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Kagi Small Web
As a part of our ongoing pursuit to humanize the web, we are pleased to announce the launch of the Kagi Small Web initiative. What is Kagi Small Web? To begin with, while there is no...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 62 posts.
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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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You might not need an effect
The library for web and native user interfaces
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Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed
There's been a lot of concern recently about the Web Environment Integrity proposal, developed by a selection of authors from Google, and apparently being...
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Creating a React App
The library for web and native user interfaces
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Svelte 5: Runes
Rethinking ‘rethinking reactivity’
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Bard and new AI features in Search
Introducing Bard (now Gemini), Google's conversational AI service — plus, new AI features in Search.
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It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼♂️".length == 7 (2019)
From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for…
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Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript
By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…
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If is Evil when used in location context (2015)
Learn how to deliver, manage, and protect your applications using F5 NGINX products.
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RSS Autodiscovery (2006)
RSS autodiscovery is a technique that makes it possible for browsers and other software to automatically find a site's RSS feed, whether it's in RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 format.
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WasmGC – Run GC languages such as Kotlin, Java in Chrome browser
There are two types of programming languages: garbage-collected programming languages and programming languages that require manual memory management. With to WebAssembly Garbage Collection, garbage-collected languages can be ported to WebAssembly.
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HDR QR Code
Here’s an HDR QR Code . If you’re viewing this on an Apple device’s built-in display, it should work. If the big QR code is brighter than the smaller one, it works.
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Email: Explained from first principles
Modern email is a patchwork of protocols and extensions. Here is one article to understand them all.
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The worst API ever made (2014)
A call-by-call look at context switch logging with the Event Tracing for Windows API.
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JSON vs. XML
Today's guest is Douglas Crockford. He's sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript's good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there's a better way to build software. This is foundational stuff for the…
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The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
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What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
Modern extension to classic 2003 article by Joel Spolsky
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Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS
With iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1 comes support for Web Push for Home Screen web apps, Badging API, Manifest ID, and more.
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Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification
Why Vivaldi browser thinks Google’s new proposal, the Web-Environment-Integrity spec, is a major threat to the open web and should be pushed back.
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Servo to Advance in 2023
A brief update on the Servo project's renewed activity in 2023
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Why Htmx Does Not Have a Build Step
In this essay, Alexander Petros explores the reasons why the htmx JavaScript library does not include a build step, detailing the benefits of its simple, dependency-free structure. He highlights the longevity of plain JavaScript, the improved debugging experience, enforced code clarity, and the tradeoffs of avoiding…
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Google resumes transition to Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions
In December of last year, we paused the planned deprecation of Manifest V2 in order to address developer feedback and deliver better solutions to migration issues . As a result of this feedback, we’ve made a number of changes to Manifest V3 to close these gaps , including:
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X Window System Basics (2014)
Since this article contains a lot of interactive demos relying on fairly modern browser technology, let's make sure that everything is OK before continuing.
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Bluesky's AT Protocol - Federation Architecture Overview
Soon, we’re launching a sandbox environment for federation. In advance, we want to share some technical details about our design decisions.
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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
arXiv’s goal is equitable access to scientific research for all – and to achieve this, we have been working to make research papers more accessible for arXiv…
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Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool…
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Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.…
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Bringing garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly
A recent article on WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) explains at a high level how the Garbage Collection (GC) proposal aims to better support GC languages in Wasm, which is very important given their popularity. In this article, we will get into the technical details of how GC languages such as Java, Kotlin…