alt.hn

5/10/2026 at 5:43:10 PM

Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES

 https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/03/incident-report-cve-2024-yikes.html

by miniBill

5/10/2026 at 6:44:08 PM

For anyone confused, this is (very good imo) fiction about supply-chain incidents. It had me very worried during a brief scan that it was real though, which made me read it more attentively :)

by lynndotpy

5/11/2026 at 6:58:40 AM

As the victim of the one from last year, it wasn't particularly fun to read.

The implication that I don't know what I'm looking at, or that I don't know what security is (despite having a clean track record for about 15 years now) was a bit aggravating.

In fact, even months later, the lasting effects have been panicking over anything that is remotely suspicious. The most recent example was just a few days ago. Had just gotten on the plane to go on vacation when someone Liked the original "I've been pwned" post on Bluesky. I misread the notification as being a new message to me saying "You've been pwned" and started to panick. I'd have had no way to address it and it would have ruined the small chance per year I get to have a break.

The attack last year wasn't me misunderstanding security. It was the sum of many, many small things (my history with and perception of npm especially w.r.t. their security posture and poor outreach over the years, being stressed out overall, and being in a rush at that particular moment, and a few other personal things) coming together in a perfect storm that resulted in the attack.

by junon

5/12/2026 at 3:25:13 PM

> The implication that I don't know what I'm looking at, or that I don't know what security is (despite having a clean track record for about 15 years now) was a bit aggravating.

I'm a security geek, a clean track record means much less to me than anyone would expect. The comment from the article mentioning that there was no evidence of exploitation explains why. I would never have noticed that implication, because I don't think it exists. (And it's completely unreasonable if it does), so that's your own deal... it's not a good conclusion to take from the article.

The only thing that matters is how much any given owner cares. Are they willing to go the extra mile to make sure things get done correctly. That's the best signal about if you can trust a project. Seems like you give a shit, so I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. The people that matter can tell, (everyone who can't tell is already willing to lie so they can be safely ignored!)

> In fact, even months later, the lasting effects have been panicking over anything that is remotely suspicious. The most recent example was just a few days ago. Had just gotten on the plane to go on vacation when someone Liked the original "I've been pwned" post on Bluesky. I misread the notification as being a new message to me saying "You've been pwned" and started to panick.

You haven't dealt with it yet, if you want to get your attention back so you can spend it on more important things than worrying about something from the past, you gotta talk to somebody. A therapist would help the fastest, but friends and family are often just as good.

> I'd have had no way to address it and it would have ruined the small chance per year I get to have a break.

Seriously, having been there myself it's not worth it... you're just allowing them to DoS your brain by allowing them to live rent free in your head. The only thing that matters is how seriously you take the remediation. Attention to detail, and the willingness to go the extra mile for security defects to tie up all loose ends is what matters. It's not your job to fix everybody's issue yourself, even if they don't or can't. You still have to enjoy life, or you burn out, and some idiot that doesn't care will take your place. Then they really win.

You're not responsible for the security or stability of anybody using nightly packages. (Only maintainer signed and tagged releases)

> The attack last year wasn't me misunderstanding security. It was the sum of many, many small things

so, a misunderstanding of how the little things actually impact security?

> (my history with and perception of npm especially w.r.t. their security posture and poor outreach over the years, being stressed out overall, and being in a rush at that particular moment, and a few other personal things) coming together in a perfect storm that resulted in the attack.

Those other personal things are the kinda thin that being able to enjoy a vacation make much easier. You can't help anybody if you don't put on your own mask first... Well... You definitely can, you're obviously trying to do now, but it's needless harder.

Npm, and the JavaScript ecosystem is a fucking joke. It's a mistake to blame yourself (or any maintainer) for how difficult it is to meet the bar for both security and accessibility. Worrying about the difficulty in consistentenly demonstrating the perfection required for security is a fool's errand, and your allowing the bad guys to get what they want by letting it live rent free in your head, it won't go away for as long as you worry about it more than you talk about it.

And I say all of that as the person who has multiple times, made the argument that it's perfectly fine to name an engineer and their decisions or incompetence as the root cause analysis in an official incident report. (Pilot Error is a thing): If I thought you were responsible, or had done anything wrong, I'd gladly blame you. Smart people don't care about mistakes, because they are always noise in the signal. I care about effort. People who give a shit are much more important and valuable.

by grayhatter

5/10/2026 at 8:21:59 PM

I couldn't tell at first, tbh. It had this vibe: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawi...

by adastra22

5/10/2026 at 11:12:26 PM

Yeah. Me too. It looked like a spoof when I started reading, but as I went on it didn't seem to be increasing in it's implausibility.

by OhMeadhbh

5/11/2026 at 5:25:02 AM

Well, the one I linked to is real. BIP-42 made bitcoin's monetary policy fixed, by fixing a bug in the client which would have resulted in the initial subsidy code being reset every ~250 years or so. It's just the official writeup documenting it that is silly.

by adastra22

5/11/2026 at 1:54:25 AM

"left-justify" absolutely slayed me :)

by zahlman

5/11/2026 at 6:55:58 AM

I should have known when the first package was left-justify, but I read until karen before I realized it must be fiction

by dirkc

5/11/2026 at 11:00:50 AM

Would explain why most of the download traffic comes from the Middle East :)

by CoastalCoder

5/12/2026 at 11:21:30 AM

i think i might be missing some reference/joke

obviously it's referencing the left-pad incident[0], and to 'justify' text is another kind of text manipulation[1]; but with the more common definition, i guess it's a joke about justifying something? The Left? idk

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Flush_le...

by throawayonthe

5/12/2026 at 11:35:37 PM

No, the meaning is straightforward. It's a joke because the audience is assumed to write in a left-to-right script (such as English), such that text is already left-justified by default.

