Top all-time · #145
Nikita Tonsky
Personal blog · tonsky.mewebprogramming
Nikita Tonsky's personal blog at tonsky.me covers web and programming. Since 2014, 278 different Hacker News readers have linked it 380 times, most often “Time to Upgrade Your Monitor”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link tonsky.me for essays on software slowness, UI design and rendering, such as Software Disenchantment, and for a proposal for a new git interface. Commenters also pass it along as a good blog.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Git-interface post has 'a lot of good ideas' and a 'really great concept'; a follow-up is 'nice'; listed as a good blog.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- Time to Upgrade Your Monitor25 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2020-06-17
- Software Disenchantment (2018)19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2020-01-01
- It's hard to justify Tahoe icons12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2026-01-05
- Hardest problem in computer science: centering things10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2024-04-16
- Good times create weak men9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-12-30
- SwiftUI Defaults Considered Harmful8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-01-21
- The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 20238 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-10-02
- The Web After Tomorrow (2015)7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-05-11
- A Case for ClojureScript 2.07 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-06-26
- Local First, Forever7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-06-24
What Hacker News says?
From https://tonsky.me/blog/gaslight-driven-development/ today: > Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks is just part of the experience. Millions of people create accounts, confirm emails, dismiss notifications, solve captchas, reject cookies, and accept terms and conditions—not because they particularly want to or even need to. They do it because that’s what the…
Comment linking /blog/gaslight-driven-development/
on “Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists”- kg · 2024-01-28
Submitted In loving memory of square checkbox as a story · 1967 points
HN discussion Okay, tracked down this[0], which is probably what you were talking about(?), and what the actual fuck is wrong with that rendering engine? You render a Apx horizontal line, Bpx of space, a second Apx line, Bpx of space, and the third Apx line, where A=B=1. Maybe you use 2px of space. Maybe, if you're rendering obnoxiously huge, you use a 2px line and however many pixels of space. You don't fucking use real-valued v…
Comment linking /blog/monitors/hinting_failures.png
on “Time to Upgrade Your Monitor”Submitted Hardest problem in computer science: centering things as a story · 1419 points
HN discussionAll of these modern "declarative" frameworks seem to be optimized for hello world kinds of apps. Jetpack Compose, too. And SwiftUI is just being too smart sometimes: https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/ Not sure about other people, but for me, my UI framework making its own heuristic decisions about how to lay out and style my views is the last thing I want. It robs me of the certainty that my UI will look and work the w…
Comment linking /blog/swiftui/
on “Apple's Software Quality Crisis”Submitted Time to Upgrade Your Monitor as a story · 1220 points
HN discussionCan’t not mention tonsky’s post about most important feature of Sublime: https://tonsky.me/blog/sublime/
Comment linking /blog/sublime/
on “I still like Sublime Text”Submitted Chrome breaks the Web as a story · 1187 points
HN discussionHe has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subo…
Comment linking /blog/good-times-weak-men/
on “Software Disenchantment (2018)”Submitted Software Disenchantment (2018) as a story · 934 points
HN discussionSee also: in Good times create weak men [0], the author explains his interpretation as to why. I can't summarize it well. It's centered around a Jonathan Blow talk [1] Preventing the collapse of civilization . [0] https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
Comment linking /blog/good-times-weak-men/
on “Software Disenchantment (2018)”Submitted Let’s fix font size as a story · 918 points
HN discussionI feel like combined with https://tonsky.me/blog/font-size/ that these comment threads are fleshed out enough to go the HTML and CSS groups for discussion, refinement, and eventual implementation. Clear, useful, reasonable, game-changing, and able to be opt-in.
Comment linking /blog/font-size/
on “Let’s fix font size”Submitted Computers as I used to love them as a story · 692 points
HN discussionParsing and processing several megabytes of JS for each page you visit can get expensive quickly. https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/
Comment linking /blog/js-bloat/
on “Htmx 4.0”Submitted Local First, Forever as a story · 689 points
HN discussionHi, I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest: Tech - https://wasteofserver.com/ - https://tonsky.me/ - https://brianschrader.com/ - https://blog.thea.codes/ - https://fasterthanli.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://blog.royalsloth.eu/ Non-tech - https://www.drorpoleg.com/ - About w…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Redesigning GitHub Repository Page as a story · 614 points
HN discussionTime to pull up my RSS reader! https://drewdevault.com/ http://jvns.ca/ https://www.benkuhn.net/ https://danluu.com/ https://scattered-thoughts.net/ http://antirez.com/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/ https://neilkakkar.com/ https://zachholman.com/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://endler.dev/ https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/ https://www.the-paper-trail.org/ https://tonsky.me/ https://dave.cheney.net/ https://b…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Graphics for JVM as a story · 564 points
HN discussionI personally keep on eye on new things here - https://tonsky.me
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted People expect technology to suck because it sucks as a story · 447 points
HN discussionI'm still waiting for a decent GUI that takes full advantage of the simplicity of git's underlying data model. The CLI is okay and I've gotten really good with it, but fundamentally I think git's DAG is something that would be best represented and manipulated graphically. [Reinventing the Git Interface][1] was written almost 3 years ago now and yet to my knowledge nobody's implemented anything quite like that yet. […
Comment linking /blog/reinventing-git-interface/
on “Announcing GVFS: Git Virtual File System”Submitted Emoji Under the Hood as a story · 430 points
HN discussionI'm still waiting for a GUI that uses the fundamental model of how git works to its advantage instead of trying to paper over it. I saw a really great concept for this a while back, but AFAIK nobody ever really implemented it: http://tonsky.me/blog/reinventing-git-interface/
Comment linking /blog/reinventing-git-interface/
on “Git from the inside out”Submitted JavaScript Bloat in 2024 as a story · 420 points
HN discussionIt's because it's so opaque and inconsistent. If git was a program like Microsoft Word, where every available action is easily discoverable and the current state is obvious, then it wouldn't be so bad. Something like what Nikita Tonsky wrote in an article called "Reinventing Git Interface"[0], which has a lot of good ideas. [0] http://tonsky.me/blog/reinventing-git-interface/
Comment linking /blog/reinventing-git-interface/
on “Write yourself a Git (2018)”Submitted How not to hire a software engineer as a story · 329 points
HN discussionhttps://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ give it some time and you'll never want to turn it on again.
Comment linking /blog/monitors/
on “macOS Big Sur”Submitted Software disenchantment as a story · 317 points
HN discussion
