Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 6,220 posts.

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5347

Microplastics: No longer a "maybe"

It’s Already Inside Us Microplastics are not just an environmental problem affecting nature. They’re in our blood [1] , lungs [2] , placentas [3] , brains [4] , and breast milk [5] . Every human tissue scientists have tested so far has come back contaminated. In diseased tissue samples of people with chronic illnesses…

5363

Quirks of Common Lisp Types

Humans have a tendency toward binary thinking (pardon the pun). If it's not A, it's B. Perhaps because Lisps have REPLs, they are often thought of from the outside as being dynamic, interpreted languages. Our years of Python have taught us that such languages don't really have strong typing - it's all a wild guess…

5364

QVQ-Max: Think with Evidence

QWEN CHAT GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DISCORD Introduction Last December, we launched QVQ-72B-Preview as an exploratory model, but it had many issues. Today, we are officially releasing the first version of QVQ-Max, our visual reasoning model. This model can not only “understand” the content in images and videos…

5367

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…