HackerX

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2026

Ideas that Hacker News readers were still recommending in 2026.

34 posts cited122 citations

Counts show how many picks Hacker News readers cited in each year, not when the post was written.

@mxcl

Career

@mxcl

View on X
Recommended by 42 HN users
From the Hacker News threadleetcode seems to agree with your definition [0]. the meme isn't to say that inverting a binary tree is particularly difficult - anyone familiar with coding challenges and trees could trivially produce a solution. the meme is more pointing out how ludicrous it is that senior/staff/principal interviews can hinge on these types of problems, despite the engineer proving their proficiency by doing something like running DOOM in typescript types or writing homebrew [1]. [0] leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tre…... [1] x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768@LiquixTypeScript types can run DOOM [video]2025
117

@yishan

Internet

@yishan

View on X
Recommended by 7 HN users
From the Hacker News threadVery nice thread by the former CEO of Reddit about online behavior, moderation, etc: x.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 Per the thread, it’s possible this problem could’ve been solved by burying the site in affiliate links…@msteffenGot kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made2026
18

@karpathy

AI

@karpathy

View on X
Recommended by 6 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI don't think there is evidence in either direction (takeoff impossible vs inevitable). But the "convex hull" idea always came across as wishful thinking and hand-wavy pseudo-science to me. Here's a rebuttal [0] of it from Tim Gowers (uses another math metaphor, but still clear and the whole thread is worth a read): >...the popularity of the idea that AI "merely explores the convex hull" mystifies me. Why wouldn't it be more like the subgroup generated by existing mathematical knowledge? (That's also a metaphor -- I'm not saying there's a group structure.) >The convex hull metaphor suggests that AI isn't having radically new ideas and will eventually run out of things to do, whereas the group metaphor suggests the possibility of building up in small steps to something well beyond what you started with, with no obvious limit. [0] twitter.com/wtgowers/status/21080909208…@pelican0The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening2026
8

@CRTpixels

Hardware

@CRTpixels

View on X
Recommended by 5 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI get your point, but also on the other hand, art is subjective, and people subjectively appreciate older / imperfect versions of things. Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made. But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back - it gets added artificially to modern films, added as filters to video games, and video encoding has special features to support it without affecting compression negatively too much. Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616… But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing. At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.@Cthulhu_Pirating the Pirates2026
9

@garius

Business

@garius

View on X
Recommended by 4 HN users
From the Hacker News threadSpeaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all, under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to avoid them or not. 1. x.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904@GolfPopperMicrosoft's "fix" for Windows 112026
5

@sergeykarayev

AI

@sergeykarayev

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadGPT3 has demonstrably been able to run/execute execute and make API requests with python for quite some time now. You can test it too. See here twitter.com/sergeykarayev/status/156937… twitter.com/sergeykarayev/status/157086… None of this seems like it would be hard to implement. The memory would be the more out there thing but even that would be a matter of retrieval.@famouswafflesAI teaches itself to use an API2023
8

@AuthorJMac

AI

@AuthorJMac

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. From: x.com/AuthorJMac/status/177367919763170… As a species, we need to evaluate our attitudes to work. The quote above resonates at some level, but maybe there are some people who enjoy doing dishes and laundry, who knows. Most people are just surviving. It is a constant battle between slaving away in jobs (and have healthcare tied to our jobs) we don't like and rest of our lives, including relationships, hobbies, even health. Most people do not have the time or energy to think about anything else other than just getting through the day.@akudhaIn Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants2026
4

@Rich_Harris

Web Development

@Rich_Harris

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadUnfortunately, as most of them left Twitter they also temoved all their accounts, so you can only see responses from framework authors like Rich Harris. But here's a very on-brand toot from Alex Russel: toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/1132222807127588… This is the article he's reacting to: dev.to/ryansolid/web-components-are-not…... --- Or here's Lou Verou (a TAG member) calling it hate (this is the mildest reaction, btw): x.com/LeaVerou/status/18401346548522477… and uncritically reposting a bullshit article calling it excellent x.com/LeaVerou/status/18397369083705879… (see reaction by Vue author: x.com/youyuxi/status/1839833110164504691 and x.com/youyuxi/status/1839834941884121363) Note that Lea Verou also says that people decided to fix some things around web components after her post in 2020: lea.verou.me/blog/2024/wcs-vs-framework… Here's Rich Harris (author of Svelte) in 2019: x.com/Rich_Harris/status/11983323985613… Here's the 2022 Web Components Group report: w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html. Notice similarities? Literally everything web framework authors have been saying for ever has been completely ignored in favor if the in-group/tribe. Literally nothing has changed. Nothing at all.@troupoWeb Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance2026
14

