Hey buddy,

Just finished scrolling through Hacker News from Tuesday, November 4, 2025. Man, some interesting stuff popped up. Thought I'd give you the quick rundown.

X (Twitter) Auto-Opens Links in Webview

First off, remember how X (you know, Twitter) was doing that thing where it'd open any link in its own web browser, even if you didn't click it? Well, it's back, and people are still hating it. It apparently causes a bunch of "fake views" because it just preloads everything.

But here's the kicker from the comments: even after correcting for those fake views, Substack's traffic from X actually went up substantially! Wild, right? Some folks in the comments were saying it's an old, annoying feature that Elon brought back, probably just to keep people stuck in the app and track everything.

The Story of Mr. Tiff

There was a cool article about the creator of the TIFF image format. It sounds like TIFF was super flexible, which was both its greatest strength and biggest weakness. People in the comments were saying that because it was so extensible, no two programs ever really supported the *exact* same TIFF extensions, which caused a ton of compatibility headaches back in the day. Someone also brought up how finding old digital archives, like the Vine videos, is a big deal for preserving internet history, which kinda ties into the whole "old tech" vibe.

My Truck Desk

Okay, this one was a bit different. Someone wrote about how they work out of their truck, basically turning it into a mobile office. They talked about how productive they can be in those small chunks of time waiting around. A cool takeaway from the comments was how someone mentioned that "context switching is a skill that gets easier the more you practice it," which totally makes sense for busy folks like us.

When Stick Figures Fought

This one was a blast from the past! It was all about the old Flash stick-figure fighting animations, like Xiao Xiao. Remember those? The comments were full of nostalgia for that era of the internet. There was a good debate about whether Flash itself was a CPU hog, or if it was just because a lot of non-coders were writing really inefficient code for it. Good times!

The Morris Worm Anniversary

Talk about a throwback! It was the anniversary of the Morris Worm from 1988, which was one of the first major internet worms. This thing infected like 10% of the entire internet in just 24 hours! What's really wild is that Robert Morris, the guy who created it, later went on to co-found Viaweb with Paul Graham. Pretty wild career trajectory, huh? Someone else in the comments compared it to SQL Slammer for being incredibly fast at spreading.

NoLongerEvil-Thermostat Firmware

Finally, for the tinkerers out there: someone released open-source firmware called NoLongerEvil-Thermostat for the old Nest Generation 1 and 2 thermostats. The idea is to free them from Google's cloud and make them "less evil." People in the comments were talking about how important this is because these internet-connected devices often stop getting updates and just become useless bricks, so having open firmware like this is a real lifesaver for keeping them working.

Alright, that's the gist of it. Talk soon!