Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 236 posts.

Web & Frontend
62

Twitter's Secret “Guest Mode”

Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old browser. Anything using LetsEncrypt…

65

Idle Until Urgent

A few weeks ago I was looking at some of the performance metrics for my site. Specifically, I wanted to see how I was doing on our newest metric, first input delay (FID). My site is just a blog (and doesn’t run much JavaScript), so I expected to see pretty good results.

69

Post-REST

More or less all the big APIs are RESTful these days. Yeah, you can quibble about what “REST” means (and I will, a bit) but the assertion is broadly true. Is it going to stay that way forever? Seems unlikely. So, what’s next?

72

JS things I didn’t know existed

I was reading through the MDN docs the other day and found these JS features and APIs I never knew existed. So here is a short list of those things, useful or not - learning JS seemingly never ends. Label Statements [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/

74

Demystifying CORS

CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) is subject tinged with dread for many web developers. Like tales of a mythical sea beast, every developer has a story to tell about the day CORS seized upon one of their web requests, dragging it down into the inexorable depths, never to be seen again.

88

Freeing the Web from the Browser

The Web is, without a doubt, the most powerful research tool currently available to man. No longer must researchers comb through endless indices and catalogues to find what they are looking for. Instead, hyperlinks allow users to associatively explore rich interconnected structures of information with ease. In just a…