@FFmpeg

Open Source

@FFmpeg

View on X
Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadMy apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time. I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”. If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help. My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg. Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1]. [0] x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 [1] pocketbase.io/faq/@gregsadetskyGitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source2026
3

@XenoKovah

Security

@XenoKovah

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadIncorrect. Apple's original presentations on Arm Macs suggested that booting other operating systems would be supported, and recently this has been confirmed by two of the engineers who worked on it. twitter.com/NikolajSchlej/status/133979… twitter.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714… Although you cannot turn off secure boot on Arm Macs, Apple has deliberately provided a path by which you can prove that you really want to chainload to a user provided bootloader not signed by Apple. From there, obviously, it will be possible to load the kernel of another operating system, such as Linux.@krunkcoinAsahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project2021
6

@karpathy

AI

@karpathy

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadAt this point, anyone claiming that LLMs are "just" language models aren't arguing in good faith. LLMs are a general purpose computing paradigm. LLMs are circuit builders, the converged parameters define pathways through the architecture that pick out specific programs. Or as Karpathy puts it, LLMs are a differentiable computer[1]. Training LLMs discovers programs that well reproduce the input sequence. Tokens can represent anything, not just words. Roughly the same architecture can generate passable images, music, or even video. [1] x.com/karpathy/status/15828073679886540…@hackinthebochsExperts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models2026
8

@rygorous

Programming

@rygorous

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadReminds me of this quote which I recently found and like: > look, I'm sorry, but the rule is simple: if you made something 2x faster, you might have done something smart if you made something 100x faster, you definitely just stopped doing something stupid x.com/rygorous/status/12712968344392826…@patricktheboldRob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)2026
4

@karpathy

Tools

@karpathy

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadBack when I was looking for a new PKM system, I remember a "competitor" (now irrelevant) of obsidian making fun via Quote tweet of the Files over app manifesto, saying something like "nobody cares about the way the notes are stored". Ironically, that mean-spirited tweet made me discover Obsidian, and I've adopted it since then as I strongly agree with the philosophy of sovereignty over the content by them being plain files. I do care about how files are stored, felt trapped with OneNote proprietary format, and seeing what happens to Evernote, now care even more. More recently, Andrej Karparthy succinctly captured what's great about Obsidian: x.com/karpathy/status/17614679047370674… And with the new LLM powered, I find having tight control over files to be extremely powerful Thank you kepano!@borh375How I use Obsidian (2023)2026
2

@michaeljburry

Business

@michaeljburry

View on X
Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadThere is also a significant amount of accounting fraud happening right now, according to Michael Burry: x.com/michaeljburry/status/198791865010…... The comments to his tweet, if true, tend to say that the real lifespan of an AI chip tends to be around 1 to 3 years in reality, since racks don't cool down that well. Not sure if these commenters are a reliable source though lol. x.com/xdire_me/status/19879204249788377…@gorgmahThe AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble2026
3

@karpathy

Learning

@karpathy

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadSomething from Andrej Karpathy on learning that stuck with me [0]: > Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn. [0] x.com/karpathy/status/17563800665804555…@setgreeLearning to Learn2024
3

@SemiAnalysis_

AI

@SemiAnalysis_

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadYes, according to this: x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/206481504408… also, codex apparently uses fewer tokens to complete tasks, in part because their tokeniser is about 80% the length of that in tokens for the same string as that of the latest anthropic ones. This might be fable only though.@m101Companies are scrambling to curtail soaring AI costs2026
7

@trq212

AI

@trq212

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadLLMs are great at generating aesthetic HTML/CSS. But there's nowhere to actually use that output. There's no code native tool to edit, present, and share decks built as HTML. So we built one. Variant is a presentation editor where slides are real HTML documents. Agents author them directly (Claude Code or Codex via MCP works great), then you immediately open that deck in a presentation viewer/editor/collaborator (think Google Slides) and finalize the deck by hand, then present. Models are best with code, they aren't great with working with elements like in powerpoint, and even image generation has a ton of pain points. HTML lets it reason in flex/grid and components, which it's great at. Plus you get embeds, SVG, canvas, and interactive widgets in slides for free. Great writeup on model generated HTML here: x.com/trq212/status/2052809885763747935 Happy to answer questions or hear feedback.@harpoonedVibe code your next presentation2026
4

