Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 161 posts.

Open Source
63

FreeCAD v1.1

After an enormous amount of work and dedication from FreeCAD contributors we are delighted to announce that FreeCAD Version 1.1 is now released and available for download. There are significant amo…

65

ACM Is Now Open Access

As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable.

67

The federated code forge

For most of the past two decades, the code forge has been where projects live: where code is hosted, where changes are reviewed, and where contributors find each other. Forges offered convenience in exchange for centralisation.

71

The Zulip Foundation

Today marks a major transition for the Zulip open-source project and for Kandra Labs, the company behind it: I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation. …

74

Linux 7.2

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…

77

Squeak 6.1

These release notes are optimized for viewing inside Squeak, as they contain a lot of interactive examples. On this page, interactive links open in SqueakJS, which is a browser-based Smalltalk VM with some limitations. For the best experience, download Squeak and read the release notes there.

87

Apache Arrow is 10 years old

The Apache Arrow project was officially established and had its first git commit on February 5th 2016, and we are therefore enthusiastic to announce its 10-year anniversary! Looking back over these 10 years, the project has developed in many unforeseen ways and we believe to have delivered on our objective of…

88

CERN to host a new phase of Open Research Europe

In an important step for open science, CERN has been selected to host a new phase of Open Research Europe (ORE) , an initiative supported by the European Commission and a new funding consortium of European national funding agencies and research organisations. Aligned with the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (2022)…