Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 204 posts.

Math & Algorithms
22

JPEG Compression

JPEG is a clever image compression algorithm that exploits a human perceptual bias and the structure of natural images. It makes a change of basis before encoding so that the rewritten image representation concentrates the signal that humans are most perceptive to, and thus, the remaining details can be discarded…

30

You can beat the binary search

We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values one by one, until we encounter the value, or exhaust the … Continue reading…