by zahlman

5/11/2026 at 12:15:08 AM

Searching for CVE-2024-YIKES also provides a gallery of AI slop blogs that AI-rewrite the content of this post while being absolutely stone cold serious about it.

by smsm42

5/11/2026 at 1:48:08 AM

Currently a Google search for vulpine-lz4 gives a very serious AI overview.

by b473a

5/11/2026 at 3:18:13 AM

Googling is no longer a reliable way to figure out if something is real or not (since, in this case, it just regurgitates the original article, including a couple slop blogs about it)

by trollbridge

5/11/2026 at 8:53:54 AM

Contributing factors are entirely serious

edit: actually more and more thing I'm recognizing as being entirely serious (ie benelovent worms :D); satire indistinguishable from reality

by eithed

5/11/2026 at 11:40:49 AM

i got half way through before i realized

by lukewarm707

5/10/2026 at 6:52:50 PM

'nmp'

by philipwhiuk

5/10/2026 at 7:16:15 PM

Node's Malicious Packages.

by INTPenis

5/12/2026 at 10:35:33 AM

"The Good Parts"

by animuchan

5/10/2026 at 11:30:23 PM

I only noticed at goat farming. But anyway, what would a left-justify package do?

by krautsauer

5/11/2026 at 6:12:45 AM

> I only noticed at goat farming

Heh. I didn't even blink at that. I know a couple of open-source folks who actually packed up to buy off-grid farms in Portugal

by swiftcoder

5/11/2026 at 12:10:05 AM

Pull left-pad as dependency presumably.

by yk

5/11/2026 at 2:31:42 AM

Which then, inexplicably, pulls left-justify as a recursive dependency.

by yellowapple

5/11/2026 at 9:17:36 AM

The dependency cycle is actually the functional mechanism of the code, because they subvert the dedup mechanism in the package manager using a random generation trick. Each recursive copy of the dependencies takes up a little bit more space, which ultimately gets converted to the spaces inserted into the original datum; the caller is expected to adjust the cache settings to signal the desired amount. That's also why if you're using left-justify to process strings, Yarn is recommended for best compatibility. /joke

by dasyatidprime

5/12/2026 at 10:46:30 AM

This is so beautifully cursed, reusing the module loader state as your local state. We could have the familiar Python syntax of

`from <key> import <value>`

And a custom import hook eating the error. To get value(s) for a given key, naturally we'd scan the module loader cache. Elegant.

by animuchan

5/11/2026 at 1:16:40 PM

So you're saying dependency resolution is Turing complete?

by brazzy

5/11/2026 at 6:46:02 AM

Just because it's not important to pay attention to CVEs, why not waste the readers' time by creating "fictional" CVEs without a disclaimer in the first line? Just because it's not already difficult to scrape through the information and noise on this internet... especially if it appears on the front page of hackernews

by fvv

5/11/2026 at 7:06:08 AM

Could one mistake this

> Status: Resolved (accidentally)

> Severity: Critical → Catastrophic → Somehow Fine

for a real CVE report?

by jmusall

5/11/2026 at 8:40:01 PM

Have you not read CVEs as of late? As a precondition for getting their funding back, all the doge boys get to write the CVEs for their own orgs. Insane parentheticals about trans people is the norm now.

by User-MBAB

5/11/2026 at 1:53:35 PM

next level NIST enrichment in action

by red-iron-pine

5/11/2026 at 7:08:15 AM

The tag list at the top of the page includes “satire”.

by dasyatidprime

5/11/2026 at 2:37:03 PM

I saw a comment very similar to this on a blog post testing the Copy Fail exploit, where someone was complaining that without a tl;dr at the top, it took too much effort for them to find out whether the blog post documented a new exploit. In fact, reading less than a paragraph already showed that couldn't be the case; the table of contents is enough.

If a glance at the CVE number that isn't a number doesn't do it, a minute or less of skimming this article likewise reveals it to be satire on a blog that's actually pretty thoughtful when it comes to supply chain attacks.

Idk how else to characterize this except as a literacy problem. Learn to skim. It should be unacceptable to characterize a few minutes of reading as unbearable toil. If your time is really so precious that (although you can surf Hacker News) you can't spare 1-3 minutes to read, surely you have someone else to whom to delegate the responsibility of watching for supply chain attacks.

Why am I seeing this crop up over and over?

by isityettime

5/10/2026 at 8:09:53 PM

> Day 1, 14:47 UTC — Among the exfiltrated credentials: the maintainer of vulpine-lz4, a Rust library for “blazingly fast Firefox-themed LZ4 decompression.” The library’s logo is a cartoon fox with sunglasses. It has 12 stars on GitHub but is a transitive dependency of cargo itself.

I got a bit curious and here is an incomplete list of crates to compromise to be part of the cargo build and that already have a build.rs so it doesn't stand out to much:

flate2 tar curl-sys libgit2-sys openssl-sys libsqlite3-sys blake3 libz-sys zstd-sys cc

As a nice bonus - if you get rights for xz2 you can compromise rustup.

