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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 324 posts.
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Solarized - Color scheme for vim, mutt, terminal emulators
Precision colors for machines and people
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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming
Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.
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CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns” (2017)
Over the last several years, the way I write CSS has transitioned from a "semantic" approach to something more like what people call "functional CSS." In this post I explain how I got to this point and share some of the lessons and insights I've picked up along the way.
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Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."
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Magic Ink
This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bret worrydream.com . You can also download the PDF .
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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work . I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the…
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Readability: The Optimal Line Length
The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability — yet this is often overlooked in e-commerce. See our latest test findings on line length readability.
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A Primer on Bézier Curves
A detailed explanation of Bézier curves, and how to do the many things that we commonly want to do with them.
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Oklab: A perceptual color space for image processing
From personal project to industry standard Introduction added in 2025 When introduced Oklab in 2020, I never expected it to reach as far as...
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GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
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Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
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Response Time Limits: Article by Jakob Nielsen
How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.
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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
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QArt – Pictures in QR code with no inherent errors
QR codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode arbitrary text strings. A common use of QR codes is to encode URLs so that people can scan a QR code (for example, on an advertising poster, building roof , volleyball bikini , belt buckle , or airplane banner ) to load a web site on a cell phone instead of having to…
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Edward Tufte Notebooks & Sketches
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
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Google Maps' Moat
Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities.
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Design Tip: Never Use Black
One of the most important color tricks I’ve ever learned was to avoid using the color black in my work. Mrs. Zamula, my childhood art teacher, first warned me about black when I was in middle school. And I heard the same again multiple times at RISD. It sounds weird at first, but it’s good advice.
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Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
For more information on the context behind this talk, see An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" .
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Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)
Bill Buxton Microsoft Research Original: Jan. 12, 2007 Version: December 10th, 2025
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DPI Calculator / PPI Calculator
Noteworthy display sizes of monitors, PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches and HMDs. Link background color takes into account typical viewing distance:
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Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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Text rendering hates you (2019)
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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Explorable Explanations
An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's…