Hacker Blogs
Work in progress: 181,232 of 181,233 sites checked so far, more every week · updated 2 Nov 2026Missing a blog? Tell us

Top all-time · #9793

J

Jonathan Ong

Personal blog · jongleberry.comprogrammingweb

Jonathan Ong writes Jongleberry, a personal blog at jongleberry.com about programming and web. Since 2014, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “SemVer has failed us”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.

Visit the blog
9mentions?
8HN people?
2014–2016first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 8 in 2014

Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?

Why HN links it

HN readers link Jonathan Ong's critiques of package management and versioning, such as "Semver Has Failed Us" and "Why I Hate NPM", when discussing semantic versioning and npm's dependency design.

Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.

Jonathan Ong's blog — software engineering, personal finance, and notes.

Most-linked posts?

  1. SemVer has failed us
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-08
  2. /why-i-hate-npm.html
    2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-09-11

What Hacker News says?

  1. Lavinski · 2014-08-30
    This link ( http://www.jongleberry.com/semver-has-failed-us.html ) was also posted on HN a while ago. HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154933

    Comment linking /semver-has-failed-us.html

    on “Fix the versioning”
  2. rayshan · 2014-08-08

    Submitted SemVer has failed us as a story · 51 points

    HN discussion
  3. codereflection · 2014-09-12Recommends
    Look at this link http://www.jongleberry.com/why-i-hate-npm.html I agree with a lot of the points there While I don't hate npm, there are better examples of how to do package management. For example, Nuget gets a lot of things right with no nested dependencies.

    Comment linking /why-i-hate-npm.html

    on “Node OS”
  4. davemac8 · 2014-05-14

    Submitted The Inevitable Demise of CSS Preprocessors as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  5. codereflection · 2014-09-12
    You're reading too much into my statement. I said npm frustrates me, I didn't say NPM IS BAD. I do not feel this is the proper place to go into why NPM frustrates me so much, but on a high level, I'll tell you that it has much to do with nested dependencies & lack of support for seeing more than 1 version number on their website. Bower is even worse on the latter. Look at @bshimmin's link, http://www.jongleberry.com…

    Comment linking /why-i-hate-npm.html

    on “Node OS”
  6. bpierre · 2014-05-06

    Submitted Why You Should and Shouldn't Use Koa as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  7. bshimmin · 2014-09-11
    It'd be good if there were a canonical "Why npm sucks" article, like the "fractal of bad design" one for PHP. This one seems like a fairly reasonable candidate: http://www.jongleberry.com/why-i-hate-npm.html (though the "nested dependencies" bit needs much more swearing, and I disagree with the last paragraph suggesting things in Ruby and Python land are just as bad).

    Comment linking /why-i-hate-npm.html

    on “Node OS”
  8. sgottit · 2016-03-15

    Submitted Heroku as a Lambda service as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion
  9. aeflash · 2014-08-30
    After reading "Semver Has Failed Us" [1] and this current debacle (among others) I feel like something like "ferver" [2] is more practical. The funny thing is, is ferver is what a lot of libs are de facto, even if they are trying to rigidly adhere to semver. `save-prefix = ~` has been in my ~/.npmrc ever since the default became `^`. [1] http://www.jongleberry.com/semver-has-failed-us.html [2] https://github.com/jon…

    Comment linking /semver-has-failed-us.html

    on “Why Semantic Versioning Isn't”

Search all of HN for jongleberry.com