HN Top 10 — May 31, 2026
Today’s Top 10 on Hacker News
1. Dav2d
⭐ 96 💬 16 👤 captain_bender 🔗 Discuss on HN
A codec does not really exist until everyone can decode it. Today, we announce dav2d, a fast decoder for the new AV2 codec, developed by members of the VideoLAN community. A few weeks ago, we opened the repository and started development in public. Since then, AV2 itself has reached its first official specification release, making this…
2. The Website Specification
⭐ 247 💬 98 👤 k1m 🔗 Discuss on HN
A platform-agnostic specification of the technical features every decent website should have — from <title> to /.well-known/security.txt, from WCAG contrast to llms.txt. Categories Ten areas, mapped to widely-accepted standards. Platform agnostic Whether you ship WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, a Django app, or plain HTML, the spec is the spec.
3. London’s Free Roof Terraces
⭐ 129 💬 53 👤 zeristor 🔗 Discuss on HN
Opened September 2022, 57th-58th floor, blogged here Tickets released on Mondays, they go fast but ridiculously early slots are often available. Opened August 2022, 50th floor, blogged here Tickets released on Mondays, current availability in four days time, but Horizon 22 is better. _I went instead to the…
4. Domain expertise has always been the real moat
⭐ 683 💬 401 👤 aaronbrethorst 🔗 Discuss on HN
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll system you had to understand garnishments and pre-tax deductions and what happens when someone’s pay period straddles a rate change.
5. Security Envelope Pattern collection – S.E.C.R.E.T
⭐ 29 💬 1 👤 ColinWright 🔗 Discuss on HN
| Security Envelope Pattern collection | S.E.C.R.E.T. was founded to connect with fellow collectors, to create the first standardized security envelope pattern collection, and to delight in playful taxonomy. Adopting the coined term of Obscurationists, we celebrate the craft of secrecy. |
6. Backpressure is all you need
⭐ 11 💬 4 👤 lucasfcosta 🔗 Discuss on HN
There are two obvious ways to use coding agents. The first is to let the LLM run unattended and hope the repository survives. This is fast, exciting, and stupid.
7. Shantell Sans (2023)
⭐ 293 💬 33 👤 aleda145 🔗 Discuss on HN
The Story of Shantell Sans Shantell Sans mixes variable axes for Weight, Italic, Informality, and Bounce to deliver a wide array of font styles, from friendly, readable, everyday typographic workhorses to striking, high-energy, experimental styles meant especially for animation. This is the story behind its inspiration and creation. Why make a new font? Shantell Martin, Artist ![Image 1: Shantell Martin drawing on a piece of…
8. One year of Roto, a compiled scripting language for Rust
⭐ 57 💬 11 👤 Hasnep 🔗 Discuss on HN
By Terts Diepraam Almost exactly one year ago, we announced Roto, a JIT-compiled embedded scripting language for Rust applications. A lot has happened since then that we’d like to tell you about! Along with this post, we published Roto v0.11.0!.
9. A pictorial introduction to differential geometry (2017)
⭐ 72 💬 2 👤 ricudis 🔗 Discuss on HN
As all the concepts are presented as pictures, there are no equations in this article. As such this article may be read by pre-university students who enjoy physics, mathematics and geometry. However it will also greatly aid the intuition of an undergraduate and masters students, learning general relativity and similar courses.
10. I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
⭐ 354 💬 97 👤 Hawzen 🔗 Discuss on HN
The author discovered a fully solid rock that eerily resembles a seashell at the base of a cliff in the Alghat desert, Saudi Arabia — 500 km from the nearest coastline. Carbonate rocks and marine fossils in the area suggest parts of the Arabian Peninsula were submerged during the late Jurassic (~150 million years ago). Curious about the fossil’s identity, the author DIY’d a morphological analysis: mathematically representing shell shapes, defining distance metrics between them, and mapping the space of 7,894 species from a dataset of 59,244 shell images — all to find the closest modern lookalikes to this desert specimen.