Best of 2026

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

Life, Learning & Writing
635

The Slow Death of the Power User

There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read…

641

How can I keep from singing?

This is a story of a most unexpected journey — one that is just starting. If somebody had told me four years ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have stared at them in astonishment or laughed dismissedly. Yet here I am, writing about a late-found hobby that has somehow become a very important part of my life.

649

I love email (2023)

I constantly hear about how much everybody hates email. Look, I receive just as many spam messages and useless email-based notifications and stuffy vapid “regarding my previous email” work messages as the next gal. I get it. But I’ve found there’s something magical about email as a medium of communication, and as a…

651

Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep?

This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu. It is widely known that people don’t remember the first 1-3 years of their childhood, only have episodic memory at 3-6 years old, and only after those first 5-6 years we start to form autobiographical memories. So…

654

Eating Fruit Skins

This summer, I learned that one can eat a whole apple. Every part of the apple is edible 1 . Before learning this, I would just eat the flesh and throw away the core. The core seemed hard and jagged and inedible. Turns out, you can eat the whole thing. I suppose I’ve always known that deer eat the whole apple. Why…