Daily HN summary for February 9, 2026, focusing on the top stories and the themes that dominated discussion.

Themes

• Infrastructure fragility and centralization: GitHub outages highlighted how much modern development relies on a few chokepoints.
• Security incentives: from Ivanti exploits to telecom disclosures, misaligned incentives keep surfacing.
• Bootstrapping weirdness as joy: UEFI + JavaScript and planetary‑scale visibility searches show HN’s love for audacious systems work.
• Practical engineering over purity: C‑generation and road‑geometry posts focused on techniques that survive real constraints.
• Skepticism toward “backdoors”: telecom discussions returned to lawful‑intercept systems as high‑value targets.

Sleeper Shells: Attackers Are Planting Dormant Backdoors in Ivanti EPMM

Link: https://defusedcyber.com/ivanti-epmm-sleeper-shells-403jsp
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946062
Summary: A threat‑intel writeup on a February 2026 exploitation wave targeting Ivanti EPMM via auth‑bypass + RCE, with attackers dropping a dormant in‑memory Java class loader at /mifs/403.jsp that can be activated later to load a second‑stage payload.
Discussion: Commenters were unsurprised that enterprise security/compliance products become high‑value attack vectors; many urged shrinking exposed surface area and noted how AI‑assisted scanning could accelerate exploitation.

GitHub Is Down

Link: https://github.com/
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946872
Summary: A front‑page outage thread driven by widespread availability issues and the unicorn error page, highlighting how dependent teams are on GitHub for code hosting, issues, PRs, and security workflows.
Discussion: Debate centered on what “critical infrastructure” should deliver (communication, postmortems, resilience) and whether platform complexity is hurting reliability.

Thoughts on Generating C

Link: https://wingolog.org/archives/2026/02/09/six-thoughts-on-generating-c
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945235
Summary: A compiler engineer’s notes on using C as a backend: static inline helpers, explicit integer conversions with -Wconversion, and “intent types” via single‑field structs; also recommends memcpy for unaligned loads and highlights ABI/tail‑call pitfalls.
Discussion: Many agreed the tradeoffs feel real in practice; debugging tips like #line directives and the difficulty of precise GC when targeting C were common threads.

UEFI Bindings for JavaScript

Link: https://codeberg.org/smnx/promethee
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945348
Summary: “Promethee” boots into a JavaScript environment inside UEFI, loading script.js from the boot volume and exposing UEFI services to JS in a freestanding build.
Discussion: The thread mixed delight at the audacity with skepticism about GC pauses and firmware constraints; many noted you still need C/asm for low‑level setup.

Show HN: Algorithmically Finding the Longest Line of Sight on Earth

Link: https://alltheviews.world/
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943568
Summary: A project that exhaustively searched Earth’s terrain for the longest visible line‑of‑sight and presents results via an interactive map, reportedly using a Rust + SIMD pipeline over hundreds of cores.
Discussion: The conversation focused on how to compute viewsheds at planetary scale and praised the pairing of a deep pipeline with a playful visualization.

It’s not you; GitHub is down again (Status Page)

Link: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/54hndjxft5bx
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946827
Summary: The status page reported notification delays while users reported broader site instability, creating a messaging mismatch.
Discussion: Some argued for more decentralized Git hosting; others noted Git already enables that, yet GitHub remains the collaboration chokepoint.

Long‑Sought Proof Tames Some of Math’s Unruliest Equations

Link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/long-sought-proof-tames-some-of-maths-unruliest-equations-20260206/
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945641
Summary: A Quanta Magazine story about extending Schauder theory to a hard subclass of elliptic PDEs for nonuniform materials, improving analysis where solutions can be irregular.
Discussion: Visible comments were limited, mostly asking about real‑world modeling impact and practical significance.

Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original

Link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/medieval-monks-wrote-over-a-copy-of-an-ancient-star-catalog-now-a-particle-accelerator-is-revealing-the-long-lost-original-text-180988123/
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885249
Summary: A headline‑level palimpsest story: medieval manuscripts overwritten by monks, with modern imaging (particle‑accelerator‑based techniques) revealing an older star catalog beneath.
Discussion: No visible discussion was available in the fetched summary.

AT&T, Verizon Blocking Release of Salt Typhoon Security Assessment Reports

Link: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/senator-says-att-verizon-blocking-release-salt-typhoon-security-assessment-2026-02-03/
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945497
Summary: Reuters reports Sen. Maria Cantwell says AT&T and Verizon are blocking release of Mandiant security assessments tied to “Salt Typhoon,” an alleged Chinese spying operation in telecom networks; China denies responsibility.
Discussion: Debate split between “lawful intercept/backdoor” risk vs telco complexity and underinvestment; many agreed telecom is critical infrastructure needing stronger oversight.

Art of Roads in Games

Link: https://sandboxspirit.com/blog/art-of-roads-in-games/
HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938511
Summary: A technical art essay on why road geometry in city‑building games often feels wrong, arguing that Bezier offsets break curvature and advocating circular arcs (and optionally clothoids) as more robust primitives.
Discussion: The thread mixed urban‑planning debate (roads vs streets, stroads) with sim‑design ideas about legacy messiness vs idealized geometry.