Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 325 posts.

Web & Frontend
272

Stop crawling my HTML – use the API

One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers"…

273

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403

Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403 Postmortem It is a feature not a bug! I got detailed explanation from chrome developers which is very helpful. You may find the complete response in the bug ticket. Also this blog post draws a lot of attention after I post it on Hackers News. You may find comments here…

274

Just Use HTML

I’ve worked on so many projects recently that were more complicated than they needed to be because they used JavaScript to generate HTML. JavaScript is… Slower to load Slower to run More prone to breaking Harder to read and reason about Doesn’t actually look like the final output It’s inferior to just using HTML in…

277

Local First Htmx

Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…

285

Finding Dead Websites

As some of the work planned for Marginalia Search this year has been progressing a bit faster than anticipated, there was time to implement an unplanned change. This post details the implementation of a system for detecting when servers are online, to avoid serving dead links and improve data quality, and for…

294

Move on to ESM-Only

Three years ago, I wrote a post about shipping ESM & CJS in a single package , advocating for dual CJS/ESM formats to ease user migration and trying to make the best of both worlds. Back then, I didn’t fully agree with aggressively shipping ESM-only , as I considered the ecosystem wasn’t ready, especially since the…