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
3456

Unintuitive JSON Parsing

Despite the goal of JSON being a subset of JavaScript — which it failed to achieve (update: this was fixed ) — parsing JSON is quite unlike parsing a programming language. For invalid inputs, the specific cause of error is often counter-intuitive. Normally this doesn’t matter, but I recently ran into a case where it…

3461

AM – Attribute Modules for CSS

A few months ago, I read an article by Harry Roberts where he introduced an interesting concept for working with related classes in CSS. In his article, he describes the use of the [] characters in class attributes to help understand their purpose at a quick glance. He presents this example, arguing that it makes the…

3467

Why I'm Excited About Native CSS Variables

A few weeks ago CSS variables—more accurately known as CSS Custom Properties—shipped in Chrome Canary behind the Experimental Web Platform Features flag.[1] When Chrome engineer Addy Osmani first tweeted about the release, he was met with a surprising amount of negativity, hostility, and skepticism. At least, it was…

3471

Xkcd meets reality

Earlier this week, xkcd posted a fantastic comic about the apocalypse happening and the dead rising to walk the earth. In the comic, mathematicians scribbled frantically and raced to Paul Erdos’ grave to get him to sign a document that is presumably co-authorship on a paper. (For the uninitiated, read about the Erdos…

3472

The problem with federated web apps

Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built…

3474

Stop crawling my HTML – use the API

One of the (many) depressing things about the "AI" future in which we're living, is that it exposes just how many people are willing to outsource their critical thinking. Brute force is preferred to thinking about how to efficiently tackle a problem. For some reason, my websites are regularly targetted by "scrapers"…