Top all-time · #6403
Steve Fenton
Personal blog · stevefenton.co.uk/blogprogrammingproductivity
Steve Fenton's personal blog at stevefenton.co.uk covers programming and productivity. Since 2011, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Pie Charts Are Bad”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Steve Fenton's posts mainly for his essay against pie charts, which comes up in data-visualisation threads. One commenter also points to a post on starting test-driven development.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Steve Fenton's personal home page and blog.
Most-linked posts?
- Pie Charts Are Bad6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-06-22
What Hacker News says?
Some people say that pie charts are bad ;) https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
Comment linking /Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
on “MetricsGraphics.js – D3-based library optimized for visualizing time-series data”Submitted Pie Charts Are Bad as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The second, which looks more rigorous to me, is "taking source code written in one language and transforming into another language that has a similar level of abstraction" (found for example here: https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/2012/11/compiling-vs-transpili... ). > For example, “Transpile Java Bytecode to WebAssembly” adds exactly zero information to “Compile Java Bytecode to WebAssembly” No, the point is that ‘tr…
Comment linking /2012/11/compiling-vs-transpili...
on “TeaVM – Ahead-of-time transpiler of Java bytecode to JavaScript or WebAssembly”Submitted Pie charts are bad as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFrom a quick Google search, I find mainly two kinds of definitions of "transpile". The first is a generic "translating from one source programming language to another, producing translated source code in the other language". This is basically compiling, except that it excludes "non-source" languages from the output. The second, which looks more rigorous to me, is "taking source code written in one language and trans…
Comment linking /2012/11/compiling-vs-transpiling/
on “TeaVM – Ahead-of-time transpiler of Java bytecode to JavaScript or WebAssembly”Submitted Why Too Many UI Tests Prevents Change as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMore pie chart hatred from a guy I used to work with. http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/ http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Blog/Date/201109/Blog/T... http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Blog/Date/201012/Blog/C...
Comment linking /Content/Blog/Date/201012/Blog/Continued-Pie-Chart-Hatred/
on “Please don't use pie charts”TDD takes time and is hard to get right at first. I'm sure you will find the usual tutorials so I would rather recommend this blog post: https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Blog/Date/201305/Blog/... and Ian Cooper's talk "TDD, where did it all go wrong": https://vimeo.com/68375232 In a nutshell: test your high level API and not your implementation, minimize your usage of mocking.
Comment linking /Content/Blog/Date/201305/Blog/My-Unit-Testing-Epiphany/
on “Ask HN: How do I start with test driven development?”These 3D pie charts are the worst. http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
Comment linking /Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
on “What do colors mean to your users”I don't like to be THAT guy on HN who posts off-topic criticism (especially on a really interesting link like this), but as someone who is very interested in data visualization I think it's worth pointing out: pie charts are almost never the correct way to visualize data. I decided to mention this because it's not really intuitive - even many data vis experts had to be taught this. A bar chart presents the same info…
Comment linking /Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
on “Where the Jobs Are in “Who Is Hiring” (June 2013)”OTOH you can shrink a pie chart without losing information. Although I agree they are generally bad http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
Comment linking /Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
on “The iPod’s Dark UI Pattern”In general it's hard to know what a chunk of the pie chart means. You get a very simple glance that one chunk is bigger, and another chunk is much bigger. But looking at that chart: How big is Eclair & Older compared to Honeycomb? That chart is ordered by release; you start reading it at "3 o'clock" on the right hand side, and work clockwise. Luckily they've labled each chunk of the pie. Normally they'd just have a…
Comment linking /Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/
on “Android Jelly Bean passes 10% adoption and Gingerbread finally falls under 50%”https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/blog/2022/06/run-a-bash-script...
Comment linking /blog/2022/06/run-a-bash-script-with-arguments-in-github-actions/
on “Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally”Thanks, not sure I agree, but familiar with the format; might be wrong, but believe these are notable examples of such a format: https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/blog/2022/09/the-difference-be... If you’re aware of other notable examples, would be interested in links to them. As for my guess, it’s at a best seller format, it’s 100s of tiny chapters, which makes the readers feel like they’re rapidly discovering new info…
Comment linking /blog/2022/09/the-difference-between-the-phoenix-project-and-the-unicorn-project/
on “Screw motivation, what you need is discipline”
