Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,614 posts.
Before the term was hijacked by crypto-grifters (and, admittedly, a few genuinely neat projects), web 3 (point oh) referred to Tim Berners-Lee's project to promote a standard way to expose and parse metadata on the web. It never took off. In this piece, I'll argue that a breakthrough idea introduced last year by HN…
With the Fall 2025 anime season, Crunchyroll demonstrates zero respect for anime as a medium as the presentation quality of its subtitles reach an all-time low.
In the old days In the old days we had some really awful JS being written on pages in a pretty ad-hoc fashion and it caused us huge problems. Presumably most people still do this but they're the same...
I’ve had an unusual number of interesting conversations spin out of my previous article documenting that mobile web apps are slow. This has sparked some discussion, both online and IRL. But…
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on…
On the trend of consumer software designed around developer convenience instead of user needs, from forced accounts to telemetry to privilege creep.
The goal of Explanations is to try to allow people to play with fun parts of computers. Graphics, compression, audio. The tagline is my biggest inspiration: "Play, don't show", riffing off the typical "Show, don't tell" rule of writers and authors everywhere. Why bother giving a diagram when I give you an inspector…
SVG gives us many different primitives to work with, but by far the most powerful is the element. Unfortunately, it’s also the most inscrutable, with its compact Regex-style syntax. In this tutorial, we’ll demystify this infamous element and see some of the cool things we can do with it!
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
Earlier this year, when Spotify announced that “The Joe Rogan Experience” would stream exclusively on Spotify, it sent shockwaves throughout the podcast ecosystem. This deal – reportedly worth over $100 million – is one of the most lucrative podcast deals. The presence of this deal, let alone the magnitude, is rare…
An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.
Why building a rich, selectable, streaming Markdown chat UI on macOS still pushes you toward WebKit or Electron.
No JavaScript frameworks were created during the writing of this article.
The native web platform has caught up with frontend frameworks and will slowly render them obsolete.
Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last year, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on:
Or, the JAM stack.
A love & hate relationship
Nov 27, 2023: Much has changed since this article was published. I've become far more involved with ZC development; the name of the program is now ZQuest Classic; our website is zquestclassic.com ; and the web version discussed in this article is now hosted at web.zquestclassic.com
The story is personal, but I hope readers find something they can relate to in their own life stream.
