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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 4,614 posts.

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2885

Cool URIs can be ugly (2023)

Around last year this blog, a simple static site, was running on GitHub pages, together with Cloudflare in front of it due to (perceived) unreliability with GitHub’s SSL provisioning for custom domains. In order to simplify my stack, I tried running it on Cloudflare Pages .

2889

The case for frameworks

I push back on Alex Russell's "Market for Lemons" post blaming JS frameworks and their advocates for poor mobile web performance. Developers aren't stupid or deceived: React dominates because of rational economics. Frameworks save developer time, enable hiring, and compound via ecosystems. Better frameworks, not fewer…

2890

A horrifying globalThis polyfill in JavaScript

The globalThis proposal introduces a unified mechanism to access the global this in any JavaScript environment. It sounds like a simple thing to polyfill, but it turns out it’s pretty hard to get right. I didn’t even think it was possible until Toon blew my mind with an unexpected, creative solution.

2892

CNN, NYTimes, Mashable all vulnerable to XSS

Pretending innocence, I ask why all these high profile websites have their homepages covered in spinning images? CNN (screenshot) The New York Times (screenshot) Mashable (screenshot) Fox News (screenshot) Okay, obviously enough, I’m messing with them. But how can I do that? The answer is cross site scripting (“XSS”)…

2894

Lorem Picsum, death by a million pixel-gigabits

Updated 2023-04-16 Or how to serve half a billion placeholder images a month on a budget. Lorem Picsum is one of the most popular placeholder sites on the internet. It started as a small side project written in NodeJS five years ago to cover my own needs and has since gone through several iterations as it has grown…

2897

The Karma connection in Chrome Web Store

A bunch of malicious extensions in Chrome Web Store have hidden affiliate fraud functionality, collect users’ browsing profiles, or both. These extensions appear to be connected to the Karma shopping assistant, developed by Karma Shopping Ltd. which is not a small company.

2904

Todo example in Rust

Rust Qt Binding Generator lets you combine Rust code with a Qt 1 graphical application. A previous blog shows how to make a simple clock. It’s a good idea to read that post before reading this more advanced post, because in this post we are getting serious.

2907

Scammers registering date-based domain names

Yesterday, January 2nd, my wife received a billing alert from her phone provider. Luckily, she's not with EE - because it's a pretty convincing text. That domain name is specifically designed to include the day's date. If you're stood up on a crowded train, with your phone screen cracked, would you notice that a . is…

2909

Backend for Front-end

In the good old days, applications were simple. A browser sent a request to a webapp endpoint; the latter fetched data from a database and returned the response. The rise of mobile clients and integrations with other apps upset this simplicity. I want to discuss one solution to handle the complexity in this post. The…