Hacker News: streptomycin

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

New comment by streptomycin in "We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)"

streptomycin — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:34:26 +0000

Back when I had a job at a big old corporation, a significant part of my value to the company was that I knew how to bypass their shitty MITM thing that broke tons of stuff, including our own software that we wrote. So I could solve a lot of problems people had that otherwise seemed intractable because IT was not allowed to disable it, and they didn't even understand the myriad ways it was breaking things.

New comment by streptomycin in "Show HN: Modeling the US Debt as a Healthcare Pricing Failure ($26T Gap)"

streptomycin — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:56:38 +0000

Any thoughts on arguments like https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o... that basically the US spends a lot on healthcare because the US is very rich?

New comment by streptomycin in "Perl's decline was cultural"

streptomycin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:12:18 +0000

Perl CGI scripts were ubiquitously supported by shared hosts, but IIRC mod_perl was not unless you had some custom setup on a dedicated server. Also IIRC, mod_perl was just a lot more complicated to set up and use, while mod_php was dead simple.

New comment by streptomycin in "Perl's decline was cultural"

streptomycin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:08:32 +0000

mod_perl was a lot more complicated, so in practice "normal people" (such as 14 year old me) didn't use it because it would have required a dedicated server and some sophisticated configuration, rather than a $2/month shared hosting account.

New comment by streptomycin in "Perl's decline was cultural"

streptomycin — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:29:35 +0000

For me it wasn't cultural.

Perl was my first language because I wanted to make interactive websites and that was the most common way to do it in the late 90s. Shortly after, everyone switched to PHP because mod_php was much faster than Perl CGI scripts.

New comment by streptomycin in "California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind"

streptomycin — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:53:34 +0000

China https://x.com/bataille_chris/status/1981476968202752109

New comment by streptomycin in "Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware"

streptomycin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:16:54 +0000

FWIW "quantum advantage" and "quantum supremacy" are synonyms, some people just prefer the former because the latter reminds them of "white supremacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy#Criticism_of...

New comment by streptomycin in "Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites"

streptomycin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:33:20 +0000

I suspect that most people would not vote for a government policy that puts their favorite websites out of business so they can do more chores :)

New comment by streptomycin in "Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites"

streptomycin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:20:11 +0000

In some sense, "no one wants to be advertised to" is similar to "no one wants to pay for stuff". Like yeah it'd be nice if my groceries were free, but that's not very realistic, the grocery store would just close if they had to give everything away. Advertising is similar - a cost we pay so that websites can make some money in exchange for their services. Most ad supported websites would just disappear without them.

New comment by streptomycin in "EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars"

streptomycin — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 01:40:56 +0000

Yeah, this article says the 2023 price of a new Model Y was $48k, and then in 2024 it was worth only $33k used.

But in 2024 I bought a brand new Model Y for about $33k, after factoring in all the incentives/rebates. So if anything that $33k used price sounds high.

Reality is, prices came down a lot, and also depending on how incentives/rebates are factored in, the "sale price" might be fiction.

Same with other brands too. Back then you saw some companies like Hyundai claiming their EVs were really worth like $60k MSRP, and then turning around and leasing them for $300/month with $0 down. In some states people were leasing brand new EVs for $100/month with $0 down, or less.

Now with the federal rebate gone and states removing at least some of their incentives, the numbers might start to look a little more normal.

New comment by streptomycin in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

streptomycin — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:25:33 +0000

In NJ it goes further and the poorest towns have much better funded schools than average. Been that way for decades. Zuckerberg even gave us an extra $100 million just for fun. None of it has affected the disparity in outcomes.

New comment by streptomycin in "PWA Browser Scorecards"

streptomycin — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 01:32:40 +0000

It says "popular mobile and desktop browsers" but doesn't include the most popular desktop browser, Chrome? I know it has Chrome for Android, but desktop Chrome supports some extra stuff (Shared Workers, File System Access API) which makes it basically the best browser for PWAs. Feels like that level of popularity and quality should be represented somewhere.

Biggest problem for me as a PWA dev is how eager mobile browsers are to delete your local data, which is not part of this scorecard. I guess that's tricky to quantify, but basically they all suck but Safari sucks more.

New comment by streptomycin in "Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks"

streptomycin — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:50:36 +0000

My bad, it really annoyed me when npm stopped respecting lockfiles years ago so I stopped using it. That's great news that they eventually changed their mind.

However in rare cases where I am forced to use it to contribute to some npm-using project, I have noticed that the lockfile often gets updated and I get a huge diff even though I didn't edit the dependencies. So I've always assumed that was the same issue with npm ignoring the lockfile, but maybe it's some other issue? idk

New comment by streptomycin in "Pnpm has a new setting to stave off supply chain attacks"

streptomycin — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:50:04 +0000

If they were for some reason doing `npm install` rather than `npm ci`, then `npm install` does update packages in the lock file. Personally I always found that confusing, and yarn/pnpm don't behave that way. I think most people do `npm ci` in CI, unless they are using CI to specifically test if `npm install` still works, which I guess maybe would be a good idea if you use npm since it doesn't like obeying the lock file.