Top all-time · #779
Ben Nadel
Personal blog · bennadel.com/blogprogrammingweb
Ben Nadel's personal blog at bennadel.com covers programming and web. Since 2009, 83 different Hacker News readers have linked it 154 times, most often “Privacy Policy / Terms Of Service Generator”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 31 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ben Nadel's AngularJS and ColdFusion posts, mostly as references. A few are called helpful, and his privacy policy generator is linked as a tool.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called helpful for RESTful controllers and AngularJS learning, an interesting scope discussion, and a great resource.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 31 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Recent articles on web development by Ben Nadel. Topics range from ColdFusion and CFML to HTML and CSS to SQL and database performance.
Most-linked posts?
- Privacy Policy / Terms Of Service Generator7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-05-05
- /blog/2439-My-Experience-With-AngularJS-The-Super-heroic-JavaScript-MVW-Framework.htm3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-30
- Cell Phones, SMS, Twilio, Pusher, ColdFusion, And Google Maps == Fun2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-07-21
- Programming as a Hobby in the Age of AI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-26
- InvisionApp Co-Founder: Rediscovering My Love of ColdFusion and CFML in 20202 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-11
- You Can Throw() Anything in JavaScript – and Other Async/Await Considerations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-01
- After 3 Months of JavaScript Linting, It's Pretty Much All Pain and No Gain2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-01
- Styling Console.log() Output Formatting with CSS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-16
- Two-Way Data Binding Is Just a “Box of Bananas” in Angular 2 Beta 12 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-03
What Hacker News says?
Small correction - it's InVision. https://www.invisionapp.com/ Its co-founder and lead engineer is/was very prolific in the ColdFusion community. https://www.bennadel.com/
Comment linking /
on “Logojoy: AI-powered logo creator”Submitted I've been merging microservices back into the monolith as a story · 282 points
HN discussionBTW, you can do very complex transforms with XSLT on RSS https://www.bennadel.com/rss also take a look on feedburner
Comment linking /rss
on “The Webpage, an online RSS reader and news aggregator, styled like a newspaper”Submitted Only solve one new problem at a time as a story · 189 points
HN discussionWhat I find sad is people making judgements based on twelve year old information. Like most languages CFML has evolved. People writing CFML today use MVC frameworks, use ORM and the cloud. Yes it is still easy for beginners to write bad code, I think that may be more true in ColdFusion than in other languages. But getting started easily can also be a virtue. You might be surprised but a lot of the ColdFusion communi…
Comment linking /blog/2061-Seven-Languages-In-Seven-Weeks-Ruby-Day-1.htm
on “Why must you laugh at my back end?”Submitted Using the “X-AMZN-Trace-Id” Header for Request Tracing Through AWS Load Balancer as a story · 82 points
HN discussionI don't think his criticism is too harsh. Two of the main problems I had with angular - the template syntax and the way the digest cycle worked, both contributed to its scaling factor. The template syntax meant you would always wonder what a parameter meant when passed to a directive. Essentially, all parameters passed to a directive were strings, but angular would parse some strings to mean "the property of a paren…
Comment linking /blog/2766-stateless-filters-don-t-apply-to-objects-arrays-or-ngrepeat-in-angularjs-1-3.htm
on “I Was Wrong About TypeScript”Submitted Replacing jQuery (110kb) With UmbrellaJS (8kb) as a story · 52 points
HN discussion> Do you know of any really good tutorials emphasizing Angular's $resource service? Not really. I just used the official documentation. The egghead.io tutorials may touch on $resource. I also found this helpful: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2433-Using-RESTful-Controllers-... Some Googling turned this up: https://github.com/dalcib/angular-phonecat-mongodb-rest . It may help you.
