Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 267 posts.

Web & Frontend
46

Rails 7 Released

This version of Rails has been years in the conceptual making. It’s the fulfillment of a vision to present a truly full-stack approach to web development that tackles both the front- and back-end challenges with equal vigor. An omakase menu that includes everything from the aperitif to the dessert.

55

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019)

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of…

58

Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

With the change of administrations comes a new website, and this morning the all-new Whitehouse.gov debuted. Like its predecessor, the site is powered by WordPress – but this version carries many differences and modern out-of-the-box features that we’re glad to see used on a site of this magnitude. Dave Amirault…