The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,666 posts.
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
Smartphones have a thumb problem. The touchscreen is a magical invention, but it definitely has its shortcomings.
[2026/09/14]: This article became the most popular I've ever written. Since it was written a long time ago, I decided to rework it: polishing the wording to facilitate comprehension, fixing dead links and typos, and adding interactivity. Still, it remains faithful to the original — a lot of people discussed it and…
My previous Let’s Make a Map tutorial describes how to make a basic map with D3 and TopoJSON ; now it’s time to cover thematic mapping in the form of a proportional symbol map. The simplest symbol is a circle, or bubble , whose area is proportional to the associated data. In this tutorial, we’ll make a bubble map of…
Butterick’s Practical Typography
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
Over six months ago, I stopped using Adobe Photoshop and switched to GIMP for all my personal photography projects. This wasn’t the impossible task that most people believe it is.
One of my favorite classic screensavers from back in the day was “Flying Toasters,” a part of the After Dark bundle.
Programmers don't generally have reels, but we do have blogs. I've been explaining the rendering work I did on BioShock Infinite quite a b...
TL;DR - I spent five years earning a side income by drawing and selling cartoons to magazines, mostly of various animals in business suits. I found the cartooning industry to be old-fashioned and inefficient. So I’m building a product to disrupt the industry and help cartoonists make more
A New Car UI - How touch screen controls in cars should really work.
I removed social media buttons from my site in 2014 after noticing they got near-zero clicks. Here's what I learned—and why the share-button era ended.
Let me begin by saying that I love Windows 8. I have it on all of my computers and I find that is the best OS for productivity and awesomeness. OS X is good looking and polished, especially with the Mavericks update (A.K.A. fake leather killer), but I find that it is lacking some productivity detai
Ask around about the best onboarding experiences out there, and Quora's flow is likely to come up. That's for good reason - it's brief, it's effective, and it's even kind of fun!
A Lonely Planet project
Last week Information Architects (iA) released Writer Pro, a follow-up to the company’s popular text editor, iA Writer. By far, their most heavily touted new feature is Syntax Control. Oliver Reichenstein, iA’s director, promised in a blog post to vigorously protect this new feature: Syntax Control is a solid…
Here is Part 1 of 3 on a case study of the shot compositions from Pixar's film "The Incredibles, I'll go over how the relationships of all ...
Compare Wix vs WordPress for ease, design, ownership, SEO, apps, ecommerce, and cost. See which platform fits the website you want to build.
For more information on the context behind this talk, see An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" .