@rakyll

AI

@rakyll

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadI will let a principal of engineering at google do the talking for me: > I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour. src: x.com/rakyll/status/2007239758158975130@game_the0ryClaws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents2026
3

@ID_AA_Carmack

Philosophy

@ID_AA_Carmack

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadSuperhuman coding has not happened. I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master: x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/209844326221… working with them on projects daily gives me a pretty tactical read on what they can and cannot do IMO. That's how I reconcile it. But let's say it had. That's just 1 of 20 events that have to happen in sequence to hit the jackpot here.@LogicFailsMeFor AI leaders Doom is a form of hype2026
3

@danluu

Writing

@danluu

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadTokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way. For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not. No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world. Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough. That's why in 2025, there were many mainstream articles about how CEOs were forcing their employees to use AI or get fired. Tokenmaxxing was just the other extreme. Companies will arrive at an equilibrium. There's no need to overthink this. Edit: One reply cited this X post as an example of why management needed to do this. Trying to change a company with hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of employees is hard. You have to send one simple message at a time. x.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969…@aurareturnTokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing2026
3

@karpathy

AI

@karpathy

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadHe's building Eureka Labs[1], an AI-first education company (can't wait to use it). He's both a strong researcher[2] and an unusually gifted technical communicator. His recent videos[3] are excellent educational material. More broadly though: someone with his track record sharing firsthand observations about agentic coding shouldn't need to justify it by listing current projects. The observations either hold up or they don't. [1] x.com/EurekaLabsAI [2] PhD in DL, early OpenAI, founding head of AI at Tesla [3] youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos@beng-nlA few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks2026
2

@aelluswamy

AI

@aelluswamy

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadI took delivery of a beautiful new shiny HW4 Tesla Model X today, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for 5 years. Basically... I'm amazed - it drives really, really well, smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3 (my previous car) and eons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla ~9 years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. (note this is v13, my car hasn't been offered the latest v14 yet) On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high tech Maglev train pod - the car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the (incredible) sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes, it gracefully went around construction and temporarily in-lane stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides, it gracefully gave way to the car that went out of order in the 4-way stop sign, it found a way to squeeze into a bumper to bumper traffic to make its turn, it overtook the bus that was loading passengers but still stopped for the stop sign that was blocked by the bus, and at the end of the route it circled around a parking lot, found a spot and... parked. Basically a flawless drive. For context, I'm used to going out for a brief test drive around the neighborhood to return with 20 clips of things that could be improved. It's new for me to do just that and exactly like I used to, but come back with nothing. Perfect drive, no notes. I expect there's still more work for the team in the long march of 9s, but it's just so cool to see that we're beyond finding issues on any individual ~1 hour drive around the neighborhood, you actually have to go to the fleet and mine them. Back then, I processed the incredible promise of vehicle autonomy at scale (in the fully scaleable, vision only, end-to-end Tesla way) only intellectually, but now it is possible to feel it intuitively too if you just go out for a drive. Wait, of course surround video stream at 60Hz processed by a fully dedicated "driving brain" neural net will work, and it will be so much better and safer than a human driver. Did anyone else think otherwise? I also watched @aelluswamy 's new ICCV25 talk last week (x.com/aelluswamy/status/198176057659139…) that hints at some of the recent under the hood technical components driving this progress. Sensor streams (videos, maps, kinematics, audio, ...) over long contexts (e.g. ~30 seconds) go into a big neural net, steering/acceleration comes out, optionally with visualization auxiliary data. This is the dream of the complete Software 1.0 -> Software 2.0 re-write that scales fully with data streaming from millions of cars in the fleet and the compute capacity of your chip, not some engineer's clever new DoubleParkedCarHandler C++ abstraction with undefined test-time characteristics of memory and runtime. There's a lot more hints in the video on where things are going with the emerging "robotics+AI at scale stack". World reconstructors, world simulators "dreaming" dynamics, RL, all of these components general, foundational, neural net based, how the car is really just one kind of robot... are people getting this yet? Huge congrats to the team - you're building magic objects of the future, you rock! And I love my car <3.@Rover222Andrej Karpathy reviews latest wide-release Tesla FSD version2025
3

@ID_AA_Carmack

AI

@ID_AA_Carmack

View on X
Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadHow big of a Carmack fan are you really, if you don't know one of his most well known takes on programming? (And you definitely don't need to be a fan.) Carmack has been heavily in favor of leveraging power tools since way back. Direct quote from the man himself: > I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. > My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. > Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers. > Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering. > AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. > Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. > The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost. x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/190931117484…@helloplanetsAutomatic Programming2026
2

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