Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 254 posts.

Games & Graphics
9

Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

Igalia is an open source consulting firm specialised in the development of innovative projects and solutions. Our engineers have expertise in a wide range of technological areas, including browsers and client-side web technologies, graphics pipeline, compilers and virtual machines. We have the most WPE, WebKit…

16

The Most Mario Colors

The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was…

22

Half-Life

Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…

24

Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

Interested in Anti-Cheat analysis? I highly recommend checking out Guided Hacking’s Anti-Cheat section. I’ve been reversing Black Ops Cold War for a while now, and I’ve finally decided to share my research regarding the user-mode anti-cheat inside the game. It’s not my intention to shame or promote cheating/bypassing…

27

Solitaire

I have cited a few games as inspiration for Balatro in the past, but I wanted to talk about one in particular that hasn’t been mentioned much that arguably is the most important. I think if I had some kind of Balatro vision board, solitaire (Klondike) would be right in the middle of it with a big r