Fwiw at least they do track Cargo.lock

by athrowaway3z

5/11/2026 at 12:31:23 AM

-sys crates are just bindings and doing something else in them is highly suspect. The rest I recognize as being owned by a Rust maintainer like alexcrichton or rustlang itself.

by b40d-48b2-979e

5/11/2026 at 3:09:33 AM

> The rest I recognize as being owned by a Rust maintainer like alexcrichton

The issue here isn't Alex Crichton going rogue, but rather, some malware stealing his credentials to use them to publish more malware in crates.io

In this sense, the more well known and upstanding Rust developer, the higher the risk they will be targeted by such operations

by nextaccountic

5/11/2026 at 4:07:18 AM

With crates.io using GH as its IdP, I think there would be much farther reaching consequences to account pwning in that scenario. I agree, though, that the security model for crates.io is only as strong as the weakest link there, and would pray someone like Alex is using physical tokens or the like for his MFA and can't be conned by a well-crafted email.

by b40d-48b2-979e

5/11/2026 at 1:26:55 AM

sys crates are also mostly generated and lack a lot of eyeballs. Sneaking something into the build.rs of a sys crate would not be difficult and would land in the builds of everything downstream of it.

by duped

5/11/2026 at 4:00:49 AM 

    would not be difficult
Surely that's why we see evidence of all these build script attacks, since it's so easy?

by b40d-48b2-979e

5/11/2026 at 4:56:19 AM

I had pondered the same thing about other package ecosystems in the past, in general. Now with the benefit of hindsight we can comfortably say that the absence of known (!) attacks doesn't really say anything about how relatively difficult an attack would be. Are -sys crates, or build script attacks, particularly potent? Who knows. When I did a cursory search, the only attempts I saw were at runtime rather than build time[1]. Which raises a good point; pwning a developer machine or CI box with a build script may be quite valuable, but if you might get that and prod with a runtime exploit, is the build time exploit that much more valuable? Guess it depends! (Of course, I personally think having at least optional build time sandboxing is even better than hoping it won't be valuable to attack.)

Of course, crates.io has surely had some malicious packages. (I'd assume it isn't all that unlikely there could be some undiscovered right now; it's definitely large enough for something like that to slip under the radar, even if it is relatively small compared to say, NPM.) But, I think it really hasn't had its XZ backdoor moment, its left-pad, where you really get to see how well it does or doesn't handle a serious challenge. Since I have actually not published on crates.io, I'm not really sure how the security posture is, but if it's more similar to other programming language repositories than it is to Linux repos, I dunno exactly why it would be hard to believe a high-level compromise is possible and could slip in (really, anywhere, be it a build script or otherwise.). Of course, "would not be difficult" is all relative. I'm sure many of these attacks are not really all that simple, but a lot of them aren't exactly groundbreaking either. It was well executed and took quite a lot of time, sure, but there wasn't all that much about the XZ backdoor that was novel. (Except maybe the slyness with which the payload was hidden in test files. That was pretty cool.)

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/09/24/crates.io-malicious-cr...

by jchw

5/12/2026 at 7:29:08 PM

ou can defend a claim that literally anything is a supply-chain risk from this logic. Don't use vim to edit your config files because you don't have any way to know that someone couldn't slip a "reflections on trusting trust" compiler attack into clang so that your MacOS binary distributed by homebrew detects when you're editing an npm.json and exfiltrates your ssh keys so that they can push rogue builds!

by saghm

5/12/2026 at 8:18:25 PM

Did you reply to the correct parent comment?

by jchw

5/12/2026 at 9:30:04 PM

Yes. Your comment reads to me as a defense of the comment above the one you replied to:

>>> sys crates are also mostly generated and lack a lot of eyeballs. Sneaking something into the build.rs of a sys crate would not be difficult and would land in the builds of everything downstream of it.

>> Surely that's why we see evidence of all these build script attacks, since it's so easy?

> Now with the benefit of hindsight we can comfortably say that the absence of known (!) attacks doesn't really say anything about how relatively difficult an attack would be.

Given that you were responding to a critique of what seems to be fully conjecture with the argument that we don't know for sure that it's not feasible, it's not clear to me why that wouldn't be a sufficient defense of any claim of a potential vulnerability without regard for merit. You don't propose any alternative than ignoring the only hard evidence we have, so although you might not have intended it this way, it's not clear to me what discussion you could expect to happen with that standard of evidence other than throwing up our hands and saying everything is screwed.

by saghm

5/11/2026 at 12:25:17 PM

Remember the XZ backdoor? Or do you mean that Rust build script attacks are less likely? (Probably true but not much comfort)

by cbolton

5/11/2026 at 2:43:50 PM

We do in fact see them a lot. Typically they target Python or Node because those ecosystems are much more popular than Rust. But build.rs provides exactly the same opportunities to attackers for Rust.

by isityettime

5/11/2026 at 6:16:23 PM

No, we don't. We see build system attacks, such as injecting malicious scripts into their CI and getting malicious code into the artifact for use at runtime. You don't see someone doing a drive-by PR to a `setup.py`.

by b40d-48b2-979e

5/11/2026 at 7:11:16 PM

Not a drive-by PR, but once a package is compromised it often does spread to its reverse-dependencies via mechanisms like setup.py at build time. There was case like this with setup.py less than two months ago: https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/forcememo-hundreds-of-githu...

Lots of npm supply chain attacks propagate at build time via post-install hooks, too.

by isityettime

5/10/2026 at 6:49:23 PM

It's easy to be cynical because, yes, both the problems and solutions seem dead obvious in hindsight. But for a long time (and maybe even still), a hacker creed was "move fast and break things."

It's great that there's so much momentum in fixing the glaring problems with supply chain systems like npm, but I'm concerned that we're entering a new era of security-related problems caused in large part by agentic development.

I'm not just talking about Mythos/Glasswing surfacing vulnerabilities in pretty much everything it touches; I think the way we're developing software, pulling in dependencies, and potentially losing human thought modeling of complex systems is going to lead to a lot of hacked together software and infrastructure that humans won't fully understand.

I hope in a few years we don't look back at today and wonder how we could have been so naive -- how we failed to actually plan for the long-tail of AI development in a way that doesn't solve problems by attempting to just use AI to rebuild complex systems.

