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The Changelog
Personal blog · changelog.complete.orgsystemsculture
The Changelog is a personal blog at changelog.complete.org about systems and culture. Since 2008, 79 different Hacker News readers have linked it 153 times, most often “Count me as a systemd convert”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on Unix and Linux tools, Debian, systemd, filesystems, compression, Python 3 filename handling, and p2p and federated messaging. Commenters cite its posts as background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Count me as a systemd convert4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-04-21
- The Xz Issue Isn't About Open Source4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-04-05
- Easily Accessing All Your Stuff with a Zero-Trust Mesh VPN4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-04-14
- ARM is great, ARM is terrible, and so is RISC-V3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-10
- Consider Security First3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-03
- I introduced my 5yo and 2yo to startx and xmonad. They’re delighted.3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-06-21
- Pipe Issue Likely a Kernel Bug3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-20
- The Disaster of Python 33 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-11-21
- Roundup of Secure Messengers with Off-the-Grid Capabilities2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-01-19
- Update on the systemd issue2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-10-13
What Hacker News says?
<grin> There are a whole bunch of excited preschoolers out there running sl now, apparently, judging from the comments here: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/6359-a-proud-dad
Comment linking /archives/6359-a-proud-dad
on “I introduced my 5yo and 2yo to startx and xmonad. They’re delighted.”Submitted Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon as a story · 638 points
HN discussionHi Michael, Thanks for writing this. I wrote a response here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defen... The tl;dr version is I agree with you about some of the things you mention, but also feel like there's an element of personal preference for web-based tools showing through.
Comment linking /archives/9971-a-partial-defense-of-debian
on “Winding down my Debian involvement”Submitted I introduced my 5yo and 2yo to startx and xmonad. They’re delighted. as a story · 520 points
HN discussionSee this "Roundup of Secure Messengers with Off-The-Grid Capabilities (Distributed/Mesh Messengers)": https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10205-roundup-of-sec...
Comment linking /archives/10205-roundup-of-secure-messengers-with-off-the-grid-capabilities-distributed-mesh-messengers
on “Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access”Submitted Silent Data Corruption Is Real as a story · 319 points
HN discussionhttp://changelog.complete.org/archives/741-from-dell-a-uniqu... https://web.archive.org/web/20090201192037/http://junkbuster...
Comment linking /archives/741-from-dell-a-uniquely-terrible-experience
on “Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?”Submitted KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE as a story · 315 points
HN discussionTesting them all on -9 is perhaps not a fair comparison. For example, according to http://changelog.complete.org/archives/931-how-to-think-abou... , gzip -9 saved a tiny amount of space compared to gzip's default, but took significantly longer.
Comment linking /archives/931-how-to-think-about-compression-part-2
on “Xz”Submitted Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network as a story · 308 points
HN discussionYes, the new compression algorithms (BWT and LZ77-based) are slower and require a lot more memory than DEFLATE (*zip) in most cases. This guy did a not so rigorous analysis but it is mostly OK: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/931-how-to-think-abou... A little bird told me there's a better algorithm in speed/compression rate coming soon ;)
Comment linking /archives/931-how-to-think-about-compression-part-2
on “Xz”Submitted The Python Unicode Mess as a story · 284 points
HN discussionLast time I have seen data damage was about 2005, this was multiple SATA drives connected to a regular consumer motherboard running Linux (sorry, don't remember the brands). If I remember right, I think there was an 8-byte block damaged every few gigabyte transferred or so? So a very high number of damaged files given I had a few terabytes of data. I never found the cause, because I just switched to a completely dif…
Comment linking /archives/9769-silent-data-corruption-is-real
on “ntfs2btrfs: In-place conversion of NTFS filesystem to Btrfs”Submitted Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie as a story · 282 points
HN discussion> Of course, but most of this kind of corruption is trivial to recover from with just retries, that's why checksumming there works, but not on the filesystem level, where it can only detect corruption. FS-level checksum saves you from the situation when the underlying storage thinks everything is okay but it is not: > This means there was a data error on the drive. But it’s worse than a typical data error — this is…
Comment linking /archives/9769-silent-data-corruption-is-real
on “What’s New in Apple Filesystems [pdf]”Submitted I Finally Found a Solid Debian Tablet: The Surface Go 2 as a story · 248 points
HN discussionYour program will crash at runtime if you pass any string that isn't valid UTF-8 and you forgot to use bytes, and using .decode requires that your input has a valid, known encoding which is rarely true in the real world of messy data. It's a problem with Unix filenames where the encoding is just a convention. A Python program that doesn't take great care can crash on a parameter that takes a filename even if that fi…
Comment linking /archives/9938-the-python-unicode-mess
on “Glibc Buffer Overflow in Iconv”Submitted I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad (2012) as a story · 205 points
HN discussionThat kind of reminds me of this story from 2019: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9969-goodbye-to-a-15...
Comment linking /archives/9969-goodbye-to-a-15-year-old-debian-server
on “macOS has become more reliable”Submitted Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years as a story · 198 points
HN discussionI'm the guy that wrote the blog article that got posted here. So, I'm dusting off my really old HN account, to step up and say that I am very sorry it felt depressing to you, because that was not my intent. In fact, as I said in the post, I use Matrix, I love Matrix, I evangelize Matrix (especially to Discord people), it has made a lot of strides lately. I had a previous post on distributed offline-capable IMs at ht…
Comment linking /archives/10205-roundup-of-secure-messengers-with-off-the-grid-capabilities-distributed-mesh-messengers
on “Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal”Submitted My boys love 1986 computing as a story · 198 points
HN discussionCounterpoint from a former systemd skeptic who now likes it: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9655-count-me-as-a-sy...
Comment linking /archives/9655-count-me-as-a-systemd-convert
on “Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork”Submitted After over a decade of Vim, I’m hooked on Emacs as a story · 180 points
HN discussionUnix! http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-...
Comment linking /archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted
on “We consistently underestimate kids.”Submitted Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal as a story · 179 points
HN discussionHis follow-up is at: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-sy...
Comment linking /archives/9241-update-on-the-systemd-issue
on “First Impressions of Systemd, and They Are Not Good”Submitted Debian developer revisits FreeBSD after 20 years (2015) as a story · 156 points
HN discussionThere is a new blogpost from the author that explains the problems: http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9241-update-on-the-sy... TL;DR: systemd breaks badly (at the moment) when having to deal with non-standard setups (ZFS, cryptsetup)... As for the eternal systemd debate... if someone as knowledgeable as the author (his publications: http://www.complete.org/Publications ) can't debug it... we'll have fun times a…
Comment linking /archives/9241-update-on-the-systemd-issue
on “First Impressions of Systemd, and They Are Not Good”Submitted Managing an external display on Linux shouldn’t be this hard as a story · 117 points
HN discussion
