Best of 2026

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

Software Engineering
996

The quadratic sandwich

If you have ever tried to minimize a function with gradient descent, you probably noticed that some functions are a joy to optimize and others are a nightmare. The difference often boils down to two properties: strong convexity and L-smoothness. These two concepts define a “sandwich” of quadratic bounds around your…

1004

Deno 2.9

`deno desktop` for building native desktop apps from web tech, first-class migration from npm/pnpm/yarn/Bun, CSS module imports, snapshot and parameterized testing, smaller `deno compile --bundle` binaries, and Node.js 26 compatibility.