Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,615 posts.

Web & Frontend
Any year
2974

Sane RSS usage

The first time I went without RSS in August, I simply went around to three or so of what I consider to be the best sites to get the latest news from. I combined that with my usual e-mail communications … and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day. It was stress-free, and I…

2977

What is the value of browser diversity?

In May 2019 I attended a talk by Mike Taylor who works on webcompat at Mozilla. Mike told the sordid story of window.event, a non-standard IE invention that was replicated in Konqueror, which showed up in Webkit, which stuck around in Blink, and was now Mike’s problem in Firefox. It was a good story fraught with ups…

2983

Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

One of the things that came up at the HTTP Workshop was “distributed HTTP” — i.e., moving the Web from a client/server model to a more distributed one. This week, Brewster Khale (of Archive.org fame) talked about similar thoughts on his blog and at CCC. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d highly suggest watching the…

2985

How to Achieve Polished UI

Ever since the original iPhone came out, I’ve had several ideas about how they managed to achieve such fluidity with relatively mediocre hardware. I mean, it was good at the time, but Android still struggles on hardware that makes that look like a 486… It’s absolutely my fault that none of these have been implemented…

2993

Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs

As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?

2999

The lie of the API

Really, nobody takes your website serious anymore if you don’t offer an API . And that’s what everybody did: they got themselves a nice API . An enormous amount of money and energy is wasted on developing API s that are hard to create and even harder to use. This is wonderful news for developers, who get paid to build…