jgon

My ideal tool would be less tooling, which I know is not a great answer. But what I mean by this is that I can probably cobble together a build pipeline that handles most of this stuff if I spend enough time working with Gradle. And the reality of Java's popularity in the enterprise means that its build tools generally orient around builds that can be crazy and bespoke and so immense flexibility is usually needed. I totally get that need, and I'm not begrudging any of that work.

I'm speaking more from my view as just an individual Joe Sixpack developer. If I'm not developing an enterprise behemoth, and let's just say I want to whip up a command line utility to do some image processing, or network communication, etc, Java's fantastic standard lib and ecosystem means I can do all of that pretty easily. But when I want to distribute that, what does it look like? What comes out the other side of the CI build? I have to integrate jlink with gradle, which is kind of a pain, I have to somehow integrate a training run and then package up the aot cache output and make sure that the directories are handled properly, and what do I ship to the user? A tar/zip file that they have to somehow copy and decompress to the relevant directory, maybe with #! file in .local/bin to get it on the path? By contrast the situation with Go or Rust is immensely easier, even if that actual development process may almost be harder because I have to spend time faffing about deciding which image library to pull in for Go, or dealing with async for Rust. But once that is actually done, I just ship the binary and simply copy it somewhere to get it on the path, and I never have to worry about reading gradle/maven docs or anything like that.

So I'll finish by saying that my ideal build tool is probably not a great one. What it is crucially is a simple one. I think that's that gap right now, that Java has these huge, immensely powerful and general build tools, build tools that I am guessing eventually gain equivalents in the Rust and Go worlds when projects grow old and gnarly enough to require a bunch of custom build stuff, but it doesn't have baby's first build tool like go build and cargo, where you can just get an idea and start building and come out the other side with an artifact and 0 time spent on thinking about the build system, until you actually need the kind of complexity that maven and gradle provide. Give me a build tool that assumes the standard src/ and test/ directory layout, then builds everything into some sort of archive file, creates a minimized JRE to run it, accepts an argument for an aot.cache file location, or for the more difficult option runs the program to generate that file and then bundles it up with the archive, bundles all the libraries that I've pulled into the project up into the archive along with all the resources declared for the project as well, and then spits out a single file artifact that I can immediately use and run. Give me a build tool that I don't even realize is there until I actually need that complexity.

I understand if this is vague and not a great answer, and I also appreciate all the work you've done for the Java community, so thanks for replying.

jpackage is heavily oriented around installable artifacts, it creates a .deb or .rpm for Linux for example. So if I wanted to throw someone a cli utility I can literally just send them the binary if I’m working in Go, whereas Java they need to use dpkg to install the deb. This somewhat complicates building a docker image as well. It’s the same story for windows and Mac as well. If I’m creating a Swing app or something similar this is very convenient but anything else and jpackage isn’t ideal. Not to mention that I don’t know what the integration is currently with jpackage and the aot cache that Leyden produces but I’m guessing it isn’t super straight forward.

I’m sure that all of this stuff can be strung together after spending a suitable amount of time trolling through the documentation of the individual tools, but it’s far cry from go build and cargo build, and I think it would be great if Java could narrow the gap in this aspect.

I completely agree. I know that there has been some work on command line ergonomics for this stuff, but my hope is that after the bulk of the Leyden work is done, another project starts up aimed at unifying all of the various disparate tools that modern Java now has. You have training runs to generate bytecode/compiled code, you have jlink to create a distributable JRE for your app, leaning on jdeps and various other tools to correctly create it, you have the venerable jar file, but all in all the process of actually getting a java project ready to distribute in a way that doesn't presuppose a relevant pre-installed JRE on the user's side, and which takes advantage of the various facilities available to modern Java is still a pretty bespoke and painful process.

Compared to Go and Rust, and just throwing a static binary to someone or some server, Java kind of sucks. And that's unfortunate because the language, the runtime, and even the dependency situation all feels pretty competent, there's not some huge gulf that makes Java "old". Its really just the every about setting up a project and then distributing it, so the "start" and "end" of a project, that currently sucks, and I fear that so much of the great work the Java team is doing is going to go largely unused if they don't work to make it easier for the average developer to utilize it.

