Hacker Blogs
Work in progress: 15,409 of 181,233 sites checked so far, more every week · updated 2 Nov 2026Missing a blog? Tell us

Top all-time · #263

D

Douglas Crockford

Personal blog · crockford.comprogrammingwebmath

Douglas Crockford's personal blog at crockford.com covers programming, web and math. Since 2008, 180 different Hacker News readers have linked it 221 times, most often “Base 32”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.

No feed foundVisit the blog
221mentions?
10recommend?
180HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 31 in 2023

Sometimes recommended · 10 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?

Why HN links it

HN readers link Crockford's site for the Little JavaScripter and his JavaScript essays, and cite his base32 encoding and JSON grammar pages as sources.

Recommended for · 10 comments
A page helped; urges a paper; suggests Little JavaScripter; calls links 'interesting', 'great' and 'goodness'.

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?

  1. Base 32
    12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2020-02-20
  2. DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020)
    10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-01-30
  3. JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language (2001)
    8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-12-13
  4. The Little Javascripter
    8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2009-09-26
  5. Douglas Crockford's Wrrrld Wide Web (JSON+Javascript: The good parts)
    8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2008-03-12
  6. Misty Programming Language
    7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-06-10
  7. JavaScript: The Most Misunderstood Programming Language (2001)
    7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-04-19
  8. /wrmg/base32.html
    6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-10-09
  9. Top Down Operator Precedence (2007)
    6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-01-11
  10. /little.html
    5 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-08-14

What Hacker News says?

  1. JavaScript is very expressive and powerful language. Maybe hard to learn. The prototypal inheritence and 'this' were confusing to me and took much time to understand those. Then I learnt that prototypal inheritance is a superset of ''class''ical inheritance [1] as well as this [2]. Hmm. With Reflect, Proxy etc. you have great metaprogramming capabilities that make this language much powerful. Still, there are some (…

    Comment linking /javascript/private.html

    on “Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)”
  2. Submitted Tilton as a story · 131 points

    HN discussion
  3. I'd recommend using Crockford base 32 [0] to encode the bytes. It makes the text more human friendly by eliminating case sensitivity, removing similar/ambiguous letters, and preventing accidental profanity. And in most cases I think you're also better off just using a uuid and encoding its bytes as base 32, in which case you're basically doing type id's [1]. If the "slug" portion of the id actually encodes a uuid, t…

    Comment linking /base32.html

    on “You'll regret using natural keys”
  4. Submitted Actual JavaScript Engine Performance as a story · 107 points

    HN discussion
  5. this construction is familiar to anyone who has taken a course on writing post middle or high school. The formal version is "not only... but also" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/... , which I personally use regularly but I often write formally even in informal settings. "not just... but" is just the less formal version. Google ngrams shows the "not just ... but" construction has a sharp…

    Comment linking /style.html

    on “Open-source Zig book”
  6. Submitted DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020) as a story · 77 points

    HN discussion
  7. Maybe this is long game karma revenge for his notorious role in spreading communicable diseases in Habitat. [1] Disease One of the more successful "games" we invented for Habitat was the disease. There are three strains currently defined: Cooties Happy Face Mutant (AKA The Fly) We only were able to test Cooties with live players, but it was a hit. It works like this: Several initial Avatars are infected with a "Coot…

    Comment linking /ec/anecdotes.html

    on “In defence of Douglas Crockford”
  8. Submitted The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it as a story · 76 points

    HN discussion
  9. Or my personal favorite for anything you show to a user: https://www.crockford.com/base32.html

    Comment linking /base32.html

    on “‘War Dialing’ tool exposes Zoom’s password problems”
  10. Submitted This is the page that made doing OOP in Javascript click for me. as a story · 74 points

    HN discussion
  11. Jepp: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html

    Comment linking /javascript/jsmin.html

    on “John Resig annotates original jQuery source code”
  12. Submitted Misty Programming Language as a story · 58 points

