Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 32 posts.
Purely functional code makes some things easier to understand: because values don't change, you can call functions and know that only their return value matters—they don't change anything outside themselves. But this makes many real-world applications difficult: how do you write to a database, or to the screen? In…
It was Jan last year that I suggested HTTPS adoption had passed the "tipping point" [https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/], that is, it had passed the moment of critical mass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point] and as I said at the
I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles:
Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy).
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension. It bestowed upon its users nothing less than the power to change the appearance of the internet. Its extensive bank of user-made skins gave bright websites a dark background…
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
Four years in the making, it covers just 3% of the U.S.’s area and 4.9% of its population:
Lessons learned from mixins, render props, HOCs, and classes.
2021 update: Browsers now implicitly set rel=noopener for any target=_blank link, following a spec change . If the demo on this page no longer seems scary, congratulations — you’re using a modern browser!
OAuth has become the de facto standard for authorization and authentication on the web. Nearly every company with an API used by third party developers has implemented OAuth to enable people to build apps on top of it.
Created this by pasting together a few screenshots from a NetBeans profiler session – of a Spring + Hibernate web-app running within JBoss. Quite interesting to see how the business logic is …
For his 1965 composition “It's Gonna Rain”, Steve Reich designed a generative mechanical system.
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
Firefox’s FPI system keeps websites from tracking your movements across websites. This gives excellent privacy protections but at a cost of web compatibility.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
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…
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…
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
It is surprisingly difficult to find realistic, interesting and creative privacy case studies. It is perhaps even more difficult in the case of major software. There are no proper motivations for making this kind of work public (employees often paid to do some kind of work in-house; their compensation
The protocol that's been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3. This was triggered by this original suggestion by Mark Nottingham. The QUIC Working Group in the IETF works on creating the QUIC transport protocol. QUIC is a TCP replacement done over UDP…
What makes UI engineering difficult?
A detailed look at the frameworks, concurrency model, error handling, middleware constructs, and testing strategies of a web service written in Rust.
