Top all-time · #354
Nolan Lawson
Personal blog · nolanlawson.comprogrammingweb
Nolan Lawson writes Read the Tea Leaves, a personal blog at nolanlawson.com about programming and web. Since 2014, 148 different Hacker News readers have linked it 257 times, most often “Web SQL Database: In Memoriam (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link nolanlawson.com for its web-platform history, especially the WebSQL story, and for posts on Safari, JavaScript bundling, and web components.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Praised as a good WebSQL retelling with very good details; a 'gem' and a post that 'sums it up pretty well'.
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.
Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson
Most-linked posts?
- Web SQL Database: In Memoriam (2014)9 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2016-06-10
- Progressive enhancement isn't dead, but it smells funny8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-10-13
- What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-03-05
- Safari is the new IE6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-06-30
- You can just choose how many bugs you want now6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-08-16
- Fixing memory leaks in web applications6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-02-19
- Web components are okay5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-09-29
- My talk on CSS runtime performance5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-01-17
- /2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-10-12
- Style scoping versus shadow DOM: which is fastest?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-06-22
What Hacker News says?
Servo produced a very fast CSS rules matching engine now used in Firefox (see https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shad... ), and WebRender which underpins Gecko's rendering. That's not nothing. About embedding Servo, I have some experience around that ( https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/ ) and it's been easy to embed: you just need to provide a GL surface and hook up your input events into…
Comment linking /2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shadow-dom-which-is-fastest/
on “Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project”Submitted Safari is the new IE as a story · 753 points
HN discussionI view the "standards" argument as a red herring for building a NoSQL db in the browser. Which, to this day, is slow, buggy and requires third party libraries to be usable [1] For those who are able to stomach an uncomfortable political history instead of an easy, technical answer, you can take a look at [2]. It's interesting that 7 years later, many the folks who pushed hard to get rid of SQL in favor of NoSQL seem…
Comment linking /2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/
on “A future for SQL on the web”Submitted The balance has shifted away from SPAs as a story · 486 points
HN discussionI used it back in the day and was quite sad when it disappeared. Nolan Lawson does a good job telling the sordid tale at https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memor...
Comment linking /2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/
on “A future for SQL on the web”Submitted The collapse of complex software as a story · 388 points
HN discussionThis should have a big impact on the "cost of small modules", as outlined here: https://nolanlawson.com/2016/08/15/the-cost-of-small-modules... Which is to say, one of its most effective use cases will be making up for deficiencies in Webpack, Browserify and RequireJS. Which I'm a little ambivalent about - I wish we could have seen improvements to those tools (it's possible, as shown by Rollup and Closure Compiler)…
Comment linking /2016/08/15/the-cost-of-small-modules/
on “Prepack helps make JavaScript code more efficient”Submitted Why don't more developers “use the platform”? as a story · 330 points
HN discussionIn addition to Wil Wheaton's experience linked above, we have: https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng... https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr... [2] [1] See section on identity and moderation - you can't decouple them when you have a hybrid between a content platform and a social media application (Which…
Comment linking /2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/
on “YouTube deleted an electronics repair channel [video]”Submitted The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks as a story · 299 points
HN discussionI realize Mozilla spearheaded an effort to remove webSQL from the standards. But chrome still uses it for fulltext search in gmail. https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://nolanlawson.com/tag/websql/
Comment linking /tag/websql/
on “The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70”Submitted The fate of "small" open source as a story · 295 points
HN discussionThe linked article is such a gem: You can choose how many bugs you want now https://nolanlawson.com/2026/08/16/you-can-just-choose-how-m... Love the concept of agents adding epicycles to fix bugs. It maps closely to my experience.
Comment linking /2026/08/16/you-can-just-choose-how-many-bugs-you-want-now/
on “There's no reason for software to be slow anymore”Submitted Web components are okay as a story · 278 points
HN discussionThe article links to "You can just choose how many bugs you want now" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/08/16/you-can-just-choose-how-m... So going on a tangent: an additional mechanism you have that becomes feasible with LLM assistance today is proving your code correct.
Comment linking /2026/08/16/you-can-just-choose-how-many-bugs-you-want-now/
on “There's no reason for software to be slow anymore”Submitted My love-hate affair with technology as a story · 244 points
HN discussionHe is parroting a year old clickbait headline ( https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/ ) where the main gripes were that - Apple didn't attend EdgeConf 2015 - https://webkit.org/blog/ was not updated often enough - Safari 9 had a seriously buggy IndexedDB (fixed in Safari 10)
Comment linking /2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
on “You might not need JavaScript”Submitted The asteroid currently hitting front end web development as a story · 235 points
HN discussionChrome might not be the best, but Safari is very far behind. http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
Comment linking /2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
on “Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software”Submitted Fuite: a tool for finding memory leaks in web apps as a story · 219 points
HN discussionI think I'm more cynical about the process than you are. From my point of view, the process has been intensely political from day one, with rules honoured mainly in the breach. The best retelling of events, I think, is this one: http://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memori... Has some very good details. And it's certainly funny to see what was said during the discussion with how things turned out in…
Comment linking /2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/
on “Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control”Submitted Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs as a story · 218 points
HN discussionThe thing is, I can't/don't disagree with you, in terms of arguing for SQLite over alternatives. Hearing the practical specifics of your edge case is (depressingly) insightful. I just realized the links I posted didn't include the article I had in mind when I went link-digging (and didn't properly check the results, woops). I found it: https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memor... Potentially inter…
Comment linking /2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/
on “WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation”Submitted Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system as a story · 192 points
HN discussionI never thought of replacing WebSQL like that . Cooool. Pretty sure Electron provides IndexedDB though. (Ref: https://nolanlawson.com/2015/09/29/indexeddb-websql-localsto... , vaguely https://nolanlawson.github.io/offlinefirst-2016-03/ )
Comment linking /2015/09/29/indexeddb-websql-localstorage-what-blocks-the-dom/
on “WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation”Submitted Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages as a story · 168 points
HN discussionhttps://nolanlawson.com/2016/10/13/progressive-enhancement-i...
Comment linking /2016/10/13/progressive-enhancement-isnt-dead-but-it-smells-funny/
on “Step-by-step tutorial to build a modern JavaScript stack from scratch”Submitted My talk on CSS runtime performance as a story · 114 points
HN discussion(PouchDB contributor here.) Just a quick note that slow replication is one of the things that is largely fixed in CouchDB 2.0 thanks to the new _bulk_get API ( https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2310 ) and is set to get even better in CouchDB 3.0 once it has HTTP 2. As for your app feeling sluggish, my hunch is that you're seeing this in a Chromium or Gecko browser (e.g. Android WebView) in which cases In…
Comment linking /2015/09/29/indexeddb-websql-localstorage-what-blocks-the-dom/
on “PouchDB, the JavaScript Database That Syncs”Submitted Web SQL Database: In Memoriam as a story · 104 points
HN discussion
