Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,615 posts.
What does Overture Map mean for the future of OpenStreetMap?
Personal blog of Andriy Holovin. A little about everything.
Building a WebAuthn Click Farm
How I built a click farm to “bypass” Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA killer with some cheap USB security keys, an Arduino, and a bit of python.
Hacker News for Hackers
Hacker News is one of the best sources for news in the intersection of technology and business. Hacker News gets nearly 1000 submissions on a busy weekday, and quite a bit less on the weekends:
Live Streaming in Rails 4.0
TL;DR Rails 4.0 will allow you to stream arbitrary data at arbitrary intervals with Live Streaming. HAPPY MONDAY EVERYONE! Besides enabling multi-threading by default, one of the things I really wanted for Rails 4.0 is the ability to stream data to the client. I want the ability to treat the response object as an I/O…
CSS System Colors (2021)
In another episode of “I’ve been a web designer for how long and am only now learning about this?” let’s talk about CSS system colors. Background On my blog, I…
How to deal with dirty side effects in your pure functional JavaScript
If you start learning about functional programming, it won’t be long before you come across the idea of pure functions. And as you go on, you will discover functional programmers appear to be obsessed with them. “Pure functions let you reason about your code,” they say. “Pure functions are less likely to start a…
CSS as the back end – Cascading Server Sheets
Here we go again! Another one of these, and promise, you will be questioning my sanity after this...
Neat trick for getting private info for Facebook, GMail, Twitter and Digg users
Hidden img and script tags with onload and onerror let any site tell if you're logged into GMail, Facebook, Twitter or Digg. Google called it expected.
The Web Is Fantastic
No not that web. The real web.
It's weird how design systems are so rote, yet so difficult
Reflecting on investing in design systems
CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts
An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable to document…
CDN vs S3
As I said in my last post: S3 is NOT a CDN. It is an amazing Simple Storage Service, not a Simple Delivery Service. Via AWS: Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make...
State of HTML 2023 now open
While the survey will be open for 3 weeks, responses entered within the first 9 days (until October 1st) will have a much higher impact on the Web, as preliminary data will be used to inform Interop 2024 proposals.
NVD3 Erased From Existence
I was incredibly surprised to find out today that the popular graphing library NVD3 has been erased from the web, due to what what looks like a copyright dispute.
JavaScript Modularity Shaming
Pete Hunt of React fame recently got into an online discussion about the pros and cons of Webpack vs. Browserify . In the discussion he inadvertently coins a hilarious term for a form of rhetoric in some circles of the JavaScript community - “Modularity Shaming”. React itself has been on the receiving end of…
Myspace lets you hijack any account just by knowing the person’s birthday
In April this year whilst roaming the plains of the wild world web, I stumbled across an old Myspace account of mine. Attempting to gain access and delete the account I discovered a business process so flawed it deserves its own place in history. I wrote to Myspace describing my
IPFS and Their Gateways
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is according to the Wikipedia description: "a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.". It works a little like bittorrent and you typically access content on it using a very long hash in an ipfs:// URL…
Noosphere, a Protocol for Thought
Your brain on IPFS
Stop adding email tracking links to phone numbers
My Chinese takeaway delivery was late. Very late. I flipped open the confirmation email sent by Just-Eat to double-check I had all the details correct. At the bottom was a "click to call" link. Hurrah! I clicked dial, and this is what filled my screen: An absurdly long phone number. Bemused, I went to inspect the link…
Building the new hypermedia systems
A shiny new edition of Hypermedia Systems is out! Apart from incorporating typo and grammar fixes sent in by readers, the book was completely redesigned inside with a new layout. To achieve a much higher fidelity of design, we ported the book to Typst --- the hot new LaTeX replacement.