Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 243 posts.

Web & Frontend
216

Web-based cryptography is always snake oil

Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer “end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service, which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises “end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that it can't see your…

218

I Just Want to Search

Learning to search was a key skill growing up as a teen in the 2000s. How to use accurate keywords, quotes, the entire lot of search operators. Google-fu was a hard earned skill (yes, I read a book) and helped me figure out a surprising amount of life.

226

Tailwind and slop apps

Tailwind is great. It's a quick way to style a webpage and offers incredible flexibility. The problem is, despite Tailwind being incredibly customisable I can instantly tell when a site is using Tailwind. It has a certain look and feel that is hard to shake. A few years ago this "look and feel" was fresh and classy…

229

Sprites on the Web

In game development, it’s common to use spritesheets for animation, but this technique isn’t as widely used on the web these days. Which is a shame, because we can do some pretty cool stuff with sprites! In this post, we’ll share the niche CSS function you can use to leverage this technique, and explore some of the…

232

Justifying Text-Wrap: Pretty

Something truly monumental happened in the world of software development in 2025. Safari shipped a reasonable implementation of text-wrap: pretty: https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wrap-pretty/. We are getting closer and closer to the cutting-edge XV-century technology. Beautiful paragraphs!

236

An NSFW filter for Marginalia search

… optional, that is. I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers. The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach. We’ll land on a single…