Hacker News: esprehn

New comment by esprehn in "JEP 540: Simple JSON API (Now in Incubator)"

esprehn — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:18:42 +0000

Not supporting comments will be a mistake that haunts this API. They give an example of replacing properties files but those do have standardized comments! The proposed pre-processing step means all the comments are lost during round tripping, and the single line comments they suggest are not enough to even match JSONC. By the time those issues have userland workarounds you might as well use another library instead of the built-in one.

This seems to repeat the same mistakes of Go's built in JSON library where the ecosystem is full of workarounds and other libraries that are faster or have better features.

New comment by esprehn in "Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus"

esprehn — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:30:41 +0000

GKE uses spanner (with an etcd API layer) per the docs.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concept...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...

New comment by esprehn in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

esprehn — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:43:44 +0000

GitHub and LinkedIn both appear to be pretty successful businesses.

New comment by esprehn in "Resetting Xbox"

esprehn — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:11:49 +0000

Is Xbox really worse than Play-Station?

It's a pretty good name actually because it's unique, easy to Google, and is never ambiguous in conversation. It's all the suffixes that made a mess of it.

New comment by esprehn in "Half-Baked Product"

esprehn — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:27:51 +0000

Yahoo. They very nearly bought Google too, but refused the initial $1m offer and then bid too low the second time. Kind of hilarious to see how that played out over time.

  Yahoo had two failed attempts to acquire Google; in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo to sell their nascent search engine for $1 million, but Yahoo declined the offer.[37][38]

  In 2002, when Terry Semel entered into negotiations to purchase Google. Google was reportedly seeking a price of $5 billion. After weeks of negotiation, Yahoo's final offer was $3 billion, a figure that Google's leadership rejected, leading them to terminate the deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo

New comment by esprehn in "Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore"

esprehn — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:35:58 +0000

The good part about a language runtime is there's a massive corpus of tests that are in that language and agnostic to the implementation language.

For a JS engine that's Test 262: https://github.com/tc39/test262

For node that's its unit tests which are mostly JS: https://github.com/nodejs/node/tree/main/test

Node also runs the web platform tests too: https://web-platform-tests.org/

Bun has a similar large corpus of JS/TS tests: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/tree/main/test

You're right about general purpose rewrites, but language runtimes are a lot easier.

New comment by esprehn in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

esprehn — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:06:02 +0000

Apple was doing effectively everything on that list, though the self driving car was cancelled and the AI is now gemini.

New comment by esprehn in "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"

esprehn — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:40:50 +0000

Is the simpler thing not Lambda/Cloud Run (with terraform)?

On the application developer side k8s is awesome fo, but the you look inside the box and it melts your face off.

I'm not sure a middle ground exists unfortunately. It's either full service like Lambda or bag of knives like k8s.

New comment by esprehn in "Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation"

esprehn — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:56:22 +0000

I assume they meant the Attention process in LLMs, not the human concept of paying attention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning)

New comment by esprehn in "Flue is a TypeScript framework for building the next generation of agents"

esprehn — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:54:08 +0000

One big difference seems to be Mastra has tests and this project doesn't.

New comment by esprehn in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

esprehn — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:02:30 +0000

It also can't inherit css variables which is unfortunate since it means the image doesn't respect the theme.

New comment by esprehn in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

esprehn — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:59:27 +0000

They totally could sanitize it, just like they did with the gadget proxy, they just choose not to fix this ancient request.

It's like my ticket to add data url support to sheets. It just gets punted year after year.

New comment by esprehn in "Caffeine, cocaine, and painkillers detected in sharks from The Bahamas"

esprehn — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:16:46 +0000

There's a whole movie about a snail that's super fast (Turbo). An adult version of that isn't so far fetched.

New comment by esprehn in "You can't cancel a JavaScript promise (except sometimes you can)"

esprehn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:33:22 +0000

Yes, I was around during the original discussions. AbortSignal exists because TC39 was taking too long and cancelling fetch() is table stakes for a networking oriented platform like the web.

Those threads are a good example of what's wrong in TC39. A simple AbortSignal could have been added, but by the time it's reconciled with SES, large speculative APIs like Governers, or the original attempt to add a parallel throw mechanism just for cancellation, nothing actually gets done.

It's been 10 years since CancelToken was first discussed and we're still debating it.

New comment by esprehn in "Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat"

esprehn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:20:28 +0000

I just can't help but imagine those long lived rats escaping and taking over our cities. We already struggle with the rat population and they only live 3 years, imagine if they lived 15.

Also I love rats and totally agree they're tough pets because they don't live long enough. We had many of them growing up and spent a fortune removing tumors.

New comment by esprehn in "You can't cancel a JavaScript promise (except sometimes you can)"

esprehn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:52:14 +0000

AbortSignal is same thing on the Web. It's unfortunate TC39 failed to ever bring a CancelToken to the language to standardize the pattern outside browsers.

New comment by esprehn in "Pretext: TypeScript library for multiline text measurement and layout"

esprehn — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 02:14:08 +0000

The proposal already exists [1], but vendors would need to agree to both prioritize and ship it.

Right now Chrome is much more focused on AI related APIs (sigh) and not stuff like FontMetrics.

[1] https://drafts.css-houdini.org/font-metrics-api-1/

New comment by esprehn in "Pretext: TypeScript library for multiline text measurement and layout"

esprehn — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 02:11:17 +0000

The FontMetrics API solves this, hopefully browsers will ship it someday.

https://drafts.css-houdini.org/font-metrics-api-1/

RIP eae@.

New comment by esprehn in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

esprehn — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:11:20 +0000

It can request with a JS call. It can't passively collect it without you approving first. The article is written like calling that JS function will turn on location tracking without consent.

New comment by esprehn in "Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller"

esprehn — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:55:16 +0000

This is very cool, but I'm confused why the React player is smaller than the HTML player. What's actually in the size comparison there?