HN Top 10 — May 30, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Zig: Build System Reworked
⭐ 83 💬 11 👤 tosh 🔗 Discuss on HN
This page contains a curated list of recent changes to main branch Zig. This page contains entries for the year 2026. Other years are available in the Devlog archive page.
2. The Kaiser and a “Mediocre Man” Theory of History
⭐ 26 💬 8 👤 baud147258 🔗 Discuss on HN
Napoleon was the archetype for this model, a man who seemingly came from nothing to leave an indelible mark on world history. This model places extreme focus on individuals and thus on elite politics. The theory does not account for mass politics or leave room for the histories of those far from the levers of power.
3. Pandoc Templates
⭐ 15 💬 0 👤 ankitg12 🔗 Discuss on HN
A curated gallery of ready-to-use templates for Pandoc document conversion. Browse and filter templates by output format (PDF/LaTeX, HTML, DOCX, EPUB, PPTX, ODT, ICML) and use case (letters, resumes, IEEE papers, PhD theses, presentations, and more). Each template links to its source repository and includes star counts and last-update dates.
4. SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
⭐ 553 💬 280 👤 tomasol 🔗 Discuss on HN
DBOS recently argued that Postgres is all you need for durable execution: if you already trust your database, you do not need a separate orchestration tier. I agree with the direction, and I think the idea can be pushed further. For a large class of durable systems, SQLite is all you need.
5. Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation
⭐ 162 💬 107 👤 vrganj 🔗 Discuss on HN
Denmark’s largest pension fund, ATP, has removed SpaceX from its investment universe, citing concerns over the company’s private valuation and governance structure. The decision reflects growing scrutiny of how institutional investors allocate capital to highly valued private firms, where opacity around ownership, management oversight, and exit timelines can create significant risk for pension beneficiaries.
6. Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
⭐ 212 💬 86 👤 GaggiX 🔗 Discuss on HN
I’m very pleased to announce that Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% decompiled! All of the game’s functions have now been implemented in C and compile to assembly that matches the original game. There’s still some occasional __asm__ hackery,1 and plenty of code needs better names and documentation, but every function now has a matching C implementation.
7. Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us
⭐ 67 💬 46 👤 satvikpendem 🔗 Discuss on HN
Have you heard about algebraic effects? My first attempts to figure out what they are or why I should care about them were unsuccessful. I found a fewpdfs but they only confused me more.
8. Floor and Ceil versus Denormals on CPU and GPU
⭐ 9 💬 0 👤 ibobev 🔗 Discuss on HN
Recently, I dove deep into floating-point numbers and their behavior. Somehow, this topic haunts me in my programming practice since I created Floating-Point Formats Cheatsheet back in 2013 and also released a comprehensive article The Secrets of Floating-Point Numbers in 2024. This…
9. Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
⭐ 384 💬 162 👤 vnglst 🔗 Discuss on HN
May 29, 2026 * ai * article I was in Paris the last few days to visit the AI Now Summit by Mistral AI, hoping to learn more about their models, plans for the future of European AI and more. My personal insights: Mistral is no longer just a model company. They’re building the full AI stack: compute, models, platforms & consultancy. They own the compute (a 40MW data…
10. What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks
⭐ 59 💬 14 👤 pseudolus 🔗 Discuss on HN
A Cambridge University project is working to rescue data from aging floppy disks before the magnetic media deteriorates beyond recovery. The initiative uses specialized hardware to read degraded floppies at the physical sector level, combining forensic data recovery techniques with archival best practices to preserve decades of academic research, software, and personal data stored on these obsolete formats.