Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 314 posts.

Web & Frontend
186

How “See a Satellite Tonight” Works

See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I wanted: The front page…

187

Are forum platforms dead?

👋 Hello everyone. I'm Matt Mecham and today I will be your Rosieland guide. It feels that every other week a new article is written proclaiming the death of the venerable forum platform. The author often cites forums they used to frequent in the early 2000s and how they now hang out on Twitter and Discord, which, in…

203

Speeding up this site by 50x (2014)

I've seen all these studies that show how a 100ms improvement in page load time has a significant effect on page views, conversion rate, etc., but I'd never actually tried to optimize my site. This blog is a static Octopress site, hosted on GitHub Pages. Static sites are supposed to be fast, and GitHub Pages uses…

208

Body Margin 8px

All browsers add an 8px margin on the body element – it’s part of the w3c-recommended default stylesheet which browsers generally use as a starting point for their own ‘user agent’ styles. But why 8px ? Where does that come from?