Its also described as a provincial problem but all of the provinces receive a substantial amount of funding, particularly for healthcare, via the federal government. People say "oh its the provinces fault, they just need to spend more", and then don't reflect on how much room there is for increased taxation, and particularly how much taxation the federal government currently applies. By far the most tax I pay as a Canadian is in the form of federal taxes. Of course, a bunch of this money does find its way back to the province, so the waters are a little muddy, but the federal government has been repeatedly downloading costs onto the provinces, while doing very little about its own spending. The Chretien government in particular did massive downloading of costs to the provincial governments, although their hand was forced by Canada's fiscal situation at the time. So simply saying, oh well the provinces need to step up, is an easy deflection from what is a pretty thorny problem. If the responsibility really is up to the provinces, then why does the federal government need all this money? If the feds are going to continue scooping up the lion's share of tax revenue then they need to continue helping to fund the various provincial responsibilities.

You've come into this thread, which is about an article where a doctor talks about insurance denying care for her husband, ultimately resulting in his death, to basically say "This doesn't prove anything, and also in systems with government provided healthcare the same thing happens, the AI said so, so what can you do!?"

I just can't even imagine what your response would be to writing about your own experience in the legal profession, about a deeply hurtful or traumatic issue that happened to you, and then having some joker come in and post an AI transcript to basically say "I have no actual experience or expertise in your field but the bot says you're wrong".

What are you even hoping to contribute to this thread? You've done no work of your own, you seem to have barely understood the events described in the article, and you've attempted to immediately make it a political issue by bringing in a foreign government's healthcare system and deflecting. This is geniunely one of the least helpful things I've ever seen written by an ostensible "long-time contributor" to this site.

You've dug through tens of thousands of code bases? 30 years would give you ~10,950 days, so you'd have to be digging into 2 code bases per day, every single day without any breaks for 30 years straight, to get to "tens of thousands".

When I read things like this it makes it very hard to give any credence to the rest of your pro-AI arguments, because it just seems incredibly likely that you're a bullshitter.

Sweet thanks, I guess I never really thought about moving to the Rust Belt and then taking part in its thriving economy to get the sort of job that would allow me to support a family of 5 and own a house on a single income. I would guess at this point you'd probably try and say something about remote work and arbitraging high west coast tech salaries against low cost-of-living, but really that just gets us back to the other poster's point about this stuff not being obtainable anymore. Certainly, to take just a quick example, not in one of the cities you listed, Wichita, with a median individual income (as specified by the other poster) of between $49k and $35k for men and women, and a median house sale price of $243k (up 4.3% over the last year!), giving you an affordability ratio of roughly 5-7x. Chapman university labels that sort of ratio as "Severly Unaffordable".

Whoops! Guess it isn't quite as easy as your smug comment made it out to be...

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/wichita-ks -> link for median single income data in Wichita

https://www.redfin.com/city/19878/KS/Wichita/housing-market -> link for median house sale price

https://www.chapman.edu/communication/_files/Demographia-Int... -> Link to Chapman study, income affordability ratio labeling is on page 6 of the study.

That's actually a really great suggestion. It would be great if you could throw together a list of these many, many places and post it here, so we could think about what sort of moves we could make. Thanks in advance!

If you make 5 of a product and put a bunch of marketing behind it you can sell out too. People are going to use "selling out" as some sort of barometer of success but its like the lizard-man veto in politics. You'll always find some small percentage of people who will vote for the motion "the nation's leaders are a group of lizard people", but you can't use that as any sort of signal regarding the validity of the claim of the motion.

Valve could have priced this at 5k and probably found a couple thousand buyers, and if they only made a few thousand boxes they could claim it sold out then too. This thing is DOA in terms of having any major success or impact on the gaming market when I can walk down to my neighborhood PC store and either build a better PC myself for less money (at off the shelf markups no less!!!) or get a pre-built with better specs that costs less. I could buy a P5Pro and a Switch 2 combined for less money than the 2TB version, and the PS5Pro has 2tb as well!

Its actually mind boggling that Valve is coming in with a less economic product that a fucking hand-built premade at my local PC store.

Right, but also a big part of the "Theranos situation" was a tech company coming out and saying "We've got this revolutionary medical technology that the multi-hundred billion dollar medical industry has overlooked but which a non-domain expert undergrad has been able to innovate", and then a bunch of people, crucially many people with domain experience said stuff like "this is likely fraud, testing companies have all tried to make pin-prick blood sampling work but the volumes are just way too low to get anything reliable out of them, these companies employ PHDs who've all spent decades trying to make testing better and more affordable because there's a lot of money at stake".

