Top all-time · #4102
Alex Sexton
Personal blog · alexsexton.com/blogprogrammingweb
Alex Sexton's personal blog at alexsexton.com covers programming and web. Since 2010, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Understanding JavaScript Inheritance”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Alex Sexton's posts on JavaScript inheritance and on building large jQuery apps, plus a few of his tools and demos. Other links cite his Monty Hall rewrite post and an Uglify GUI.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Alex Sexton lives in Austin, TX and works as a software engineer at Pierre.co.
Most-linked posts?
- Understanding JavaScript Inheritance3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-04-12
- The 15 Commandments of Front-End Performance2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-09
- The Monty Hall Rewrite – Alex Sexton2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-09
What Hacker News says?
This approach to discussing inheritance treats JavaScript as if you're a Java or C++ programmer, and completely lacks any clarity with how inheritance in JavaScript really works. Best intro I've read on the topic I'm talking about is from Alex Sexton (just read the last example, it really hits the nail on the head): https://alexsexton.com/blog/2013/04/understanding-javascript... So you might want a wee bit of hierar…
Comment linking /blog/2013/04/understanding-javascript-inheritance/
on “Class Hierarchies? Don't Do That”Submitted The Productivity Cycle as a story · 143 points
HN discussionYou can do cross-domain POSTs. You just cannot get a response from the server. Often times though you can get the length of the response. This can be used to do a POST to change settings on an unsecured Wi-Fi routers, for example and checking whether the call succeeded or not by the length of the response. The method described in the SO answer is similar, from what I can tell, to what DISQUS uses. I believe they cal…
Comment linking /thirdparty/
on “The Dropbox API”Submitted The Monty Hall Rewrite as a story · 11 points
HN discussionHere's an ugly GUI for Uglify: http://alexsexton.com/uglifui/
Comment linking /uglifui/
on “Google Page Speed Online”Submitted Deploying JavaScript Applications as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAKA The Monty Hall Rewrite https://alexsexton.com/blog/2014/11/the-monty-hall-rewrite
Comment linking /blog/2014/11/the-monty-hall-rewrite
on “We built a modern data stack from scratch and reduced our bill by 70%”Submitted The 15 Commandments of Front-End Performance as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI think this post is neither trolling nor calling on people to blindly switch to Dojo. It is pointing out a thing I see over and over and over again: people choosing jQuery for tasks to which it is simply not suited. Yes, if you know what you're doing you can make it work -- Alex Sexton makes this argument quite well in his post "On 'Rolling Your Own' Large jQuery Apps" ( http://alexsexton.com/?p=106 ). This post as…
Comment linking /?p=106
on “JQuery is for Noobs”Submitted Understanding JavaScript Inheritance as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHere's a useful comparative demo that makes this a little easier to differentiate: http://alexsexton.com/inheritance/demo/
Comment linking /inheritance/demo/
on “Prototype based vs. class based inheritance”Submitted The UX of Language as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Monty Hall Rewrite – Alex Sexton as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted JavaScript Goto Statement as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The 15 Commandments of Front-End Performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding JavaScript Inheritance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding JavaScript Inheritance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted On JS Inheritance: "stop making everything so confusing and program cool stuff" as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introducing The Jed Toolkit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Thoughts on AMD as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
