Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 377 posts.

Web & Frontend
123

Returning to Rails in 2026

I love a good side-project. Like most geeks, I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when faced with problems - give me a minor inconvenience and I’ll happily spend weeks building something far more elaborate than the situation warrants. There’s joy in having a playground to explore ideas and “what ifs”; Building…

125

Vivaldi 8.0

More than thirteen years in, and I am still as excited about building this browser as I was on day one. Maybe more. That excitement comes from a genuine belief that the people who use Vivaldi deserve…

126

Multi-stroke text effect in CSS

I used to see that retro multi-stroke text effect quite often and tried to replicate it using the CSS text-stroke property, but the results never quite matched. Because text-stroke accepts a single value, stacking elements was the only workaround I could think of, though it didn't seem to work.

134

SAML: A fractal of bad design

SAML, the XML-based authentication protocol that birthed the SSO industry, is fundamentally flawed due to XML complexity, canonicalization issues, enveloped signatures, and design ossification, making it vulnerable to signature wrapping attacks and parser differentials that persist despite decades of awareness…