Top all-time · #244
Xe Iaso
Personal blog · xeiaso.net/blog · on HN as xenaprogrammingsystems
Xe Iaso's personal blog at xeiaso.net covers programming and systems. Since 2022, 200 different Hacker News readers have linked it 457 times, most often “Block AI Scrapers with Anubis proof-of-work”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Xe Iaso's blog for its posts on Anubis and anti-scraper defences, Nix, security and the V language, which some commenters call great and prescient.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Commenters call its content great, say they enjoy it, and say one post is prescient and good links to read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Xe Iaso's personal website.
Most-linked posts?
- Block AI Scrapers with Anubis proof-of-work15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2025-01-19
- Xe Iaso – Senior Technophilosopher6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-10-21
- Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-01-17
- /blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-235 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-06-18
- The Layoff4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-17
- The Legacy of Heroku's Free Tier4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-08-25
- Rolling the ladder up behind us4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-20
- /blog/vlang-update-2020-06-174 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-03
- Automuse: System for Generating Fiction Novels4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-04-15
- AI: The not-so-good parts4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-18
What Hacker News says?
How about IPv6 over S3? https://xeiaso.net/blog/anything-message-queue/
Comment linking /blog/anything-message-queue/
on “Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?”Submitted We all dodged a bullet as a story · 830 points
HN discussionSo first, let me prefix this by saying I generally don't accept cookies from websites I don't explicitly first allow, my reasoning being "why am I granting disk read/write access to [mostly] shady actors to allow them to track me?" (I don't think your blog qualifies as shady … but you're not in my allowlist, either.) So if I visit https://anubis.techaro.lol/ (from the "Anubis" link), I get an infinite anime cat girl…
Comment linking /blog/2025/anubis/
on “I use zip bombs to protect my server”Submitted Everyone should slow down AI development except for me as a story · 813 points
HN discussionSomething like https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/anubis-works/
Comment linking /notes/2025/anubis-works/
on “I use zip bombs to protect my server”Submitted Valve is about to win the console generation as a story · 647 points
HN discussionSee also Xe Iaso's posts about CVEs in the C ecosystem ( https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/CVE-2025... )
Comment linking /shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/CVE-2025-62229/
on “Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected”Submitted Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable as a story · 607 points
HN discussionEx-herokai here. This post made me have feelings. I wrote them up on my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku
Comment linking /blog/rip-heroku
on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder as a story · 484 points
HN discussionhttps://xeiaso.net/ is equally great content in a similar style in my opinion. Different area of topics a bit, but I enjoy both very much
Comment linking /
on “The HTTP crash course nobody asked for”Submitted The Layoff as a story · 452 points
HN discussionThe file explains it a bit, but my blogpost https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/s1-simple-test-time-scaling/ could probably be better explained. I'll write out more but just for you I'll summarize what I'm gonna end up writing up. AI models fundamentally work on the basis of "given what's before, what comes next?" When you pass messages to an API like: [ { "role": "system", content": "You are an expert in selling propane…
Comment linking /notes/2025/s1-simple-test-time-scaling/
on “Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools”Submitted Apple squandered the Holy Grail as a story · 423 points
HN discussionThe proof of work isn't really the crux. They've been pretty clear about this from the beginning. I'll just quote from their blog post from January. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/ Anubis also relies on modern web browser features: - ES6 modules to load the client-side code and the proof-of-work challenge code. - Web Workers to run the proof-of-work challenge in a separate thread to avoid blocking the UI thread…
Comment linking /blog/2025/anubis/
on “Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?”Submitted Anubis Works as a story · 319 points
HN discussionReading the original release post for Anubis [0], it seems like it operates mainly on the assumption that AI scrapers have limited support for JS, particularly modern features. At its core it's security through obscurity; I suspect that as usage of Anubis grows, more scrapers will deliberately implement the features needed to bypass it. That doesn't necessarily mean it's useless, but it also isn't really meant to bl…
Comment linking /blog/2025/anubis/
on “Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?”Submitted How to Store an SSH Key on a Yubikey as a story · 298 points
HN discussion> If the site really was static before, and no JS was needed One does not imply the other. This forum is one example. (Or rather, hn.js is entirely optional.) > Another great solution? Just ask users to login (no js needed). I'll stand pretty firmly behind "If you aren't willing to make an account - you don't actually care about the site". Accounts don't make sense for all websites. Self-hosted git repositories are…
Comment linking /blog/2025/anubis/
on “This website is for humans”Submitted Salary Transparency as a story · 292 points
HN discussionThis article ( https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/ ) walks through a lot of the steps I've done on all my NixOS systems As for Nextcloud vs a restic server, Nextcloud is heavier, but I do benefit from it's extra features (like Calendar and Contact management) as well as use a couple of apps (Memories for photos is quite nice). Plus it's much more family friendly, which was a core requirement for my se…
Comment linking /blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/
on “My Self-Hosting Setup”Submitted "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens as a story · 208 points
HN discussionNo prob! I wrote more about my defense tool here in case you're interested: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/
Comment linking /blog/2025/anubis/
on “Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable”Submitted Rolling the ladder up behind us as a story · 206 points
HN discussionI wish Elon Musk all the best handling whatever this is with a skeleton crew of people who hate him on Tuesday: https://xeiaso.net/blog/openssl-3.x-secvuln-incoming .
Comment linking /blog/openssl-3.x-secvuln-incoming
on “Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said”Submitted Serving a high-performance blog solely from memory, using Rust as a story · 196 points
HN discussionIt's kind of the opposite problem as well; huge well-funded companies bringing down open source project websites. See Xe's journey here: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/ One may posit "maybe these projects should cache stuff so page loads aren't actually expensive" but these things are best-effort and not the core focus of these projects. You install some Git forge or Trac or something and it's Good Enough for y…
Comment linking /blog/2025/anubis/
on “Curl-impersonate: Special build of curl that can impersonate the major browsers”Submitted Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough (2023) as a story · 184 points
HN discussionIt's actually a smooth readable (but tall-and-skinny) font on my personal laptop, and a pixelated mess on my work laptop; I've never figured out why... Oh, huh, they're using a custom font: https://xeiaso.net/blog/iaso-fonts/ so that should actually be consistent. (After the weekend I'll poke at it on the other laptop and see what's up.) What I'm getting at is that they might (unintentionally) be complaining about a…
Comment linking /blog/iaso-fonts/
on “Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder”Submitted Today I learned that bash has hashmaps (2024) as a story · 177 points
HN discussion
