Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,469 posts.

Web & Frontend
Any year
1951

We're heading for AOL 2.0

Before ‘HTTP’, whenever a new kind of application was invented (say ‘file sharing’, or ‘address book’ or ‘messaging’) someone would sit down with a bunch of others and would discuss this problem at some length. Then they’d draft up a document describing the problem they intended to solve and the protocol layer they…

1952

Why React Re-Renders

In React, we don't update the DOM directly, we tell React what we want the DOM to look like, and React tackles the rest. But how exactly does it do this? In this tutorial, we'll unpack exactly when and why React re-renders, and how we can use this information to optimize the performance of our React apps.

1972

WebKit for Developers

Feb 2015: A lot’s happened since I wrote this post two years ago. Chrome forked WebKit and started Blink, Opera adopted Chromium, and node-webkit became nw.js. This post describes a complexity of defining WebKit that doesn’t exist much anymore; with Chrome’s departure the WebKit world is more simple and clear.

1976

An SVG that always shows today's date

For my contact page, I wanted a generic calendar icon to let people view my diary. Calendar icons are almost always a skeuomorph of a paper calendar, but I wondered if I could make it slightly more useful by creating a dynamic icon. Here it is, an SVG calendar which always display's today's date: The background image…