKEN Scheme, explaining why he chose it over Scheme48 and Racket, and where Scheme's minimalist philosophy clashes with the need for solid standard libraries and numerical precision.

19. Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake vcs

submitted by mort — 79 points (+50 this week) — 70 comments

Switching Git's default hash from SHA-1 to SHA-256 will impose enormous costs on every developer worldwide for a threat that doesn't meaningfully exist in practice — the real attack vector requires the attacker to already control the repository, but that's rarely discussed in the migration arguments.

20. Calling a function in C without naming it c security

submitted by mrnossiom — 64 points (+49 this week) — 17 comments

A student bypasses an assignment's function-call restrictions by exploiting function pointer unions and leaked symbol offsets to invoke forbidden functions, then manually constructs writable-executable memory and hand-coded x86 syscalls to evade AST-based name checks.

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