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Domenic Denicola
domenic.me · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Domenic Denicola, a web standards editor, writes about JavaScript promises, streams, open source, and browser APIs.
What HN saysHN links his promises essay as a reference, plus his writeups on built-in AI API design and on the state of Windows native development.
32HN people shared it
19linked it in comments
25stories submitted
1.9Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest Is Hurting Open Source10 people · 816 points · first shared 2020 · 386 comments on HN
- 2On the Streams Standard3 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Mathematical Consciousness3 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 4You're missing the point of promises3 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 5Spaced repetition systems have gotten better2 people · 1.0K points · first shared 2025 · 512 comments on HN
- 6Peer Dependencies2 people · 22 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 7My Agentic Coding Setup, July 20262 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 8You're Missing the Point of Promises2 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Windows native app development is a mess2 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 10Hacktoberfest2 people · first shared 2025
- 11My Participation in the METR AI Productivity Study1 people · 13 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Explaining Away the Web's Magic (2013)1 people · 6 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 13ES6 Iterators, Generators, and Iterables1 people · 4 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 14Explaing Away the Web's Magic1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 15You're Missing the Point of Promises (2012)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jbmartin · 2013-08-21
jQuery loosely follows the Promises/A spec [1], so Q.js [2] might have been better choice.
[1] http://domenic.me/2012/10/14/youre-missing-the-point-of-promises/
[2] http://documentup.com/kriskowal/q/#
IvyMike · 2021-04-15
I recently started reading Nadia Eghbal's book, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" [0]. One point she makes early on is that attracting lots of people to open source projects isn't all that hard; but managing lots of potentially low quality contributions is really hard. See "Hacktoberfest" for an example. [1]
If you pay $X for someone to "resolve" the issue, when they submit a patch that doesn't work, or doesn't follow the style guide, or doesn't fit the software architecture, or is otherwise unsatisfactory, how much time are you going to spend fixing/massaging/arguing? Will it be worth it to answer the jilted contributor who keeps sending "I want my $50!!!!" emails?
Nadia also has a quick 10-minute presentation on some ways you can use money to help open source, but without actually paying for bug fixes. [2]
[0] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0578675862
[1] https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAinwgvQqc
pkmays · 2014-10-19
http://domenic.me
Editor Domenic Denicola's website
domenicd · 2026-04-27
I led the design effort on this API, before retiring. Here's my writeup on some of the considerations that went into it: https://domenic.me/builtin-ai-api-design/
severak_cz · 2026-03-24
Infecting with React can be easily explained by pathetic state of desktop application development environment.
See https://domenic.me/windows-native-dev/
whstl · 2025-09-22
I remember the Digital Ocean "t-shirt gate" scandal, where people would add punctuation to README files of random repositories to win a free t-shirt.
https://domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
It wasn't fun if you had anything with a few thousand stars on Github.
iandanforth · 2025-06-26
Which spaced repetition algorithm are you using? I recently learned that there is a much improved one that has been adopted by Anki. (https://domenic.me/fsrs/) Have you adopted that as well?
seabass-labrax · 2024-12-15
The issue with displaying statistics to potential employers is that they can easily be gamed or even falsified. If your site really takes off, you'll have to be careful that it is not inundated with 'developers' whose contributions include renaming str_name to name_str in a thousand repositories.
Cf. https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
nikanj · 2023-09-27
Are you familiar with Hacktoberfest? Every October you get an absolute torrent of crappy PRs from people who saw a youtube video on "How to get a free T-shirt". See https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
franciscop · 2022-09-14
When you are hurting the community you are pretending to help[1], and refuse to listen to them[2], then it's definitely a bad thing. Remember that most popular OSS devs are already walking a fine line, adding an extra burden to them is Not Nice™ IMHO.
[1] https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
[2] https://twitter.com/domenic/status/1311355857465225218
ushakov · 2022-06-05
Hacktoberfest flashbacks intensifies
https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
Tainnor · 2021-06-25
Similar thing happened with the Hacktoberfest incident last year: https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
In short, DigitalOcean unwisely incentivised a bunch of people to make PRs on open source repositories unaffiliated with DO so they could get a T-Shirt. It went so far that some guy actually made a very popular YT video about how you can make a PR for a small typo fix (I guess I still fail to understand why you'd need a YT video to explain that). Maintainers were none too pleased.
viraptor · 2021-06-25
This happened quite often in openstack too. Since any contributor with a merged change a few months before the annual conference got a free entry ticket, you could see people doing trivial formatting fixes at a certain time of the year.
Similar to the issue with Digital Ocean and Hacktoberfest https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
People are always going to try to game metrics.
keskadale · 2020-10-01
this is so sad. this is hurting the open source community.
https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
> Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community.
qqii · 2020-10-01
Given the timing this is an indirect response to https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2ux69/digitaloceans_hac…
tuxracer · 2016-10-24
Promises definitely do not just "wrap around" callbacks https://blog.domenic.me/youre-missing-the-point-of-promises/
nathanhammond · 2014-04-30
You're making an argument about callback aggregation. That is just one of the features that promises enable. The seminal article on the topic is Domenic Denicola's "You're Missing the Point of Promises." http://domenic.me/2012/10/14/youre-missing-the-point-of-promises/
dustingetz · 2013-08-22
its not useful to conclude anything about callbacks without considering rigorous error handling, which is of course the whole point of promises [1]
[1] http://domenic.me/2012/10/14/youre-missing-the-point-of-promises/
mschuster91 · 2025-11-06
> Just add a country IP ban, we all know who is submitting these reports.
As much as I'd like to see Russia, China and India disconnected off of the wide Internet until they clean up shop with abusive actors, the Hacktoberfest stuff you're likely referring to doesn't have anything to do with your implication - that was just a chance at a free t-shirt [1] that caused all the noise.
In ye olde times, you'd need to take care how you behaved in public because pulling off a stunt like that could reasonably lead to your company going out of business - but even a "small" company like DO is too big to fail from FAFO, much less ultra large corporations like Google that just run on sheer moat. IMHO, that is where we have to start - break up the giants, maybe that's enough of a warning signal to also alert "smaller" large companies to behave like citizens again.
[1] https://domenic.me/hacktoberfest/