Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 757 posts.

AI & Machine Learning
727

The AI Marketing BS Index

You may already be aware of John Baez’s “Crackpot Index” , which provides a simple tongue-in-cheek scoring system for assessing whether a research contribution to physics is likely “revolutionary.” The list contain such gems as “40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is…

733

Can Claude Fly a Plane?

I asked Claude to look up the X-Plane 12 API and try to fly a Cessna from Hainan to somewhere nearby. It kept a pilot's log. Everything below is Claude's own notes from during the flight. I occasionally had to remind it to keep the pilot log running, and had to tell it when it crashed as xplane would quickly restart…

744

Making a vintage LLM from scratch

In this blog post, I will share the adventures I had creating my own LLM, from (almost) scratch, trained only on old texts. I made my own base-training and fine-tuning scripts, data processing pipelines and custom datasets. ("almost from scratch" means I did use existing programming languages and libraries, I didn't…