Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 668 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
575

What Killed Innovation?

I entered the data visualization field in 2012, when D3.js had just come out and interactive graphics were going through a digital Renaissance. By the time I was fully steeped in the field in 2016, it felt like a new, experimental project was coming out every week—each one pushing the boundaries of how we think about…

583

Is Winter Coming? (2024)

In the 1960s, AI researchers tried - and failed - to deliver machine translation of Russian to English. Overly confident researchers, lazy journalists and far too optimistic tech utopianists all built expectations that couldn't be met. Eventually, the lack of results put a stop to the previously generous funding. The…

594

Swedish Campground (2004)

We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…