Best of 2025

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

Web & Frontend
97

An SVG is all you need

SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised…

110

New layouts with CSS Subgrid

Subgrid allows us to extend a grid template down through the DOM tree, so that deeply-nested elements can participate in the same grid layout. At first glance, I thought this would be a helpful convenience, but it turns out that it’s so much more. Subgrid unlocks exciting new layout possibilities, stuff we couldn’t do…

112

Feed the bots

A week ago , I set up a dynamically generated nonsense maze to catch LLM scrapers. Now, requests to it make up 99.9% of my server's traffic, but my total request volume did not increase. The bots didn't come to my site because of the trap.

118

Just use a button

One of the weirdest “debates” I seem to perpetually have with framework-enthusiastic developers is whether or not a <div> is “just as good” as a <button>. Spoiler: it’s not. Let’s dig in. The problem Among the React crowd, and also among people who seem to enjoy HTMX, I see a lot this… <div onclick="showSignIn()">…