Best of 2026

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

Software Engineering
1130

A whole boss fight in 256 bytes

Endbot is a complete audio-visual demo that fits in exactly 256 bytes . It runs under DOS (via DosBox-X) and renders in real-time: a robot sprite with progressive bullet damage, a growing explosion, a scrolling checkerboard landscape, and a MIDI soundtrack - all from a single tiny .com file.

1140

Zigzag Decoding with AVX-512

I’ve been working on speeding up AVX-512 vertex decoding in meshoptimizer recently; in the process I stumbled upon two optimizations that I did not end up using but I thought they might be fun to write about! The optimizations that actually made it in require some higher level background / explanations that will have…