Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 377 posts.
Since gradient.horse went online in January 2026, six months have passed, and more than 600 000 horses (and non-horses) were drawn. There are now more horses on gradient.horse than in the wild. The image model I trained to filter out vandalism works very well, but it also hides a lot of ingenious drawings. You could…
Bear with me, because some of these "lies" are going to feel obvious, or like unimportant trivia. In all honesty, that's not that far from the truth. However, I hope you'll let me try to build a detailed and fun illustration showing how something as mundane as email can break our expectations in surprising ways.
There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. "Oh, XML," they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. "We use…
Tailwind CSS is a very popular CSS framework among web developers. With no prior graphic design knowledge, it solves the standardization of spacing…
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who…
In a WWDC 2011 session, Dan Schimpf explained some of the goals of the refreshed design for Aqua in Mac OS X Lion were “meant to focus the user attention on the active window content”. This sentiment was echoed by John Siracusa in his review of Lion for Ars Technica: Apple says that its goal […]
a tale about a young transgender intern
a post from alan w. smith
I don't remember where the idea came from, but I decided that it would be cool if I could write websites using a stack-based language. Something like this: : h1 ( s -- ) "<h1>" emit . "</h1>" em…
Rebuilding Firefox.com with Mozilla and Lincoln Loop on modern, native CSS with no pre-processors, and what that means for design systems today.
I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from a self-proclaimed 20 year agency veteran of WordPress saying that was it, they’re moving the entire agency off of WordPress and onto AI. Now, because I, too, am a 20 year veteran of WordPress, this kind of story catches my attention. He posted that they […]
Why I built superlite, an autonomous build workflow for Claude Code that doesn't ask permission every four minutes: how it works, how to use it, and the benchmarks.
In this essay, Carson Gross argues that Markdown is now an important source artifact for software systems built with LLMs, and that, following the principle of locality, it should live in /src, alongside the code it produces.
Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I’m going to expand on …
Every time I hear someone complaining about how much CSS sucks, I have one question: Did you ever learn CSS? The words want to burst out of my lips but I stay silent and keep to myself. When I was muc
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
Notes about creative coding on the Web.
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is…
Come along and meet us at FOSDEM 2026 – we’re speaking there too!
Digital identities and what they mean for the web have become a hot topic of discussion in the last few years.They have also brought many controversies: age verification laws and what they mean for online anonymity, Wikipedia potentially having to verify the identify of its users in the UK, the reliance on official…
So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands!
A comprehensive overview of how email is encrypted, the benefits, and the trade-offs.
Vary support is now available in Cache Rules on every plan. You can normalize known negotiation headers, pass exact values through to the origin when those small differences matter, or bypass cache when the variation is too unpredictable.
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?
After using the same few image formats for 20+ years, I’m now on the WebP bandwagon. That isn’t something I thought I’d ever say. Now I’m wondering how soon it’ll be before I can use a couple more.
A parallax effect built entirely in CSS with scroll-driven animations, no scroll listeners required.
This document contains a set of informal notes on how to build an alternative specification to the Web, in such a way that hopefully prevents many of its drawbacks while still preserves many of the good points. This document is not an specification, and is therefore subject to change over time.
`deno desktop` for building native desktop apps from web tech, first-class migration from npm/pnpm/yarn/Bun, CSS module imports, snapshot and parameterized testing, smaller `deno compile --bundle` binaries, and Node.js 26 compatibility.
