Inside Hacker News’ Most-Read Blog Posts of 2025

Hacker News’ biggest hits in 2025 weren’t product launches or VC puff pieces - they were engineering write-ups with receipts. What’s notable here is the tilt toward operational pragmatism: posts that instrumented claims, published datasets, or shipped a reference repo consistently outran marketing pages. Under the hood, the themes clustered around cost-aware architecture (egress math, GPU utilization, serverless cold-start tradeoffs), the SQLite/Postgres renaissance (vectors, replication, “boring tech” scaling), and productionizing LLMs beyond demos (RAG failure modes, eval harnesses, observability for prompts). Add in a steady appetite for language and runtime contention (Rust vs. Zig ergonomics, Bun/Deno/V8 perf diaries) and frank incident postmortems, and you get a clear picture of where builders actually spent their time.

The bigger picture is a community re-centering on maintainability over novelty. 2024’s AI exuberance matured into papers-to-pagers pipelines: inference cost teardowns, partial fine-tuning notes, and GPU scheduling posts outperformed speculative roadmaps. Worth noting: independent blogs routinely beat corporate domains when authors exposed trade-offs and published negative results. The industry implication is straightforward - credibility now compounds through transparency and reproducibility. If you can benchmark it, trace it, or run it locally, it travels. Anything else reads like ad copy and sinks.