Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 1,413 posts.

Software Engineering
578

An incoherent Rust

Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.

583

An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…

587

Nix wrote half of my debugger

A few days ago I wrote about Rewind VM, a deterministic VM where every run of a Nix build is a pure function of its inputs, thread schedule included! I have been using it to find, reproduce and solve numerous race conditions in Nix builds, but it’s been making me feel a little crazy. What is this superpower, and why…

590

Racket v9.2

_posted by Stephen De Gabrielle and John Clements_ We are pleased to announce Racket v9.2 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/. As of this release:: The `match` form checks that when non-linear patterns (patterns where the same vari...