But the article was funny.

by david_shaw

5/10/2026 at 6:57:27 PM

> But for a long time (and maybe even still), a hacker creed was "move fast and break things."

Was it? I thought Zuckerberg coined this horrible phrase.

by saint_yossarian

5/10/2026 at 7:09:25 PM

He certainly popularized it (maybe coined it), but I've seen a lot of organizations and developers repeat that mantra.

Even without the specific words, look to product teams debating tradeoffs of going to market vs. waiting for better security controls. They're pushing for faster product release every time, at pretty much every org.

by david_shaw

5/10/2026 at 7:26:11 PM

In any case, not really a hacker's creed. This has always been withinin the realm of corporations, especially Silicon Valley or adjacent.

by cassianoleal

5/11/2026 at 10:32:23 AM

Hackers were moving fast and breaking things first. Faster than any corporation in fact. We didn't notice because their computers weren't powering anything useful. How do you think projects like GNU happened?

by pocksuppet

5/11/2026 at 8:03:25 PM

Ah yes, GNU. Well known for prioritizing speed and pragmatism over perfection. That's why Hurd ended up winning out over Linux. /s

by fc417fc802

5/10/2026 at 7:42:42 PM

MFABT is about survival. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

by asah

5/10/2026 at 9:12:17 PM

Sir, this is not /r/linkedinlunatics/

by walrus01

5/10/2026 at 8:25:40 PM

Don't know any hackers who talk like this. More "if you don't like the rules, play a different game"

by jazzyjackson

5/10/2026 at 8:13:56 PM

Por que no los dos? Some players seem very gleeful.

by dxdm

5/10/2026 at 8:44:14 PM

I will absolutely hate the players that chose the game and designed the rules.

by cwillu

5/10/2026 at 7:56:17 PM

I'm not sure what you're responding to.

by cassianoleal

5/11/2026 at 11:33:02 AM

[flagged]

by asah

5/10/2026 at 9:50:03 PM

Joel Spolsky.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

by jerhewet

5/10/2026 at 10:04:46 PM

I love that article, but the words "move", "fast", and "break" don't appear in it.

by rectang

5/11/2026 at 8:44:08 PM

I stand corrected! My memory is pretty vague on this, but I was pretty sure Joel had said something very close to this in one of his blog posts in the early 2000's, but it looks like Zuckerberg was the first one to use the phrase "move fast and break things":

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/move-fast-break-things-fac...

by jerhewet

5/11/2026 at 7:03:57 AM

We don't need hindsight for the problems of supply chain security to be obvious. Security people were writing and doing talks about this stuff over 10 years ago, just (like most things in security) things start getting addressed once the pressure of incidents gets high enough :)

by raesene9

5/10/2026 at 7:55:52 PM

The maintainer of left-justify receives his YubiKey from yubikey-official-store.net. It is a $4 USB drive containing a README that says “lol.”

Got me seriously laughing... Such a troll.

by ObiKenobi

5/10/2026 at 8:45:30 PM

Yeah that's great. I love that plugging in the USB device from the phishing site is, itself, another attack vector...

by sdenton4

5/10/2026 at 10:47:38 PM

I actually wonder if somebody used a fake identity to set up an account with a warehousing/shipment fulfillment company that stocks things and ships them, then set up the appropriate EDI pipeline to send shipping orders to it... What would be the results if a decently budgeted adversary made something attractive looking that shipped malicious USB flash drives to anyone that requested one.

I know we're not in the era when a windows pc will happily run any autorun.inf and .EXE file found on an inserted flash drive or DVD anymore. But even so. What if it didn't even have any malicious data payload but somebody was shipping USB-A interface capacitor based usb killers?

https://www.slashgear.com/1819672/usb-killer-explained-kill-...

What if it did have data on it and came with a slick color brochure walking people through how to run the binary, or in a linux or developer specific audience, how to 'sudo' the ELF binary that lives on its filesystem?

by walrus01

5/11/2026 at 2:34:58 AM

A USB that was both storage and a keyboard, that executed the keystrokes to download malware, was demo'd at a DefCon a few years back.

by shakna

5/11/2026 at 5:21:27 PM

BadUSB, Blackhat 2014.

That's almost 12 years now. A novice can now get ATmega32 USB devices Prime delivered. Not a cutting edge theoretical attack anymore but a basic tool in a every pen tester's toolbox now.

by crumpled

5/11/2026 at 12:16:46 AM

I mean, this is way more than you would usually get from a fishing site - a functioning USB drive!

by smsm42

5/10/2026 at 10:05:18 PM

>"The legitimate maintainer has won €2.3 million in the EuroMillions and is researching goat farming in Portugal..."

>"Root Cause: A dog named Kubernets ate a Yubikey

Ah, yes, irresponsible to get taken in by one of the well-known classic exploits. The 'ol "distract someone with a lottery windfall & make a dongle irresistibly tasty to another person's pet". When will people learn.

by ineedasername

5/11/2026 at 10:54:34 AM

I switched to EuroJackpot /s

by rmoriz

5/11/2026 at 4:00:45 AM

Brilliant satire. So many gems.

> CI passed because the malware installed volkswagen

We need this to ocassionally make us stop and think about what we are doing.

by albert_e

5/10/2026 at 10:23:02 PM

As a Fish aficionado (Afishionado?) - I feel both attacked and seen by this:

> who asked us to clarify that the fish shell is not malware, it just feels that way sometimes.

And unrelated to shells...

> The author would like to remind stakeholders that the security team’s headcount request has been in the backlog since Q1 2023.