    HN discussion
  13. Also feeding it text from the Anguish Languish[1] corpus is pretty good. [1] https://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html

    Comment linking /wrrrld/anguish.html

    on “Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology”
  14. Submitted Permanent Weight Loss as a story · 49 points

    HN discussion
  15. Yeah, the advantage here is that once you wrote your Pratt parser it's a nice, quite generic piece of code that you can just drop into any new project, reconfigure a bit and it does it's job. Don't know what page you mean, but personally I first stumbled upon it on Douglas Crockford's page [1]. A couple of years later Eli Bendersky did a nice writeup for Python [2]. I wrote my first Pratt parser in D, based on Crock…

    Comment linking /javascript/tdop/tdop.html

    on “Parsing Algorithms”
  16. Submitted An Introduction to Xiangqi for Chess Players as a story · 48 points

    HN discussion
  17. Smalltalk in Self: nearly complete Smalltalk implementation on similar prototypical language. http://www.merlintec.com/download/mario.pdf Mootools: ancient class system for Javascript. https://mootools.net/core Also, here's a very old Crockford article on implementing classes in Javascript. https://crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html

    Comment linking /javascript/inheritance.html

    on “What’s so great about functional programming anyway?”
  18. Submitted The Little Javascripter as a story · 46 points

    HN discussion
  19. Let me try then: http://www.crockford.com/pwl/

    Comment linking /pwl/

    on “Memories of Steve”
  20. Submitted Douglas Crockford's JavaScript Encyclopedia as a story · 44 points

    HN discussion
  21. Did not read the whole parent comment and my message is redundant. But, yes, objectively decimal can represent more numbers (the numbers that are composed of 1/2 and 1/5). I think there are arguments to use decimal as representation is there, (where I originally came to know about this problem) [1]. [1] - https://www.crockford.com/dec64.html

    Comment linking /dec64.html

    on “JavaScript Is Weird”
  22. Submitted If you think Apple's app store policies are ambigious, try Nintendo's as a story · 44 points

    HN discussion
  23. Hm, that's an interesting choice. I also wonder why they didn't use an encoding that has an alphabet with 2^n characters (that way you can directly map 1 charater to n bits when decoding). Coincidentally, I've just finished some work on a project[1] that is in the same space (identifiers for images). For the reasons you pointed out, I found Douglas Crockford's base32[2] encoding to be a good fit. [1] https://github.…

    Comment linking /base32.html

    on “BlurHash: Algorithm to generate compact representation of an image placeholder”
  24. Submitted JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language (2001) as a story · 35 points

    HN discussion
  25. I'm not gonna bother quoting you to fisk you. Your approach towards my evidence is weak overall. I'm gonna throw more evidence at you. Miller and Dean Tribble have been working on WeakRefs lately: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-weakrefs Crockford's personal site no longer has the original JSON description, and neither does the Wayback Machine, but his site does still have a section on E: http://www.crockford.com/…

    Comment linking /

    on “Examples of everything new in ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018”
  26. Submitted Classical Inheritance in JavaScript as a story · 31 points

    HN discussion
  27. caillou · 2022-03-10Recommends
    Reading this helped me a lot: https://www.crockford.com/pwl.html

    Comment linking /pwl.html

    on “Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?”
  28. Submitted Prototypal Inheritance (2008) as a story · 29 points

    HN discussion
  29. I think you're thinking of YAML; JSON doesn't interpret "no" as a boolean. Scroll down here to see the JSON grammar: https://www.crockford.com/mckeeman.html I actually think the "Norway problem" is a PEBKAC from users not learning the data format. But this tool may confuse some people or applications who don't know what a boolean, integer, float or string are, and try to mix types when the program reading them wasn'…

    Comment linking /mckeeman.html

    on “Jo – a shell command to create JSON (2016)”
  30. Submitted McKeeman Form (2020) as a story · 27 points

    HN discussion

Search all of HN for crockford.com

Linked by the same people?