Those people generally got shouted down when Theranos was still the hot story in SV, and of course after everything came out suddenly everyone knew it was fishy all along, which is just absolute bullshit. I remember reading comments here on HN suggesting that people saying Theranos was fraud were motivated by misogyny, just absolutely infuriating stuff.

So now we have an AI company coming out with promises of a revolutionary leap forward in medical imaging, in terms of cost and information gathered, and they're not using some sort of revolutionary sensor that they've invented, all the "hard" engineering has been done by other companies that have been in this game for decades at this point and how have R&D staffs with deep knowledge and expertise, but who somehow lack the ability to take the next step, they're coming in with the software and automated interpretation, which is basically the "?" step in the underpants gnome business plan.

The real truth about stuff in the biology and the medical world is that its all insanely hard due to the complexity of the systems involved, and there are tons of skilled and smart people who dedicate their careers to moving this stuff forward. There are really no low-hanging fruits being ignored by "the establishment" waiting for an outsider AI company to come in and overturn the table. Progress is basically won by sweating it out at the lab bench and accumulating a bunch of hard-fought incremental wins over a decade or so. Its frustrating that Elizabeth Holmes is still in jail and yet we're all here forgetting every lesson we should have learned from the previous go-round.

Lol, why do you think the C series was divested to Airbus?

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/trump-administratio...

You literally compared them in your comment.

"Wrongthink". Lol man, if you think that taking money from a country whose head of state has recently said that they may need to forcibly annex your own country, and then using that money to illegally obtain the personal information of citizens so you can attempt to break your country apart is merely "wrongthink" then you need to completely recalibrate yourself.

The really galling thing here is that as an American you would absolutely never tolerate a country like, say, China, supporting, both monetarily and otherwise, a group agitating for California to leave the union. You'd all call that treason loudly and proudly, but now that your country is doing it to someone else suddenly we have to slow-roll this.

I mean one of the opening paragraphs of that article is as follows:

"This is not because Alberta’s grievances are illegitimate. They are not. Albertans have real and long-standing concerns about energy policy, federal–provincial relations, and economic fairness within Confederation. Those concerns deserve to be debated openly and democratically by Canadians, among themselves, on their own terms. The danger is who has joined the debate and why."

This is my point. The separation stuff is clearly completely illegitimate, but the underlying causes of the grievances, several of which I've pointed out in my post above, are entirely real and legitimate, and just blowing it off as "meh, its just russian disinformation" etc, etc, is just a really lame way of not dealing with the issues at hand.

You're misunderstand my point here. Alberta, until the most recent seat redistribution, had the largest federal ridings by population. Now they're only the 3rd largest. That means that the average Albertan's vote was worth far less than the average Quebecer's, and faaaar less than the average maritimer's vote. It gives disproportionate power above and beyond just representation due to population. Its not about which party they vote or don't vote for, although we could dig into that too, as its not nearly as cut and dried at the reductionist take would make it seem.

I'll try one last reply in the hopes that you're not just playing willfully ignorant here. Alberta doesn't send money but "Albertans" do. Sorry for not being insanely pedantic with my terminology. Critically the federal government then dispenses money to provinces, so even if we want to be clever about the source of money, when it comes back it goes to geographically bounded provincial coffers, not the pockets of citizens. When people say that "Alberta" sends money, they mean that Albertans pay money to the federal government and then federal government spends that money elsewhere. And those borders matter when that money is being spent. I send money to the federal government and the federal government does not spend money in the geographical area where it would impact me. I'm happy that a person in Manitoba gets a new hospital, but that doesn't actually improve my life directly. So when people say that Alberta sends money to other provinces, that's what they mean. That provinces are able to create things for their citizens that they would not be able to fund otherwise because they received money from other geographic locations. The net in-out transfer is the bottom line. The people of alberta send X billion dollars to the federal government every year and the federal government sends X-10 billion dollars back to the provincial government, because that 10 billion is going to other provinces. This isn't rocket science unless you're trying hard to misunderstand.