I also feel seen by this.

by EdwardDiego

5/10/2026 at 10:53:52 PM

> As a Fish aficionado (Afishionado?) - I feel both attacked and seen by this:

As an alternative, it could apt-get or dnf install 'figlet' and then overwrite the contents of /etc/motd with 'all your base are belong to us' in extremely large ASCII art font.

by walrus01

5/10/2026 at 6:42:59 PM

This is the most SCP thing I've read in a while that's not actually an SCP.

by red_admiral

5/10/2026 at 6:54:16 PM

Ah yes a very rare:

Supply Chain problem(SCP)

by hacker_homie

5/10/2026 at 7:03:03 PM

Thanks, I totally read that as secure copy despite the context

by Aachen

5/10/2026 at 6:17:28 PM

Supply chain incidents suck and we need to do better. Personally for rust I’m a proponent of the foundation supporting a few core crates that go under the same audit procedure as the main rust language and give funding to the project to limit supply chain vulns. I don’t think the right answer is to remove systems like crates or npm. Crate and npm are a boon for many developers.

by vsgherzi

5/10/2026 at 6:18:21 PM

Crates has also been making efforts to include rust sec, but in addition to the above I would like the community to shy away from many small dependencies to a few larger ones just as tokio has

by vsgherzi

5/10/2026 at 6:35:32 PM

Many small crates published by large, trustworthy projects are fine and preferable to one large crate that "does everything".

by fleventynine

5/10/2026 at 7:02:06 PM

Why?

Honest question. Commons, Guava, Spring, and more seem to take this approach successfully (as in, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits in convenience, quality, and security) in Java. Are benefits in binary size really worth that complexity?

And before someone says “just have a better standard library”, think about why that is considered a solution here. Languages with a large and capable standard library remain more secure than the supply-chain fiascos on NPM because they have a) very large communities reviewing and participating in changes and b) have extremely regulated and careful release processes. Those things aren’t likely to be possible in most small community libraries.

by zbentley

5/10/2026 at 9:58:45 PM

Why? It's the essence of "Simple Made Easy": you don't have other code to complect with. You have a smaller interface, focused on a singular goal. When a library has to work as a standalone project, it can't be accidentally entangled with other components of a larger project.

Smaller implementations are also easier to review against malware, because there are fewer places to hide. You don't have to guess how a component may interact with all the other parts of a large framework, because there aren't any.

There are also practical Rust-specific concerns. Fine-grained code reuse helps with compile times (a smaller component can be reused in more projects, and more crates increase build parallelism).

It makes testing easier. Rust doesn't have enough dynamic monkey-patching for mocking of objects, so testing of code buried deep in a monolith is tricky. Splitting code into small libraries surfaces interfaces that are easily testable in isolation.

It helps with semver. A semver-major upgrade of one large library that everyone uses requires everyone to upgrade the whole thing at the same time, which can stall like the Python 2-to-3 transition. Splitting a monolith into smaller components allows versioning them separately, so the stable parts stay stable, and the churning parts affect smaller subsets of users.

by pornel

5/12/2026 at 5:27:56 PM

worth clarifying the build parallelism is because the fundamental unit of compilation in rust is the crate. so the main option available to cut down the running time of a large crate is to split it into smaller crates.

by mswphd

5/11/2026 at 11:11:06 AM

Tangent, but thanks for adding "complect" to my vocabulary!

by CoastalCoder

5/11/2026 at 8:00:24 AM

> Honest question. Commons, Guava, Spring, and more seem to take this approach successfully (as in, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits in convenience, quality, and security) in Java.

Commons and Spring have spent significant effort to break themselves up in the past, and would probably come as aggregations of much smaller pieces if they could be started today with the benefit of hindsight.

by lmm

5/10/2026 at 9:06:00 PM

You will have lots of dead code in your build.

That dead code might have "dead dependencies" - transitive dependencies of its own, that it pulls in even though they are not actually used in the parts of the crate you care about.

In the worst case, you can also have "undead code" - event handlers, hooks, background workers etc that the framework automatically registers and runs and that will do something at runtime, with all the credentials and data access of your application, but that have nothing to do with what you wanted to do. (Looking at you, Spring...)

All those things greatly increase the attack surface, I think even more than pulling in single-purpose library.

by xg15

5/10/2026 at 9:54:18 PM

Libraries like Guava and Commons don't have transitive dependencies - they are self contained except for other parts of the same library.

by tardedmeme

5/11/2026 at 2:00:27 AM

The same issue occurs whether you bundle all the code together or not, it's just that if you bundle it together you don't see what's happening and you can't use only part of it easily.

by rcxdude

5/11/2026 at 4:06:51 PM

Rust's compilation unit is a crate. Counting crates is like counting source files in C++.

> Are benefits in binary size really worth that complexity?

What complexity?

by duped

5/10/2026 at 6:49:20 PM

Yeah I’d agree that multiple crates under one project is basically the same as 1 large crate. The real problem is how many people you’re trusting and it’s all coming from the same person.

by vsgherzi

5/10/2026 at 8:53:20 PM

Contrary to what the article here presents, Rust does not have a culture of microlibraries like NPM does. The author and their LLM are cargo-culting a criticism of Rust made by people whose only experience is with the Node ecosystem. The Rust stdlib may not be especially "wide" compared to languages like Python, but it is quite deep, with the objective of making it so that you don't feel the need to publish single-purpose libraries which only exist to fix papercuts. Dozens of new APIs get added with every Rust release, which, occurring every six weeks, amounts to hundreds per year.

by kibwen

5/11/2026 at 3:03:10 AM

What are you talking about? Every Rust project I see seems to have 5 dependencies that do some simple thing that should be in the standard library, or at least in some centrally-audited monolibrary of utilities.

by MarsIronPI

5/11/2026 at 12:37:29 PM

Perhaps you're referring to things like regex and rand (each of which is itself multiple crates for the purpose of code organization), which are all first-party crates provided by the Rust organization itself, simply shipped and versioned separately from the standard library? If you trust the Rust organization enough to install and run the provided toolchain binaries on your machine, then you trust them enough to depend upon the dozens of crates that are provided under the umbrella of the Rust project.

by kibwen

5/11/2026 at 10:09:34 AM

Can you name 5 as an example?

by ChrisSD

5/11/2026 at 8:50:41 PM

Not GP but I feel like there's a continual process of the stdlib adding some new functionality to make one such crate redundant (e.g. is-terminal in 1.70), but it isn't done yet.

by DreadY2K

5/12/2026 at 4:40:45 AM

Yep, that's why I was asking. I'd be very interested to hear of more candidates for uplifting into std.

