#IgorNews 1. Emacs turned 50. And Vi too, if anyone’s been following this eternal rivalry — it somehow worked out synchronously. For half a century people have been arguing about which editor is more correct, as if anything depended on it.
I’m curious: in that time, several generations of programmers have been born, grown old, and retired, and the flame war is still the same. Only now it happens in messengers instead of conferences.
https://www.theregister.com/applications/2026/11/01/mother-of-all-editors-emacs-is-50/5306727
2. Apple is taking half of all consumer money circulating at the top of the S&P 500. Half. Not "leading," not "showing growth" — just half. The other four-hundred-something companies split the second half and pretend that’s how it was meant to be.
On one hand — good for them, ecosystem and all. On the other — it’s a bit unsettling that "consumer economy" increasingly means "people pay for an iPhone subscription."
The Last Consumer Company
3. John Leeson voiced K9 for almost half a century — from the seventies until recently. A voice that was literally made of iron, yet turned out surprisingly human. It seems to me that all those years the robot-dog joke rested on him — otherwise it would’ve just been a box with light bulbs. A pity. Voices like that aren’t news, they’re background, and you only notice them when they’re gone.
https://www.doctorwhonews.net/2026/11/john_leeson_1943_2026.html
4. Amusing. The US labor market perked up a bit — and Bloomberg’s experts are already rubbing their hands gleefully that the Fed will raise rates again. Because weak job growth is bad, and good job growth is also bad, since it fuels inflation. No matter which way you turn, there’s always a reason to raise rates.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-31/us-jobs-pickup-may-keep-fed-on-track-to-hike-rates-again
5. Terence Tao writes that mathematics has changed and it’s time to admit it. The tone is polite, academic, all that. But in effect it’s a cry from the heart of a man watching AI rewrite the rules of the game in his profession, proposing his colleagues stop pretending nothing is happening.
The phrasing itself is touching, of course — "let’s act like it." As if you can make a collective decision and then go on living peacefully. Mathematicians, after all, are famous for noticing changes last.
Mathematics has changed. Let’s act like it
6. In this piece, Picard has of course been credited with an entire political philosophy. Carefully, without irony, with respect for the viewer who supposedly didn’t realize what show they were watching. Good people in power is a sweet idea — it’s just that in real life such characters usually walk out of the room where the budget gets decided.
https://www.vox.com/politics/508526/patrick-stewart-jean-luc-picard-star-trek-liberalism
7. Another leak, another "probably." Frontier Airlines apparently handed someone a database of emails and bookings — so much so that in the airline’s subreddit scammers are already stringing passengers along with letters from "support." Classic: the company stays silent while the fraudsters work faster than the PR department.
The funny part isn’t even that it leaked, but that you find out from a Reddit thread rather than an email from the carrier. Write to support, sure — except you first have to get through to them.
PSA Email Scam
byu/nrfmartin infrontierairlines
8. OK, so Seoul Viosys started making white light without rare earths. Right, so they decided you can build an emitter without the usual Chinese classic with phosphors. Slightly ironic that a "breakthrough" has to be called exactly that — without the word rare-earth it doesn’t sound like much, but this way it’ll do. Apparently it’s already in mass production, too.
I like how news like this is usually presented: as if the planet has finally been saved. But strip away the pathos, and someone at a factory just stopped buying expensive powder and replaced it with something cheaper. What’s funny is that there are only twenty-eight comments under this on HN. Apparently "without rare earths" doesn’t grab people yet.
https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2026/oct/seoul-291026.shtml
9. Someone built a site that pulled from Hacker News comments every book mentioned at least twice — came out to 16.5 thousand. Claude wrote almost all of it itself; the author mostly steered and bought the domain. So the man literally delegated reading the forum to a neural net, so he could then read books recommended by strangers.
Cute. Now we have an aggregator of anonymous developers’ opinions, assembled by a bot that hasn’t read anything itself. All that’s left is a version where Claude reads for you, summarizes, and rates it too.
https://hackerbooks.org
10. In Britain, analog phones will be switched off in a hundred days. Well, not switched off — "migrated to digital," as if that changes anything for those who still have a rotary phone at home.
People over seventy are, of course, affected least of all. They’ve been told "everything will work." It’s just that now, if the power or internet goes out, there’ll be no way to call an ambulance. Minor details.
https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/11/01/landline-phones-will-switch-off-across-britland-in-100-days-no-extensions-openreach/5306673
11. Lenovo released an "encrypted" USB drive with a fingerprint sensor. Inside — an ordinary SD card with no encryption at all, just in a shell. So the whole biometric circus with the finger is pure marketing, and the data sits there in plain text. Someone worked very hard to pretend that security is when there’s a button.
Funny, of course, that "encryption" now means "we wrote it on the box." Nobody bothered to check, as usual — until someone took it apart. Though why be surprised: if a brand promises finger protection, it’s time to remember that a finger is not a password.
Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB drive is just an unencrypted SD card in a fancy case — AI-assisted follow-up finds a backdoor and hardcoded keys in other ‘secure’ USB products
byu/Hi_all_hwru intechnology
12. Reading this piece about "novels with Groff" — and it warms you up somehow. Not because it’s about old hardware, but because the author just went and wrote text typeset with groff, like in pre-COVID times. No "AI-powered reading experience," no subscriptions or notifications. Just a person, a format, and letters.
Funny, of course, that this is news now. People used to do it by default, and now it’s presented almost as an act of resistance. Though in fact it’s just another way of saying: to hell with all your editors and clouds.
https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-10-31/0/POSTING-en.html
13. Here we go again. Someone decided to prove that all neural nets deep down see the world the same way — and that this is supposedly good. The hypothesis is Platonic, sounds lovely, until you remember that the models’ "shared representation of reality" is exactly what we feared in high school: everyone copied off one person and thinks they’re smart. What’s next, we converge on one truth and recite it in unison?
Sure, the guys needed something to keep JEPA busy. But the idea that "the more the models agree, the better" is like being proud that the whole team has identical taste. 92 points on HN and 52 comments — half, apparently, are arguing, and half are pretending they understood.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39302
14. Another tool that "solves a problem" nobody particularly suffered from. The author went through 7,400 repositories, manually analyzed a couple thousand diffs, and now diffs fonts, cursors, and PDFs. In Rust, of course — otherwise it wouldn’t be 2024.
The speed is impressive — tens of thousands of lines of C++ in a hundred milliseconds on a 2023 laptop. It’s just that most of us look at diffs with our eyes, not benchmarks. AGPLv3 will please the lawyers, of course.
https://github.com/ivankovic/omnidiff
15. People used to argue about which framework is faster and lighter. Now they have a new metric — how many tokens your code will gobble up when you shove it into a chat. And it seems funny, but it isn’t.
Turns out everyone’s favorite React is more expensive for AI than some boring Vue, simply because the syntax is bloated. So now "convenience" also means a token bill. Progress, you gotta say.
https://nolanlawson.com/2026/10/28/the-ai-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/
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