Top all-time · #5549
Honeypot.net
Personal blog · honeypot.net · on HN as kstrausersecurityprogrammingculture
Honeypot.net is a personal blog at honeypot.net about security, programming and culture. Since 2014, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “I read Yann Esposito's blog”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link honeypot.net posts on privacy and security: a small mail server survival guide, a dispute over a Princeton GDPR/CCPA email study, a Flock surveillance opt-out, and device searches at US customs.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Extracting chaos from order
Most-linked posts?
- I read Yann Esposito's blog2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-22
- It was online for 3 seconds before getting a 404 request for /.git/config2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-17
- Anthropic's leaning in to the whole nanny state thing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-13
- One of Our Credit Card2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-13
- Commodore declared bankruptcy 25 years ago today2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-29
- /post/dealing-with-princetons-flawed-privacy-research/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-22
- Smart Progress Bars2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-04
What Hacker News says?
I archived these for posterity at https://honeypot.net/post/bing-is-censoring-tank-man-search-... because the previous thread got flagged.
Comment linking /post/bing-is-censoring-tank-man-search-results/
on “There are no results for tank man”Submitted Little League wants all your information as a story · 395 points
HN discussionNooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero. His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
Comment linking /2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
on “Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died”Submitted The Itanic Has Sunk as a story · 203 points
HN discussionAnd yet, in practice, it's true. I was getting about 600K requests to my Forgejo server a day from crawlers making idiotic queries: https://honeypot.net/2025/12/22/i-read-yann-espositos-blog.h... I just checked, and these many months later after installing Anubis, I'm getting about 14K requests per day. It's unreasonably effective at cutting crawler abuse. It should not be able to reduce my traffic by 98%, and yet i…
Comment linking /2025/12/22/i-read-yann-espositos-blog.html
on “Creepy Crawlies”Submitted It was online for 3 seconds before getting a 404 request for /.git/config as a story · 72 points
HN discussionDO NOT delete your Yahoo account! In their disclaimer when you delete it, they state: > "[...] we may allow other users to sign up for and use your current Yahoo! ID and profile names after your account has been deleted" Bummer if you forget that it was the password reset email for your Facebook account, huh? Instead of deleting your account, purge it of all data: https://honeypot.net/purge-your-yahoo-account/
Comment linking /purge-your-yahoo-account/
on “Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts”Submitted Opt Out of Hulu's New Binding Arbitration Clause as a story · 37 points
HN discussionI don’t hate Jira. I strongly dislike working with people who love it. From https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ : > A useful task manager will be somewhat opinionated. It will almost, but not quite, do what everyone wants, and will annoy everyone equally with the few things they think it does wrong. A tar pit of a task manager will claim to be everything to everyone after customization, meaning that a fe…
Comment linking /post/jira-is-a-code-smell/
on “I fucking hate Jira”Submitted Trying (and failing) to hack the Wall of Sheep (2022) as a story · 30 points
HN discussionAnd here's why: https://honeypot.net/2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-ove... LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as: Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible? A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people…
Comment linking /2026/10/09/what-really-killed-stack-overflow.html
on “StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month”Submitted I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program as a story · 17 points
HN discussionWhenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them. They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of…
Comment linking /2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html
on “Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy”Submitted Plex adding unskippable ads before and during movies playing off home server as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI ran it locally and it flat-out refused to discuss Tiananmen Square ‘88. The “thinking” clauses would display rationales like “the user is asking questions about sensitive political situations and I can’t answer that”. Here’s a copy and paste of the exact conversation: https://honeypot.net/2025/01/27/i-like-running-ollama-on.htm...
Comment linking /2025/01/27/i-like-running-ollama-on.html
on “Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models”Submitted Microsoft's VSCode based PG IDE is proprietary as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI registered https://honeypot.net/ almost 24 years ago. It was originally served off a Perl script on my Amiga, and evolved from one stack to another over the years. Now it’s generated by a script that does a “git pull; hugo; rsync” every five minutes. I add a new page in iA Writer on my iPad, use Working Copy to push it to my git repo, then wait a few minutes for it to show up on the web.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Slack was broadcasting hashed passwords for 5 years as a story · 6 points
HN discussionReally? I think it's worse than most headlines make it out to be. I wrote up some thoughts at https://honeypot.net/post/tripping-on-cracked-sidewalk/ , but the TLDR is you're allowing unknown parties to bridge their network with yours. That's one single mistake in the protocol or implementation away from all sorts of horrid failure modes.
Comment linking /post/tripping-on-cracked-sidewalk/
on “Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing”Submitted Commodore declared bankruptcy 25 years ago today as a story · 6 points
HN discussionConfluence supported Markdown (or was it HTML? It’s been a long time.). We wrote a lot of automation that would pull comments out of code, format them that way, and load them into Confluence. Voila! Documentation that’s always synced with production code. And then a point upgrade removed that support in favor of their own rich text format, so in an instant all our tooling died. We were not happy campers. I have othe…
Comment linking /post/jira-is-a-code-smell/
on “Atlassian products have been down for 4 days”Submitted To Log into the Teams as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI hacked up something like this for Apple Notes. It’s far from perfect, but at least it lets me type Markdown-style punctuation and get the expect results. Think of it like a crummy Vim mode sort of thing. https://honeypot.net/2024/01/17/making-notes-look.html
Comment linking /2024/01/17/making-notes-look.html
on “Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts”Submitted Language Server Protocol Launched a Golden Age of Editors as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI had some thoughts on Jira: https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
Comment linking /2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html
on “Pivotal Tracker will shut down”Submitted Surprise Eero Hardware End-of-Life as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've published them at https://dev.honeypot.net/kirk/keyboard-maestro if you're interested. Edit: That also turned into a new blog post at https://honeypot.net/post/making-notes-looks-like-markdown-e... . Thanks for the nudge! I've been trying to get into a cadence, but hadn't had anything to talk about recently.
Comment linking /post/making-notes-looks-like-markdown-editor-if-you-squint/
on “Why I Like Obsidian”Submitted Commodore declared bankruptcy 25 years ago today as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wrote “Jira Is a Code Smell”: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ Short version: Jira, in a vacuum, is neither great nor awful. It just is. But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for. That’s not universally true, I’m sure. However, it’s been my experience.
Comment linking /post/jira-is-a-code-smell/
on “I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)”Submitted One of Our Credit Card as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
