Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 662 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
36

Migrating to the EU

For various reasons, I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection. I don’t want to go into the first point any further for…

38

Personal Encyclopedias

Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone…

51

First, make me care

Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.

52

Goodbye Claude, hello Pi

I’ve been a longtime Claude Code user, ever since it became available in the Claude Pro subscription plan over a year ago. I remember the first time I used it, feeling giddy as it spat out messy Python code for whatever random weekend project I was working on, all from a single prompt. I’m certain that in a few years…

60

A Decade of Slug

What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…