Top all-time · #1219
Mike Davidson
Personal blog · mikeindustries.com/blogdesignweb
Mike Davidson writes Mike Industries, a personal blog at mikeindustries.com about design and web. Since 2007, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 66 times, most often “SIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses - a brilliantly practical hack”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mike Davidson's blog for web design and tech writing, including sIFR font replacement, web fonts, remote work, Newsvine and buying expired domains. Commenters value its practical tips.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- SIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses - a brilliantly practical hack6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2008-04-04
- Three Years in San Francisco5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-05-09
- How to Snatch an Expiring Domain5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-04-01
- Anchors Away » Mike Industries4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-02
- A Year of Working Remotely2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-06
- The Future Favors the Curious2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-31
- Shipping vs. Learning2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-08
- Superhuman embeds tracking pixels in user emails2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-02
- /sifr2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-03-15
- Here Lies Flash2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-29
What Hacker News says?
Thanks for the reminder about newsvine - I enjoyed that service back in the day. I found a recent blog post by the founder: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2017/10/an-epitaph-f...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2017/10/an-epitaph-for-newsvine
on “Hello, world: this is WikiTribune”Submitted Superhuman embeds tracking pixels in user emails as a story · 467 points
HN discussionBecause font choice can communicate a lot. Font choice can establish a brand, font choice can create a mood. Web fonts are better than the stuff people did to do this in the old days. Crazy abominations like siFR [1] or rendering out a gif of your text and using that instead of just delivering some ASCII text that screenreaders can deal with? Web fonts aren't perfect, especially on slow connections, but they're the…
Comment linking /blog/sifr
on “Web fonts, boy, I don't know”Submitted How to Snatch an Expiring Domain as a story · 150 points
HN discussionEdit: I have not seen anything coming from the economic literature about remote work. Sadly economists are focused on bigCorps and VCs who are not remote-friendly. Some of the best articles from remote workers i saw recently: https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2019/08/09/tips-from-16-year... https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/08/a-year-of-wo... More links like this here: https://reworkin.com/
Comment linking /blog/archive/2019/08/a-year-of-working-remotely
on “Ask HN: Good Remote Work Literature?”Submitted Never Dupe Your Readers as a story · 36 points
HN discussionSure. Here's a vacuum test study I performed on this very subject. Looks at the relative effects of words in URL, Title, Headings, and Body: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-round... It's a little TLDR, but the point above is spelled out near the end in the final "conclusion". Cheers.
Comment linking /blog/archive/2006/01/the-roundabout-seo-test
on “Title Junk”Submitted A good problem to have as a story · 10 points
HN discussionGreat read. I have fond memories of all the tricks we used to amaze visitors and fellow developers. Like using fonts that weren't installed on the visitors' computer using sIFR. https://mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr
Comment linking /blog/sifr
on “30 years of <br> tags”Submitted Is Good Design a liability when you're trying to appeal to the Masses? (MySpace vs. Virb) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThere are two different privacy issues at play. 1. You consent to being tracked in exchange for services consumed (Google Maps Navigation, for example). 2. You don't consent to it but you're still being tracked. Not only that, the data is then sold to any and every buyer. For example: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-i... OP has problems with #2. > Copyright, on the other hand, is much easi…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-is-spying-on-you
on “Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector”Submitted Anchors Away » Mike Industries as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is the best commentary I've seen about the Twitter situation, from someone who worked there for four years at a senior level (but isn't there now so is free to share their thoughts): https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away The short version: Twitter's challenges are not hard technology problems, they're hard social and community problems. These are not areas Elon has shown any interest in u…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2022/04/anchors-away
on “Fediverse”Submitted A Year of Working Remotely as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI find this hard to believe. A google answers query from 2005 puts Flash penetration at 98.2% ( http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/561724.html ) The article introducing the groundbreaking sIFR library from 2004 cites the reasoning for using Flash as high penetration ( http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr ). Macromedia in the year 2000 puts their penetration rate at ~90% ( http://web.a…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2004/08/sifr
on “Adobe, Apple, and Flash”Submitted Three Years in San Francisco as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAt Newsvine, we capitalized on an opportunity when John McCain and his campaign people hijacked some graphics from my MySpace design tutorial without permission. He referenced/hotlinked images hosted on my server on his own MySpace page so one day I "hacked" his site by changing the graphics. The prank got us on TechCrunch immediately (no surprise), the local news in Seattle (kind of a surprise), and then featured o…
Comment linking /scratch/dailyshow.mp4
on “Ask HN: How did you hack the press when you launched your startup(s)?”Submitted Slam Dunk Startups? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI recommend the Non-Designer's Design Book as well. However, there are a few little hacks that seemed to work well for some sites I had to put up. 1. A nice compelling photograph is a little easy on the eye and seems to make up for a lack of content on the front page. 2. Use sIFR ( http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/ ) to add fantastic typography to your site, and make it more visually appealing. 3. Using wordp…
Comment linking /blog/sifr/
on “Ask HN: improving your design skills?”Submitted Superhuman’s superficial fixes do not prevent it from spying on you as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSee https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5856 , the most-dup'ed JS bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org. Or this fun blog post from 2004 that blames Apple ("Apple Flunks First Grade Math"): http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/apple-cal... Finite binary floating point representations do not handle powers of five well. It takes much greater precision (bignums under the hood) to round the last digit prope…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2004/08/apple-calculator
on “Every day I learn something new... and stupid.”Submitted How to Snatch an Expiring Domain as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe key reason people have problem with data-mongers is deceit. Not that absolutist do not understand why privacy is violated, but how . For instance, - Data Collection: No way to opt-out. Ex: Analytics. - User Studies: The default is almost always opt-in. Ex: Siri recordings. This, coupled with the fact that a majority of internet and smartphone users do not understand the second thing about the ad-industry makes t…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2019/06/superhuman-is-spying-on-you
on “Privacy Fundamentalism”Submitted Anchors Away as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe banks could verify if the user is checking their mails by asking them to reply to the email or click on a link explicitly to confirm the receipt? Tracking with pixels... there's so much wrong with it that it needs a blog post of its own, and thankfully someone did just that: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-i...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-is-spying-on-you
on “MailTrackerBlocker – email tracker and spy pixel blocker plugin for Apple Mail”Submitted How to Snatch an Expiring Domain (2005) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionScalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash based technology that enables the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. It was initially developed by Shaun Inman and improved by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacemen... http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/
Comment linking /sifr
on “Encouraged Commentary (cool use of jQuery to enhance blog commenting)”Submitted Here Lies Flash as a story · 4 points
HN discussionUnreadable is 'sIFR' http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/
Comment linking /blog/sifr/
on “@font-face makes the web pretty (or ugly). (Needs FF 3.5 or Safari)”Submitted Three Years in San Francisco as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
