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The small web is beautiful
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 555 posts.
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Hobson's Browser: How Apple, Facebook and Google broke the mobile browser market
Mobile OSes and their most successful apps have drained browser choice of meaning for more than a decade. This has lead to confusion for users and loss of control over data. Web developers, meanwhile, face higher costs and reduced ability to escape walled gardens. It's time for the charade to end.
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Processing ported to JavaScript
As a sort-of reverse birthday present I’ve decided to release one of my largest projects, in recent memory. This is the project that I’ve been alluding to for quite some time now :
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“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it
2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…
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Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?) . Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to…
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Understanding JavaScript function invocation and "this"
Over the years, I've seen a lot of confusion about JavaScript function invocation. In particular, a lot of people have complained that the semantics of this in function invocations is confusing. In my opinion, a lot of this confusion is cleared up by understanding the core function invocation primitive,
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Gevent For the Working Python Developer
The structure of this tutorial assumes an intermediate level knowledge of Python but not much else. No knowledge of concurrency is expected. The goal is to give you the tools you need to get going with gevent, help you tame your existing concurrency problems and start writing asynchronous applications today.
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The problems with url shorteners
URL shortening services have been around for a number of years . Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen. Addendum: They're useful in print , too. But it's 2009 now, and this problem no longer…
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What webhooks are and why you should care
Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended…
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I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an emoji email address service. In the process I went viral on Tik Tok, made $1000 in a week, hired a Japanese voice actor, and learnt about the weird world of emoji domains.
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Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.
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Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
I work with U.S. law firms as a non-testifying technical consulting expert on matters involving the Apple platform and iOS apps. Learn more about my litigation consulting.
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My Current HTML Boilerplate
Every element I use for the basic structure of a HTML document, with explanations why.
384
An interactive intro to CRDTs
CRDTs don't have to be all academic papers and math jargon. Learn what CRDTs are and how they work through interactive visualizations and code samples.
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The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone’s way. If you’re reading this article, there’s a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you’re reading this from an RSS reader o...
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Fight back against Google AMP (2018)
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short.AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this…
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Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
I complained about this on the socials , but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post. I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon…
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This website is hosted on Bluesky
Well, not this one. But this one is! How? Let’s take a closer look at Bluesky and the AT Protocol that underpins it. Note: I communicated with the Bluesky team prior to the publishing of this post. While the functionality described is not the intended use of the application, it is known behavior and does not constitue…
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Password Rules Are Bullshit
Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules. Let this pledge be duly noted on the permanent record of the Internet. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but I’ll be finding out soon enough, and I plan
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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.