I guess saying "every project" has 5 dependencies might be somewhat hyperbolic (or at least domain specific) but it would be interesting to know the kinds of things they're talking about that haven't yet been uplifted.

by ChrisSD

5/10/2026 at 6:35:12 PM

Move high value crates into the standard library?

by hacker_homie

5/10/2026 at 9:01:19 PM

Indeed, I'm all for maximizing the amount of modules in the standard library. It's pretty obvious to me that Python thrives because of, not despite of, its standard library, "dead batteries" and all.

However, don't make the mistake of thinking that Rust has a small standard library. Read any Rust release and you'll see dozens of new APIs added with every single one. I'm tempted to paste the entire list of stabilized APIs from the most recent release for emphasis, but rather than making this comment three dozen lines longer, just look for yourself: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/04/16/Rust-1.95.0/#stabilize...

In particular, most recently the aforementioned release stabilized the cfg_select! macro for convenient conditional compilation, which obviates the popular cfg_if crate: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/macro.cfg_select.html

by kibwen

5/10/2026 at 11:10:57 PM

An extra tier of standard library which can make breaking changes, perhaps. Rust's stability guarantee for std means cryptography really shouldn't go in there, since sometimes algorithms & protocols get broken (DES, MD5, SHA1, etc.) and need to be removable. Without breaking changes you get stuck with security vulnerabilities, if not from cryptography then from other poorly-designed APIs.

by SAI_Peregrinus

5/10/2026 at 6:56:14 PM

Maybe give crates a gold star if they have no external dependencies?

by hacker_homie

5/10/2026 at 8:48:18 PM

That's not at all a bad idea, imo. And a silver star for crates which only depend on gold star crates...

by sdenton4

5/10/2026 at 10:03:37 PM

It's hard to have zero deps - I put many hours into one to have no required deps in the end but it was not easy, and writing declarative macros to do anything complex takes work (and a proc macro often means a minimum of two crates). Both of the crates it requires are part of the same project, however.

One of my other crates (getaddrinfo) requires windows-sys and libc which would be challenging to get rid of.

I like the idea of low deps but zero is tough

https://crates.io/crates/ctor/1.0.4/dependencies

by mmastrac

5/11/2026 at 10:18:52 PM

That’s because you are not moving thing into the standard library :)

by hacker_homie

5/11/2026 at 2:04:23 AM

This only encourages rewriting perfectly fine libraries badly. There's no simple metric to actually optimize here.

by rcxdude

5/10/2026 at 6:37:57 PM

Please no, that’s a terrible outcome.

by orf

5/10/2026 at 7:38:47 PM

What else would you suggest that also does not have terrible outcomes. The situation as is, is untenable.

by pixl97

5/10/2026 at 8:54:31 PM

As I said above

“Personally for rust I’m a proponent of the foundation supporting a few core crates that go under the same audit procedure as the main rust language and give funding to the project to limit supply chain vulns. I don’t think the right answer is to remove systems like crates or npm. Crate and npm are a boon for many developers.”

This is my solution. We get the quality of a std lib without forcing it in the std Lib and without extra maintaining cost for the team

by vsgherzi

5/10/2026 at 6:50:06 PM

This bloats the std library and forces lots more work and stress on the rust dev team. Not to mention it’ll add more churn to the std lib.

by vsgherzi

5/10/2026 at 8:05:16 PM

One man's bloat is another man's batteries-included, I guess?

My argument would be that if a more featureful standard library could get Rust closer to the superior dependency culture of Go, it'd be worth it. As-is, Rust dependency trees are just wild.

by jcgl

5/10/2026 at 8:53:34 PM

The rust team is already stretched pretty thin. A larger library is going to put more pressure on them. These libraries are already maintained and used. The rust project should just directly, fund, Shepard and guarantee a level of quality for the packages. The foundation has started some of this with the maintainers fund. No need to force it all into the std lib. Go has experienced breaking issues with changes in the crypto library causing churn in the ecosystem.

by vsgherzi

5/11/2026 at 9:19:03 AM

Point taken about the core team being stretched thin. But I don't see how the "increase stability of some core crates" is enough to change the packaging practices/culture. Maybe I'm wrong, but you really don't get those ecosystem benefits unless the ~entire ecosystem buys into that set of packages. Which really doesn't happen without stdlib.