Comment linking /blog/2433-Using-RESTful-Controllers-In-An-AngularJS-Resource.htm
on “Lessons Learned: A Year with a Large AngularJS Project”Submitted Using Email Yak To Provide Bidirectional Email In Your WebApp as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSounds like a bad job. I've had bad jobs but I've never blamed the language. CF is easy to get started in, so is PHP. I've seen some horrible spaghetti code in both languages. That doesn't make either of them bad. I like CF because I like writing fewer lines of code to get things done. That doesn't stop me from looking at other languages seeing if something is better. In fact some members of the community are bloggi…
Comment linking /blog/2106-Seven-Languages-In-Seven-Weeks-Haskell-Day-1.htm
on “These are things in PHP which make me sad”Submitted You Can Throw() Anything in JavaScript – and Other Async/Await Considerations as a story · 39 points
HN discussion> I consider myself to be a reasonably good js developer, but the internals of AngularJS are overwhelmingly non-approachable. Same here. I'm just getting up to speed with Angular. I spent the past weekend developing a web-app to manage our internal test-process. I like it a lot, I managed to create an incredibly complex and interactive web-app in two days. Well, I say I like it a lot, I like the idea a lot: data dri…
Comment linking /blog/2439-My-Experience-With-AngularJS-The-Super-heroic-JavaScript-MVW-Framework.htm
on “Things that suck in AngularJS”Submitted After 3 Months of JavaScript Linting, It's Pretty Much All Pain and No Gain as a story · 29 points
HN discussionAFAIK, JQuery HTML constructors use document fragments behind the scenes. See http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2281-jQuery-Appends-Multiple-El... . No need for explicit document.createDocumentFragment
Comment linking /blog/2281-jQuery-Appends-Multiple-Elements-Using-Efficient-Document-Fragments.htm
on “Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript”Submitted JQuery Events: MouseOver / MouseOut vs. MouseEnter / MouseLeave as a story · 27 points
HN discussion> For example angular 2 is not compatible with angular 1, so before you even learn a framework its API is different and when you finally learn it, probably is considered outdated Angular 1 has been released in 2010 and Angular 2 in 2016. Obviously, if you started to learn Angular 1 last year it can be frustrating (specially with Angular, it's not the easiest framework to learn out there [1] [2] ). But I would say th…
Comment linking /resources/uploads/2013/feelings_about_angularjs_over_time.png
on “Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?”Submitted Exploring Randomness in JavaScript as a story · 26 points
HN discussionBlogging about something useful is extremely difficult. If you: • A lot of research goes into a new topic, most people paste • Writing useful examples without errors and confusing extras take forever • Making the text concise also takes forever This is why I write rarely. PS - this guy serves as a prime example of someone who comes up in my search results a lot and never ends up being useful: https://www.bennadel.co…
Comment linking /blog/2782-route-resolution-using-factory-functions-vs-services-in-angularjs.htm
on “Why it's great to write blog posts”Submitted The Not-So-Dark Art of Designing Database Indexes: Reflections from an Engineer as a story · 22 points
HN discussionThere are far more extensive possibilities than what you export - almost every change can be breaking change, often without the producer knowing about it. This is why nobody uses strict semver in practice. https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3501-when-is-a-change-a-breaki...
Comment linking /blog/3501-when-is-a-change-a-breaking-change-for-an-api.htm
on “Go’s Major Versioning Sucks – From a Fanboy”Submitted Every Customer-Facing Call Should Have an Engineer on It as a story · 19 points
HN discussionThere's some insight into it here from the founding CTO https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4109-working-code-podcast-epis...
Comment linking /blog/4109-working-code-podcast-episode-039-bens-future-at-invision.htm
on “InVision design collaboration services shutdown”Submitted Ben Nadel: I Wish My Relational Database Tables Were Narrower as a story · 14 points
HN discussion`setState` doesn't actually care whether you've mutated your data or updated it immutably. In fact, I just ran a quick test, and you can even directly mutate your state object and then call `this.setState({})`, and it will update. `setState` is basically a combination of "queue an update to `this.state`, and queue a re-render along with that". So, if you mutate `this.state` and then re-render, your render output wou…
Comment linking /blog/2903-why-should-i-care-about-immutable-data-in-reactjs.htm
on “How to optimize React applications that use Redux”Submitted Prefer the Unary Plus (+) Operator over ParseInt() as a story · 14 points
HN discussionIf anyone, like me, didn't know about 'track by' as a way to optimize ng-repeats, here's a couple of articles that explain what it is and why it's beneficial: http://www.codelord.net/2014/04/15/improving-ng-repeat-perfo... http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2556-using-track-by-with-ngrepe...
Comment linking /blog/2556-using-track-by-with-ngrepeat-in-angularjs-1-2.htm
on “AngularJS Performance in Large Applications”Submitted Programming as a Hobby in the Age of AI as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI also created almost 10 years ago Umbrella JS, which is a tiny jQuery replacement but with more array-like arguments in the functions: https://umbrellajs.com/ https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4184-replacing-jquery-110kb-wi...
Comment linking /blog/4184-replacing-jquery-110kb-with-umbrella-js-8kb.htm
on “TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$”Submitted Converting Strings to Integers Using Hash, HashCode, and CRC-32 in ColdFusion as a story · 10 points
HN discussion
