Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 966 posts.

Software Engineering
458

5NF and Database Design

Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…

470

TruffleRuby

TruffleRuby started as my internship project at Oracle Labs in early 2013. It is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on the JVM, using the Graal dynamic compiler and the Truffle AST interpreter framework . TruffleRuby can achieve peak performance well beyond that possible in JRuby at the same time as…