Hacker News: streptomycin

New comment by streptomycin in "Firefox 153.0 Beta"

streptomycin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:47:32 +0000

I hope they do the same for the file system access API!

New comment by streptomycin in "Vite+ Beta"

streptomycin — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:57:49 +0000

The initial selling point was performance, but then they gradually realized that a lot of the slow cruft in Jest was necessary for correctness, and now it's about the same performance as Jest (obviously may vary in some specific situation).

However vitest is still great! Selling points now are stuff like:

- shares config with vite

- works with ESM out of the box (I think Jest still doesn't)

- integrated browser testing mode that is very nice

- overall just has a ton of nicely integrated features

New comment by streptomycin in "window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world"

streptomycin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:04:43 +0000

Well there is a permission dialog and you need to select the directory to grant access and common sensitive directories are blacklisted.

A malicious ad would probably have an easier time tricking you into downloading and running an executable, which is something that has actually happened many times IRL. Worry about that before worrying about theoretical exploits that nobody has actually exploited in an API shipped in the world's most popular web browser for the past 6 years.

New comment by streptomycin in "window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world"

streptomycin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:14:13 +0000

So what should I do if I want to make an app with this functionality? Do I have to tell users to download and run some executable? You can imagine a case where that is a bit riskier than a nicely sandboxed web app with permission to access one directory.

New comment by streptomycin in "window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world"

streptomycin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:31:44 +0000

It's been in Chrome for 6 years and I'm not aware of any problems it's caused.

New comment by streptomycin in "window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world"

streptomycin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:30:19 +0000

That is similar to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... except AFAIK that does not allow any way to access it as a normal directory outside the browser.

New comment by streptomycin in "window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world"

streptomycin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:48:52 +0000

This isn't new, the API has been around for several years. Unfortunately Mozilla and Apple say they are never going to implement it because of security concerns https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

It is a great API though, I wish the other browser vendors liked it! Because currently us PWA developers are really limited when trying to make apps that work with local data, at least in non-Chrome browsers.

New comment by streptomycin in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

streptomycin — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:08:55 +0000

The only thing I miss from Gmail is a "send and archive" button to save me a click when replying to emails.

Can AI produce writing that we want to read?

streptomycin — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:36:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/can-ai-produce-writing-that-we-actually-want-to-read

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370112

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by streptomycin in "It's Not Just X. It's Y"

streptomycin — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:54:11 +0000

https://fakewriters.onrender.com/ is a good example too

New comment by streptomycin in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

streptomycin — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:40:57 +0000

That's exactly what they did at my college (non-California state school) 20 years ago. Special program for students from poor high schools who otherwise wouldn't be admitted, where they came in the summer before freshman year and had to pass some prep classes first. IDK what the actual long term results were, but seems like a better idea than nothing.

New comment by streptomycin in "The AI zombification of universities"

streptomycin — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:21:06 +0000

The tests will be made by AI as well, because professors who spend less time on making tests can spend more time on research and get hired/promoted more. For the same reason, professors won't care who is using AI to cheat on the test that was made by AI. Maybe some people will care, but not enough to do anything about it.

(Cheating was already rampant in many classes 20 years ago when I was in college, I can't imagine what it's like now.)

New comment by streptomycin in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

streptomycin — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:33:45 +0000

Yeah I have one semi-popular package and I am still doing local publish with 2fa because all this "trusted publishing" stuff seems really complicated and also seems to get hacked constantly. Maybe it's just too complicated for us to do securely and we should go back to the drawing board.

New comment by streptomycin in "Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft"

streptomycin — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:22:20 +0000

But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.

New comment by streptomycin in "The three pillars of JavaScript bloat"

streptomycin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:26:09 +0000

In practice there's this one guy who likes to support ancient JS engines, and this one other guy who likes making lots of tiny packages which depend on his other tiny packages. They both see what they're doing as features, not bugs. And they are both very prominent devs with a lot of popular packages.

So unlikely to change unless everyone stops using their popular packages.

Every now and again people get worked up and try to bully them about it, which is unfortunate because they seem like generally good people, and their arguments in favor of their positions are pretty well documented.

New comment by streptomycin in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"

streptomycin — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:28:51 +0000

The distribution of the sum of two dice is actually triangular, not a bell curve https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1204492

New comment by streptomycin in "Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam"

streptomycin — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 03:15:16 +0000

Making a clone of a video game, even with some substantial changes, may not actually be legal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int....

New comment by streptomycin in "Why isn't LA repaving streets?"

streptomycin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:41:01 +0000

The article says the city claims the biggest issue is federal regulations (the ADA) not city regulations.

My neighborhood in NJ just got those fancy ADA compliant curb ramps last year, along with a repaving. It did take them much longer to install the curb ramps (like a week or two?) than it did to pave (one day) so I can imagine there is a significant cost, even if it's a smaller amount of materials.

New comment by streptomycin in "Ask HN: Chromebook leads for K-8 school in need?"

streptomycin — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 01:09:54 +0000

Also sad that NYC spends like $40k per student per year and they still have to resort to this.

New comment by streptomycin in "ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files"

streptomycin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 01:21:37 +0000

instrumental convergence