Also, I think that your example of Go's breaking crypto changes misses the forest for the trees--the stdlib has been incredibly stable through its history, and the vast majority of packages just never have to worry about it. I'm honestly not aware of a language out there with similar adoption, featureset, and robustness. More to the point, I'm not aware of a language out there with a more reliable stdlib that permits the ecosystem to have small dependency graphs.

by jcgl

5/10/2026 at 6:20:04 PM

do we really need both npm and nmp though

by suprfsat

5/10/2026 at 8:11:12 PM

and pnpm

by fragmede

5/11/2026 at 3:05:13 AM

You forgot pnmp! How can you not be using pnmp in 20267!?

by MarsIronPI

5/11/2026 at 10:56:53 AM

Just use the implementation of petty, a js runtime written in Zag that is just rewritten by AI in Rust. It will be memory safe.

by rmoriz

5/10/2026 at 8:51:51 PM

A ton of the most popular crates on crates.io are already first-party crates provided by the Rust organization itself. This is often overlooked when people are wringing their hands about Rust crate graphs. Looking at the top 10 list of most-downloaded crates on the front page of crates.io, the only one not either from the Rust organization or from a Rust core maintainer is the base64 crate.

by kibwen

5/10/2026 at 7:20:07 PM

honestly I thought this was the end goal of blessed.rs

by dijit

5/10/2026 at 6:25:44 PM

nah, remove NPM, nothing good comes out of that.

by PunchyHamster

5/10/2026 at 6:32:31 PM

[dead]

by 2ndorderthought

5/10/2026 at 8:40:02 PM

the Karen one gave me a good laugh :D ;) reminds me of a `make`-based build script I once got when reviewing a classmate's project - it attempted to `rm -rf` my home folder if the hostname contains `bpavuk`. that was in seventh grade!!

by bpavuk

5/11/2026 at 12:26:27 PM

That seems _awfully_ extreme LOL

by inventor7777

5/11/2026 at 3:53:10 PM

I have kinda been the most hated guy in that city. constant movement across Ukraine, mentality mismatch, all the usual things. my family was treated as foreigners everywhere except Kyiv.

and you know what? I'm grateful to them all for leveling up my opsec, among other things :)

by bpavuk

5/10/2026 at 6:43:06 PM

Customers give us heat for not shipping the latest vulpine-lz4. Their AI-based heuristic antivirus total defence solution automatically flags all software not running latest versions of everything

Kindly advice

by nikanj

5/10/2026 at 7:39:57 PM

Ya, latest is a mess. I don't care about latest, I want the version with no known security flaws.

by pixl97

5/10/2026 at 8:00:39 PM

Latest has no known security flaws.

by the8472

5/11/2026 at 2:59:07 AM

Well, other than the one where the developer allowed someone hawking malware to upload instead.

by pixl97

5/10/2026 at 8:48:46 PM

I almost prefer the one with the known security flaws that I can mitigate.

by cwillu

5/10/2026 at 8:01:49 PM

good thing I don't use npm or pip, just the recommended

    curl ... | bash

by mac3n

5/10/2026 at 8:12:08 PM

It's curl | sudo bash.

Amateur.

by fragmede

5/11/2026 at 6:23:52 AM

I always sudo curl to be extra sure.

by fmbb

5/11/2026 at 6:23:31 AM

Weak sauce.

curl | sudo dd of=/dev/sda

by naruhodo

5/10/2026 at 10:50:03 PM

To be really sure it downloads, curl -k | sudo bash

by walrus01

5/11/2026 at 12:25:22 AM

`curl -k | sudo bash | yes` for good measure, otherwise it might hang.

by scrollaway

5/11/2026 at 2:15:41 AM

If you really want to make sure that it's the right thing (because piping to sudo bash is risky), make sure the URL starts with "pastebin", or ends in ".tk", or is an IP address.

by somebudyelse

5/11/2026 at 2:39:56 AM

To be absolutely positively certain, be sure that the IP address is also in the same /24 as the same net blocks and hosted on the same AS that appear in every DNS based mail RBL possible.

by walrus01

5/11/2026 at 9:28:55 AM

Root Cause: "A dog named Kubernetes ate a YubiKey."

Technically... that's not even a joke... that really is what kicked off this entire chain of events lol.

This post reads like an actual movie lol. Someone seriously needs to make one based on this.

It has everything:

the missing key that starts the chaos, the scam nobody sees coming, one tiny mistake turning into a full-on domino disaster, sleep-deprived people making very confident bad decisions, the guy who disappeared to a farm living his best life while holding a critical piece of the puzzle... and somehow, in the final act, a completely unrelated villain accidentally saves everyone.

Imma 100% watch it..

by freakynit

5/10/2026 at 9:03:33 PM

Maintainer uses AI to find Yubikey's site.

Hacker uses AI to research countries without extradition to US.

Cops use AI to analyze ransom note. Unfortunately, because the note confidently states that Vietnam has no extradition to the US, the AI recommends paying ransom.

Vietnam's currency, the Dong, confused the AI..

by wodahs1

5/10/2026 at 9:11:10 PM

AI rejects all currency exchange transactions to Dong because of a hardcoded system prompt resulting in an overly rigid Scunthorpe problem.

by walrus01

5/10/2026 at 7:22:22 PM

Very enjoyable read, entirely too close to the mark

by swiftcoder

5/10/2026 at 8:27:47 PM

the fact that this could easily pass as real says a lot about the state of things.

by notnmeyer

5/10/2026 at 9:27:58 PM

I was convinced it was real for a long time.

by mchl-mumo

5/10/2026 at 8:46:41 PM

I hardly blinked at “left-justify”, just rolled my eyes and mentally griped “what, again‽”

by cwillu

5/10/2026 at 7:31:03 PM

This would have been completely avoided if you were using bun dependency vector locking in Nix.

by TZubiri

5/11/2026 at 3:07:38 AM

That way instead of getting the vulnerabilities now, you get them later! The joys of computing!

by MarsIronPI

5/10/2026 at 9:35:44 PM

Please someone make a mockumentary out of this.

by lschueller

5/11/2026 at 8:37:47 AM

If this:

"... old laptop, and 'something Kubernetes threw up that looked important' were stolen from his apartment ..."

was related to:

"... enters his nmp credentials on the phishing site ..."