The point about Albertans paying more is that they have higher incomes, so they are subject to progressive taxation (same as everyone, you'd don't need to reply thinking you've made a clever point). A combination of oil and gas revenue and a relatively business positive environment have made it possible for Albertans to pay more in taxes because they earn more. This is a good thing, but the point of contention comes out of the fact that there is no incentive for other provinces to try and improve their "fiscal capacity" when they can instead backfill their lack of revenue on the backs of the provinces, like BC, that are net contributors. If other provinces were faced with the having to cut services, or figure out how to improve their economies, they might undertake the work of improving their economy. But instead they can defer the hard choices and let Alberta, and BC provide that revenue.

At the end of the day I do just fine as an Albertan. One day oil and gas will be less important worldwide and Alberta will have to adapt. Luckily our economy is already more diversified than say, BC, which relies on real estate for a bigger proportion of its GDP. Better hope that trading houses back and forth continues to be a productive way to structure an economy. And even more importantly, once oil and gas subsides and Alberta can no longer provide per capita incomes ~15-20% higher than the rest of Canada what does the equalization formula look like then? I think that a lot of provinces are going to suddenly find out that they were taking things for granted and the money tap just isn't there any more. We'll see what happens at that point I guess, I feel pretty confident that Alberta will be fine, and hopefully it will force the rest of Canada to make some painful choices that will be better for the country in the long-term. But its going to suck in the short-term.

Respectfully, as an Albertan who still lives in Alberta, and who wants to remain a part of Canada I don't think that the persecution complex is 100% bullshit, and dismissals of it as such by eastern Canada only serve to reinforce it.

Re: equalization, of course the massive economy of Ontario makes a big part of GDP, but the point of Alberta's importance is that its economy allows it to make an outsized impact compared to its population. This surplus GDP/capita makes a huge difference in contributions to the equalization program wherein a province with 1/4 the population of Ontario can make the same size of contribution to the program. If you remove Alberta from the pool it becomes much much harder to retain the same size of payments to other provinces on the back of Ontario among others.

Second, Alberta has been one of the most under-represented province in the federal government, and that trend has gone on for decades. Lured by Alberta's economy people keep moving here and our ridings keep getting more and more people while we retain the same number of seats. This has been slowly changing as the government is basically forced to allocate more seats to Alberta and now between Ontario and BC, Alberta is no longer the most disadvantaged, but it still isn't a great situation.

Finally, there's all the one off issues that add up over time. As an example in the mid 2010s oil was in the gutters and Alberta was facing real economic issues. In 2015, there were roughly 35,000 job losses, and in 2016 there were another 25,000 direct job losses in the oil and gas sector. In 2018 when GM announced they were going to close their oshawa plant and put 3000 people out of work the federal government held an emergency midnight meeting to discuss how to help the workers. Those types of optics don't go unnoticed, that Alberta could lose roughly 100k jobs over 2014-2017 and that 3k jobs in Ontario gets a midnight cabinet meeting. Alberta still paid into equalization as a "have" province during that time, despite huge deficits as the provincial government tried to backstop revenue losses.

All of which is to say that the separation crowd is a bunch of bad actors and the flames of western alienation are certainly being fanned by people with ill intentions, but the core of that alienation stems from a real place and from real actions both current and historical, and glibly dismissing it is just not something I can agree with.

Equally, you are being fed a narrative. Yes, yes, every Canadian pays into federal taxes that are then dispersed amongst provinces to give a relatively "equal" standard of living, hence the term equilization payments. But why does Alberta consistently send far more money than it receives? Just what is it that allows Albertans to pay so much more in taxes? And of course that doesn't even get into how the equalization formula is created and applied, what sorts of things are factored into a province's "fiscal capacity" and what things get factored out, and whether those parts of the formula could be slanted to benefit certain provinces more than others. Of course at this point you'd probably deflect and say that the current equalization formula was put in place by the Harper government because you think that I must support the conservatives and this is some sort of gotcha.

The bottom line is that since the big oil and gas discoveries of the 60s Alberta has sent roughly 300 billion more to the federal government than it has received in return. This is of course part of being a province in a country, instead of a country itself like Norway is. And of course there has been mismanagement of the Heritage Fund, so Alberta is not blameless here. But the oft repeated talking point that Alberta doesn't actually really contribute disproportionately to the country is completely false. Why doesn't Alberta have a wealth fund on par with Norway? Because that money has instead been used to help fund hospitals, roads, schools and more across the rest of the country. I think that's a pretty good investment and I'm not upset about that, but I am upset when people don't even see that and choose instead to recycle a bunch of trite talking points that are basically lying by omission.

