The guidelines talk about primary sources and story about a story submisisons https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Creating a new URL with effectively the same info but further removed from the primary source is not good HN etiquette.

Plus this is just content marketing for the ai security startup who posted it. Theyve added nothing, but get a link to their product on the front page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The researcher who first reported the vuln has their writeup at https://adnanthekhan.com/posts/clinejection/

Previous HN discussions of the orginal source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064933

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072982

I love these questions bc they both can be answered with some slight heuristics, and they are quite surprising!

As of January 2026, there were > 13k npm packages w/ more than 1 Million monthly downloads [1]

Answering "how many total developers does that cover" is a lot harder (more expensive, rather, as I am not going to pay for the query on Google BigQuery to answer it, not after I spent $3k by accident last time doing similar exploration in the past)

I wont try to make a SWAG about how many devs have write access across those repos, but in the npm ecosystem alone I'm comfortable saying it is an order of magnitude more than 100.

[1] - https://gist.github.com/jonchurch/1dd845f4d26823fce5590af1aa...

Agreed that $200 USD would be preferable (credits dont pay rent). My comment is directed at the strong words others have left about this being in bad faith on the whole. Even if it is, then their bad faith efforts are better than most.

Opinions here will vary, I wanted to share mine <3

I dont know what the future will look like, but IMO open source is the intersection of code and community (aka the squishy bits) and for that reason I dont think AI will make it obselete, not now nor in the future.

I maintain Express.js and Lodash, as well as a number of express direct deps (as a TC member of both Express and Lodash).

OSS has been my fulltime focus for over a year (aka Im unemployed). In 2025 I made $10 from open source, in the form of an amazon gift card for fixing a bug in another random open source project (I think they have VC money).

Call it skill issue on my part, sure valid. But having a form that says “give us your email and handle, we can easily verify your contributions, and in exchange you get $200/month of value and we ask nothing of you” is the most generous gift Ive seen.

Is it enough to fix the well known power dynamics of OSS? Of course not. Is it cheap PR for Anthropic? Yes, as is every other corporate OSS fund initiative. Im not going to give them a standing ovation and a key to the city bc they cleared the extremely low bar.

My point is that, regardless of motives, from this maintainer’s perspective this is a kind offer which is respectful of me and my time. If you fall into the camp that training on OSS is stealing, I can see why youd think that this is a slap in the face. I personally do not see it that way, as my work is a conduit for me to serve millions Ill never meet, and what they do with my labor is not a personal concern. I do what I do because the process itself has value to me.

For ref, here is the post from Joshua Rogers about their investigation into the tooling landscape which yielded those findings

https://joshua.hu/llm-engineer-review-sast-security-ai-tools...

“AI Slop attacks on the curl project” https://youtu.be/6n2eDcRjSsk

If I can write 8 9k line PRs everyday and open them against open source projects, even closing them let alone engaging with them in good faith is an incredible time drain vs the time investment to create them.

Edit: left out that the user got flamed by non contributors for their apparently AI generated PR and description (rude), in defense of which they did say they were using several AI tools to drive the work. :

We have a performance working group which is the venue for discussing perf based work. Some of your ideas have come up in that venue, please go make issues there to discuss your ideas

my 2 cents on AI output: these tools are very useful, please wield them in such a way that it respects the time of the human who will be reading your output. This is the longest PR description I have ever read and it does not sound like a human wrote it, nor does it sound like a PR description. The PR also does multiple unrelated things in a single 1k line changeset, which is a nonstarter without prior discussion.

I don't doubt your intention is pure, ty for wanting to contribute.

There are norms in open source which are hard to learn from the outside, idk how to fix that, but your efforts here deviate far enough from them in what I assume is naivety that it looks like spam.

It seems this was their first time going down this rabbit hole, so for them and anyone else, I'd urge you to use the deps.dev Google BigQuery dataset [0] for this kind of analysis. It does indeed include NPM and would have made the author's work trivial.

Here's a gist with the query and the results https://gist.github.com/jonchurch/9f9283e77b4937c8879448582b...

[0] - https://docs.deps.dev/bigquery/v1/

https://s2.dev/playground?token=Oq4AAAAAAABodAPA46wzu2bBlbU7...

https://t2tmud.org/history/30th_anniversary_reboot_script.ph...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/setT...

I think it has clear requirements and opportunities for nudges from the interviewer without invalidating the assessment (when someone inevitably gets tunnel vision on one particular requirement). It has plenty of ways for an interviewee to demonstrate their knowledge and solve the problem in different ways.

Ive run debounce interview questions that attempt to exercise similar competency from candidates, with layering on of requirements time allowing (leading/trailing edge, cancel, etc) and this queue form honestly feels closer to what Id expect devs to actually have built in their day to day.

“… it doesn't ever have to handle more than one request at once (at least from the same client, so we can assume this is a single-server per-client type of architecture).“

For sure a multithreaded async queue would be a very interesting interview, but if you started with the send system the interview is constructed around youd run out of time quickly.