Any guesses why some of the newest files seem to have random ”=” characters in the text? My first thought was OCR, but it seemed to not be linked to characters like ”E” that could be mistakenly interpreted by an OCR tool. My second guess is just making it more difficult to produce reliable text searches, but probably 90% of HN readers could find a way to make a search tool that does not fall apart in case a ”=” character is found (although making this work for long search queries would make the search slower).

Was on the frontpage yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868759

The equal characters are due to poor handling of quoted-printable in email.

The author of gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen, wrote a blog post explaining this. His post was on the HN front page today.