Top all-time · #951
Tom MacWright
Personal blog · macwright.orgprogrammingwebscience
Tom MacWright writes macwright.com, a personal blog at macwright.org about programming, web and science. Since 2011, 72 different Hacker News readers have linked it 146 times, most often “Everything is fine with JavaScript”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
The blog, projects, and assorted output of Tom MacWright
Most-linked posts?
- Everything is fine with JavaScript4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-10-04
- More than you ever wanted to know about GeoJSON4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-03-23
- IPFS, Again3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-06-09
- Dear Map People3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-05-28
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-08
- So you want to decentralize your website3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-21
- Math Keeps Changing2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-14
- The other kind of privacy (2018)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-05
- Using Dark to Build Old Fashioned2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-29
- Second-Guessing the Modern Web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-10
What Hacker News says?
https://macwright.org/ ‘published since 2011.’ Topics change gradually. Mostly things I do, read, and like.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Second-Guessing the Modern Web as a story · 721 points
HN discussionHere's my personal website: https://matall.in I'm a fan of personal sites, too. Some of the ones that I like most, in no particular order: https://macwright.org https://zachholman.com https://warpspire.com https://paulstamatiou.com http://francisco.dance https://craigmod.com
Comment linking /
on “Building a Kickass Portfolio”Submitted IPFS, Again as a story · 545 points
HN discussionThis is a true solo developer: http://pketh.org/archives/ It looks like this thread is turning into general blog recommendations. I like these, and they haven't been listed: https://macwright.org/ https://tonsky.me/ https://nadiaeghbal.com/posts/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?”Submitted You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code as a story · 219 points
HN discussionHe also tried dat. https://macwright.org/2017/07/20/decentralize-your-website.h... Hasnt written about it again though.
Comment linking /2017/07/20/decentralize-your-website.html
on “IPFS, Again”Submitted Ethics in Geo as a story · 130 points
HN discussionGratuitous self-link, but I wrote this article about the SVG basics, what's useful to learn, and how it's different from HTML: https://macwright.org/2013/06/25/just-enough-svg.html
Comment linking /2013/06/25/just-enough-svg.html
on “The Trouble with D3”Submitted Math Keeps Changing as a story · 95 points
HN discussion- re · 2022-02-06
This part of the FAQ links the author's explanation of his preference. > Do you have a preference? Yes I do: longitude, latitude. http://macwright.org/2016/07/15/longitude-latitude-is-the-ri... The bullet points: * Almost every geospatial format puts longitude first * Almost all open source software uses longitude, latitude ordering * longitude-first is the equivalent of XY ordering
Comment linking /2016/07/15/longitude-latitude-is-the-right-way.html
on “Lon Lat Lon Lat” Submitted The simplicity of dropping Google in 2018 as a story · 90 points
HN discussionMapbox's Streets global basemap is ~240 GBs. source: http://macwright.org/presentations/nodedc/#7
Comment linking /presentations/nodedc/
on “New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain”Submitted Simple Statistics, a JS library for doing statistics as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThere were a lot of things discussed here in the original post of this that were lost in the HN outage. Things that stood out to me from memory/ links and stuff/ some of my own thoughts: - OSM does not always show some data. This does not really matter because the vector data is all available, and the openstreetmaps.org basemap is just one rendering of many. A good example of this is mapbox, which is one of the most…
Comment linking /mapschool/
on “Why the World Needs OpenStreetMap”Submitted The Best Programming Font: M+ as a story · 75 points
HN discussionI love a good font (and try to use one on my own blog), but part of me gets really giddy when I discover a site with very little styling. It's like I've found some secret oasis that's going to have a high signal-to-noise ratio, or at least some more "raw" writing than you'd find on ${popularNewsWebsite}. Some sites that come to mind: - https://danluu.com/ - https://100r.co/site/home.html - https://meagher.co/ - http…
Comment linking /
on “Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)”Submitted Literate Jenks Natural Breaks and How the Idea of Code is Lost as a story · 59 points
HN discussionSince passed laws are basically changesets of the existing code, it should be a simple matter of applying patches based on the new laws. In other words, once you digitize the code the first time, any git could update it. http://macwright.org/2013/02/13/the-code-compiled.html
Comment linking /2013/02/13/the-code-compiled.html
on “You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code”Submitted Paper Notes (2019) as a story · 51 points
HN discussionYou could make your own. Take the bills (which are free) and compile them yourself. Boom, your own copy of the DC Code. You can then release it under a permissive license or whatever. The hard part is compiling the bills. From the blog, Each bill is then downloaded by an employee of the company that wins the contract for maintaining the bill. This person must hold a law degree from an ABA accredited law school, and…
Comment linking /2013/02/13/the-code-compiled.html
on “You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code”Submitted Everything is fine with JavaScript as a story · 35 points
HN discussionNot sure they can be considered fait accompli necessarily because they are "works". The rule [1] they can't be copyright by virtue of what they are seems more compelling. [1] http://macwright.org/2013/02/14/the-law-is-public-domain.htm...
Comment linking /2013/02/14/the-law-is-public-domain.html
on “You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code”Submitted Penmanship and programming education (2016) as a story · 34 points
HN discussionA lot of the comments here are reminding me a lot of Tom MacWright's critique of modern web development: https://macwright.org/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html Around the same time, Vladimir Agafonkin (perhaps in response to the above??) released tinyjam, https://github.com/mourner/tinyjam , which bills itself as "an elegant, zero-config static site generator in 100 lines of code, an experiment in radical simplicity." Ma…
Comment linking /2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html
on “The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020”Submitted Viz from an open-source keylogger, with d3 as a story · 33 points
HN discussionIn addition to the prior art the author links in the README, there's also the suckless.org project ssg[0]. For something a little more graphically oriented, there's Tom MacWright's big[1] and the in-browser slide editor biggie[2], which both use Markdown. 1: https://github.com/jroimartin/ssg 2: http://www.macwright.org/big/ 3: http://www.macwright.org/biggie/
Comment linking /biggie/
on “Show HN: Patat – Terminal-based presentations using Pandoc”Submitted Report on the current experience of using IPFS to deploy a website as a story · 26 points
HN discussionIt’s a contentious point, but plenty of formats and standards use lng, lat ordering. https://macwright.org/lonlat/ https://macwright.org/2016/07/15/longitude-latitude-is-the-r...
Comment linking /2016/07/15/longitude-latitude-is-the-right-way.html
on “You probably don't need PostGIS”Submitted The 180th Meridian (2016) as a story · 25 points
HN discussion