Then I suppose it is really interesting.

by jruohonen

5/10/2026 at 9:25:52 PM

'The changelog reads “performance improvements.”' was the truest part for me. Surely what we're releasing is the most fundamental thing to understand, yet almost every single app update I see is this or something jokey that really means "don't know" or "don't care"

by f4c39012

5/10/2026 at 6:46:02 PM

absolutely hilarious, made me laugh a lot. thank you for writing this, whether human or AI.

by danielfalbo

5/11/2026 at 8:38:39 AM

Link this with the fact that anyone can use any name/email in commits and appear as the legitimate contributor on GitHub and it completes the chain. Love it :)

by simon84

5/11/2026 at 7:56:45 AM

A clickbait title should be: "A dog named Kubernetes ate a YubiKey."

by abbaselmas

5/11/2026 at 11:53:16 AM

I would consider that a spoiler

by scared_together

5/10/2026 at 6:51:50 PM

This week has been tough. Is it the begging of CVEgeddon?

by danilocesar

5/11/2026 at 3:53:47 AM

left-justify !! LOL. History really does repeat its self. Remember left-pad supply chain security panic?

by mrinterweb

5/11/2026 at 5:08:57 AM

Not a valid CVE number.

by worthless-trash

5/10/2026 at 7:55:18 PM

Too soon

by somebudyelse

5/10/2026 at 8:48:29 PM

According to Pangram, this is likely AI generated, surprised that no one has pointed this out

by bklosky

5/10/2026 at 8:55:39 PM

Not a chance. Far too funny, too well written, too terse while being densely packed with wit. I see zero signs of it being LLM-generated and lots of stuff LLMs have no way of doing.

If I am somehow wrong I would salivate at a chance to see the input.

by furyofantares

5/10/2026 at 9:04:51 PM

The author suddenly began writing a post per day around November 2025. They’re all tongue-in-cheek. I believe you are wrong.

by peyton

5/10/2026 at 9:07:53 PM

Huh, neat. I will take a look at those.

And actually I see it clearly now, it has a bunch of signs I have called out multiple times myself. (It is entirely made out of lists of various types, and never states an opinion.)

Just my ego getting hold of me because I didn't realize it on my own.

by furyofantares

5/11/2026 at 10:00:53 AM

I’m also struggling with this being AI. The blog owner is a real person who’s made significant contributions to the community for years. His post timeline is organic - wayback machine confirms they were published on the dates they show. So it’s definitely not a bot running the blog.

Whether (or to what extent) he uses AI to generate the content he posts is a valid question.

I agree with your earlier reasoning that this is far more clever than anything I’ve seen AI produce yet. Lots of AI humor is dad-joke level at best. If it is AI then he’s trained it on a hand-curated collection of top-shelf satire.

by ninjalanternshk

5/10/2026 at 9:44:41 PM

You don't even need to read past the first timeline entry. The name "Marcus Chen" is literally a meme within AI creative writing circles due to how often Claude defaults to that exact name when naming fictional characters.

by bakugo

5/11/2026 at 3:08:31 AM

Probably being used to enhance the humor, intentionally.

by MarsIronPI

5/11/2026 at 5:19:19 AM

I never used Pangram before today, but since I've seen it mentioned many times on HN and I enjoyed reading the OP, I decided to try it. I am only using the free plan so let me know if I'm missing something. I am assuming the parent was referring to the tool hosted at pangram.com and not some other tool of the same name.

Pangram indeed claims the OP is 76% AI-generated. It has "high confidence" (EDIT: some parts are "medium confidence") that the early portions of the text were created by AI, and "medium confidence" that some of the later potions were written by a human. EDIT: I was especially dismayed to see that the dog might have been an AI creation :(

When I use the "supporting evidence" option, the main piece of evidence Pangram provides is the frequent use of em-dashes. Each timestamp is followed by an em-dash. Personally I think the em-dashes could be a copy-pasted em-dash or inserted by a markdown to HTML converter. nesbitt.io is apparently using Jekyll [0] - any Jekyll users know anything about this??

Pangram's "supporting evidence" feature also considers → and € to be "unusual Unicode".

Personally, to me it looks like the "supporting evidence" feature still needs some work because Pangram's AI detection is probably a lot more sophisticated than a grep for Unicode symbols. In fact the feature even has a notice claiming that "These patterns aren't used to determine our AI score; they help you see why AI text often reads differently."

As for the rest of the OP's content, it would be interesting to compare the Pangram results to a timeline of a real vulnerability. I tried doing so, but exhausted my free "Pangram credits" - apparently the first 1000 words of this article [1] about the log4j vulnerability is considered 100% human.

[0] https://github.com/andrew/nesbitt.io

[1] https://www.csoonline.com/article/571797/the-apache-log4j-vu...

by scared_together

5/11/2026 at 11:47:00 AM

[dead]

by fallpeak

5/11/2026 at 9:11:30 AM

my sides

the kubernetes reveal had me literally in tears

by baq

5/10/2026 at 7:53:53 PM

> unrelated security researcher publishes a blog post titled “I found a supply chain attack and reported it to all the wrong people.”

ahahaha like that fiverr cloudinary bucket leak that turned out to just be a UX issue, this has me rolling

by yieldcrv

5/10/2026 at 7:59:03 PM

imagine a future where white-hat vs black-hat "AI" go around the web trying to patch vs exploit 0-days

and then become aware of each other

and then try to eliminate each other for decades

each escalating resource capture and writing new generations of better "AI"

by ck2

5/10/2026 at 9:11:06 PM

There is definitely an anime about this.

by xg15

5/11/2026 at 1:51:37 AM

nice

by quxuejun