Top all-time · #210
David Walsh
Personal blog · davidwalsh.namewebprogramming
David Walsh's personal blog at davidwalsh.name covers web and programming. Since 2007, 222 different Hacker News readers have linked it 339 times, most often “Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Walsh's posts as practical web-development how-tos (prefetch, autofocus, favicons, pointer media queries, CSS vs JS animation). Commenters mostly cite them as support; a few call one helpful or worth reading.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called helpful; much cooler than it seems; worth reading for technical reasons
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog featuring tutorials about JavaScript, HTML5, AJAX, PHP, CSS, WordPress, and everything else development.
Most-linked posts?
- Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-10-07
- I’m an Impostor5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-11-14
- CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-04-29
- /rta-label4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-10-16
- “I Don't Hate Arrow Functions” Blog Post4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-03-19
- HTML5 Context Menus4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-02-27
- JS Objects: Inherited a Mess3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-04-22
- Being a Dev Dad3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-06-29
- HTML5 Link Prefetching3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-06
- CSS4 Preview – Selectors3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-10-03
What Hacker News says?
This is a nice idea! I once whipped up a shell script to do the same thing. UX feedback - disable autocorrections on the input fields [1], you may want to trim white space as well. [1] https://davidwalsh.name/disable-autocorrect
Comment linking /disable-autocorrect
on “Show HN: Print a WiFi Login Card”Submitted Leaving Mozilla as a story · 558 points
HN discussion1) We built our own event driven system for JS interactions. It does exactly what we want, when we want and comes in under a few thousand lines of code. The data transfer happens via a wrapper we wrote around the standard Fetch API called FetchWithTimeout (thank you David Walsh [0]). We also built our own animation library to handle things like graceful entry and exit transitions (e.g. when an item is deleted, it as…
Comment linking /fetch-timeout
on “Security issue related to the NPM registry”Submitted Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac as a story · 510 points
HN discussion> To the 18 year old David who sat in that lonely computer lab: you fucking did it, dude. You lived that dream. To 37 year old David: Go do it again. I really enjoyed that part. I forget sometimes that my career - what I woke up to do this morning, the reason I'm in this office right now - this was my dream. I should remember that more often. This dream started almost 20 years ago (I'm about the same age as David) a…
Comment linking /namespace-mootools
on “Leaving Mozilla”Submitted Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019) as a story · 298 points
HN discussionSomeone on the internet says Apple iOS does support it: https://davidwalsh.name/how-to-use-jpeg-2000-jp2-for-a-faste...
Comment linking /how-to-use-jpeg-2000-jp2-for-a-faster-images-on-iphone
on “John Carmack on JPEG”Submitted More HTML5 APIs as a story · 220 points
HN discussion"stop the world and view expression(X)" is time-consuming when you're trying to discover patterns that you can later be more selective about (e.g. to turn them into a conditional breakpoint). With logs you can pretty trivially spit out thousands of them and eyeball / grep / etc however you need, which could take hours if you had to stop each time, and didn't have specialized tools to help you search for needles in t…
Comment linking /debugging-conditional-breakpoints
on “VS Code can do that?”Submitted How HN crushed David Walsh's blog as a story · 91 points
HN discussionThat'd be the "equivalent meta tag" I mentioned. And this site claims the header works too, though I haven't tested it myself. https://davidwalsh.name/rta-label
Comment linking /rta-label
on “Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids < 16”Submitted Uncss – Find unused CSS as a story · 90 points
HN discussionFor people that want to test out the download attribute, instead of just reading about it, you try a demo here on your browser: http://davidwalsh.name/demo/html5-download.php Also, as GavinB suggested for big .pdf and .jpg files, I would would prefer 2 choices,"save" and "view" buttons.
Comment linking /demo/html5-download.php
on ““Right click and save as” needs to go away”Submitted CSS4 Preview – Selectors as a story · 87 points
HN discussion<link rel="prefetch" href="http://example.com/page2" /> More info at http://davidwalsh.name/html5-prefetch
Comment linking /html5-prefetch
on “Show HN: JS library to make your website instant”Submitted JS Objects: Inherited a Mess as a story · 78 points
HN discussionYes, the correct way (these days) to detect what the OP actually wants is the pointer media query: https://davidwalsh.name/pointer-media-query Which has values for coarse (finger) and fine (mouse, tablet, etc)
Comment linking /pointer-media-query
on “Aspect-ratio is great”Submitted CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster? as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI usually use a inlined base64 encoded favicon for that purpose like this: https://davidwalsh.name/blank-favicon
Comment linking /blank-favicon
on “How to Favicon in 2021: Six files that fit most needs”Submitted Nude.js: Nudity Detection with JavaScript as a story · 66 points
HN discussionSounds like the technique that uses CSS to "brute force" your browser history. http://davidwalsh.name/jquery-spyjax
Comment linking /jquery-spyjax
on ““We are only collecting the list of applications you have installed.””Submitted Detect Caps Lock with JavaScript as a story · 65 points
HN discussionIMO rating would be a difficult thing to do as there are many factors[1] to consider. What best for one use case, might be the worst choice for another. A more qualitative comparison would be more useful: http://www.fusioncharts.com/javascript-charting-comparison/ [1] http://davidwalsh.name/13-factors-choosing-javascript-charti...
Comment linking /13-factors-choosing-javascript-charting-library
on “Show HN: JavaScript Graphing Library Comparison”Submitted Preview FirefoxOS with R2D2B2G as a story · 54 points
HN discussionYou'll find this article helpful if you are wondering what all factors to consider while choosing a JavaScript charting library: http://davidwalsh.name/13-factors-choosing-javascript-charti...
Comment linking /13-factors-choosing-javascript-charting-library
on “Show HN: JavaScript Graphing Library Comparison”Submitted I'm So Old: Web Edition as a story · 49 points
HN discussionI'm wondering if it's this: https://davidwalsh.name/javascript-proxy
Comment linking /javascript-proxy
on “How we do Vue: one year later (2017)”Submitted More New Mozilla Technologies as a story · 49 points
HN discussionWell, there's a slight distinction there. CSS animations are faster than jQuery which is important to remember. You can get the same boost from CSS Animations and even better performance if you're using GSAP (Green Sock Animation Platform) which uses Javascript to give the same benefits you see in CSS animations. Here's the two articles: https://css-tricks.com/myth-busting-css-animations-vs-javasc... - this article…
Comment linking /css-js-animation
on “Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS”Submitted Being a Dev Dad as a story · 48 points
HN discussion
