Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 518 posts.

Systems & Performance
121

The scourge of x86 emulation

Welcome to the first feature article on our site. We’re going to cover an ongoing problem with x86 emulation that affects every application that we emulate. This comes down to a single over-arching term that has wide-reaching ramifications; Emulating the x86 Total Store Ordering memory model (x86-TSO) .

128

Every Byte Matters

I have spent a large portion of my career working in Java. In that time, you get used to huge classes. New functionality? Just add a new method and field to the class. The cost of each new field is rarely considered. Performance is often considered from a classic computer science perspective by considering asymptotic…