Top all-time · #4959
Cal Henderson
Personal blog · iamcal.comprogrammingweb
Cal Henderson's personal blog at iamcal.com covers programming and web. Since 2007, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Cal Henderson builds and analyzes embedding JS and CSS in PNG's”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN links Cal Henderson's iamcal.com mainly for its Brainfuck debugger tool and a bcrypt post. One commenter recommends his talks on scaling and Unicode filtering.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /misc/bf_debug/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-28
- Cal Henderson builds and analyzes embedding JS and CSS in PNG's2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-08-24
- Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-21
What Hacker News says?
It's a brainfuck program - you can run it in your web browser at http://www.iamcal.com/misc/bf_debug/
Comment linking /misc/bf_debug/
on “The descent to C”Submitted Lego Carcassonne as a story · 91 points
HN discussionBack when I was a super junior php dev I stumbled across a post by Cal Henderson about using bcrypt https://www.iamcal.com/2012-06/use-bcrypt/ His lib is can be dropped in to any project (that doesn't have something similar built in already) https://github.com/iamcal/lib_bcrypt Anyone writing code has no excuse for not using this, it's not rocket surgery.
Comment linking /2012-06/use-bcrypt/
on “At Blind, a security lapse revealed private complaints from tech employees”Submitted Scaling web apps (sets of slides by Flickr architect) as a story · 14 points
HN discussion> Chars should be 32-bit, since 16 bits aren't enough to represent all Unicode codepoints. This would be a lot better, but even this is oversimplifying things and is going to cause problems. In this case, thinking "chars are 32 bits" ignores the fact that, in Unicode, a "char" (that is, a codepoint) and a single character you see on the screen (that is, a glyph) are not the same thing: Some codepoints don't map to g…
Comment linking /understanding-bidirectional-text/
on “User revolt over Java bloatware”Submitted Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"... I was hoping for an insight into some cool algorithm they use, instead I get a piece of puffery ..." If you want to read about the precise, analytical technology that by and large has been solved - yesterdays news then try Cal Hendersons blog ~ http://iamcal.com/talks Hendo has some excellent talks on massive scaling, unicode filtering, how to build cheap & fast, etc. If you want to read about the messy, yet to…
Comment linking /talks
on “How Flickr polices 2.8 billion photos”Submitted Cal Henderson builds and analyzes embedding JS and CSS in PNG's as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe creators are people whose names you might recognise: Denise Wilton http://www.kaiusdesign.com/ and Cal Henderson http://www.iamcal.com/ .
Comment linking /
on “City Creator (2002)”Submitted Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNice gui. It needs a fast-forward speed. It also needs to interpret the , instruction for accepting input. Maybe you could use http://www.iamcal.com/misc/bf_debug (in Debug mode) as a guide.
Comment linking /misc/bf_debug
on “Javascript Brainfuck Interpreter and Visualizer”Submitted PNGStore - Embedding compressed CSS & JavaScript in PNGs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBrainfuck. Because it's fun. My favorite Brainfuck interpreters. http://brainfuck.tk http://copy.sh/brainfuck/ http://www.iamcal.com/misc/bf_debug/ This is a good IDE for Brainfuck. http://4mhz.de/bfdev.html If you are interested, you can contribute to this Brainfuck compiler optimization project. http://www.nayuki.io/page/optimizing-brainfuck-compiler
Comment linking /misc/bf_debug/
on “Ask HN: What is your favourite unpopular programming language?”Submitted Reading List (2025) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOne of the first requests for a new UI is usually the Flat design. This is usually followed by "hey, can you add a shadow or border something?" which basically turns it non-flat. The color contrast is another big problem people seem to forget. E.G. http://www.iamcal.com/toys/colors/ Windows 8 feels cheap or at least still a work in progress. It sometimes actually reminds me of an early iteration of SkyOS. Edit: One…
Comment linking /toys/colors/
on “Flat design dangerous?”Submitted Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