The standard TI graphing calculator offered to schools is the TI-84 Plus CE, which is generally 140USD and up. This calculator is currently offered for 89USD so you're already immediately incorrect on the pricing. The battery in this one is roughly 50% larger but that doesn't translate to better battery life necessarily. They both allow for programming with Python but this calculator would have to try incredibly hard to be worse at Python that the TI calculator, so I'd probably say it has an edge there too.

Based on your replies here, one thing it really doesn't seem like is a community of people trying to earnestly exchange ideas or points of view. It really seems like you're viewing this whole thing as some sort of debate contest or point sparring, and its both aggravating and disappointing to read.

What is your hoped for outcome here man? To come off like enough of a jerk or obtuse enough that people just abandon the thread and you can declare victory?

You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.

I always like to do a little digging when I read one of these articles. The first point I come to is that the author is employed by a16z (https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/) and so you have to immediately apply the "talking his book" filter. A16Z is heavily invested in AI and so any sorts of concerns around job loss and possible regulation or associated actions by the public at large represent a risk to these investments.

Secondly David Oks attended Masters School for his high school, an elite private boarding school with tuition currently running 72kUSD/year if you stay there the whole time, and 49kUSD/year if you go there just for schooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School). I am going to generally say that people who were able to have 150k+ spent on their high school education (to say nothing of attending Oxford at 30kGBP/year for international student tuition) might just possibly be people who have enough generational family wealth that concerns like job losses seem pretty abstract or not something to really worry about.

It's just another in a long series of articles downplaying the risks of AI job losses, which, when I dig into the author's background, are written by people who have never known any sort of financial precarity in their lives, and are frequently involved AI investment in some manner.

Of course there's a heavy dose of childhood nostalgia driving this, but I do love everything about this design style and outlook. It ties into the "early" days of the internet and web, when the vibe was around having a "Library of Alexandria" in your family home, the computer as a bicycle for your mind and just a general feeling of "abundance" that permeated the environment. I would come home from school and watch Star Trek TNG and get a utopian view of the future, flip over to PBS and watch Carmen Sandiego or Square 1, have dinner, then crack open Microsoft Encarta on the family PC and browse through random topics. The world of technology felt like it held infinite promise.

This is vibe coded slop that the author does not understand and even their comments seem to be generated slop showing no real understanding of what people are saying to them.

One of the short stories in this collection "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, won the BSFA award for short fiction, the Locus award for Best Short Story, the Nebula award for Best Short Story, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. So I think that should pretty firmly answer your question on the relative quality of the works included.

Just a few days ago this company came up on HN as part of a substack post which pointed out the numerous warning signs that this company is likely a scam, so its crazy to see them given so much credulous reporting from mainstream media.

After persuasively demonstrating an inability to ship a fancy alarm clock even with 100MM in funding at his last startup, the founder has now decided to turn his attention to easily surmounting the decades of insane hard science and engineering that forms ASML's moat. Of course if this goes the way of the alarm clock startup there's also the fusion startup he's running that could form a fallback...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767013

This book was generated by an LLM, and if I look at the Github organization that manages the repo, it looks like a bunch of other written material, all generated by LLMs. I scanned through the material a little bit and it seemed like exactly the sort of surface level gloss of topic that you'd expect an LLM to output. I didn't feel a ton of motivation to thoroughly go through the whole thing, in the same way that the author didn't feel a ton of motivation to actually learn about Lisp and then synthesize their knowledge into something novel that could potentially help other people. So it possible that there is more to this document than meets the eye, but right now I don't think I'm wrong in saying most people won't miss anything by skipping this.

I’ve added the book to my queue, and if you’re so inclined I’d appreciate hearing what your other four are.

It's not an ad-hominem. When people are talking their book, you should know that they're talking their book, and that knowledge doesn't have to negate any sound points they're making or cause you to disregard everything they're saying, it just colors your evaluation of their arguments, as it should. I don't think this is controversial, and seeing that comment flagged is pretty disheartening, adding context is almost never a bad thing.

This comment is completely untrue, the place I had read the information was incorrect and I was wrong in passing on second hand information I hadn’t personally verified. One of the people in question has clarified and corrected this comment. I can’t edit the comment at this point otherwise I would, so this is the best I can do.