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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 242 posts.

2009
128

What webhooks are and why you should care

Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended…

131

Why HTTP?

The world doesn’t need another arbitrary binary protocol. Just use HTTP. Your life will be simpler. Originally this came up when scaling a gaggle of MySQL machines. I would have killed for a reliable proxy. It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with my list of things that HTTP has that an arbitrary protocol will…

147

Patch to fix RSS feed for News.YC

I’m an avid reader of news.yc , but it’s annoyed me for some time that the RSS feed is rather broken. So, I decided to dust off my Lisp skills and give it a go. The biggest chunk was adding code to do conversion from UNIX timestamps to UTC in Arc. Significant stuff that works now:

148

Stop Password Masking

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.