Hacker News: Shawnecy

New comment by Shawnecy in "Go is still not good"

Shawnecy — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 17:36:08 +0000

For too many aspects for my liking, Go moves complexity out of the language and into your code where you get to unavoidably deal with the cognitive load. It's fine if you can keep things small and simple, but beyond a certain complexity, it's a hard pass for me.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Working from home isn't just here to stay, it's growing"

Shawnecy — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 01:33:00 +0000

False dichotomy.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches"

Shawnecy — Fri, 09 May 2025 16:41:55 +0000

I'm not sure about a single leading OpenJDk build. It may depend on your use case, and even then, I suspect that they're all pretty interchangeable unless you have some very niche need.

If you're doing anything on AWS, Amazon's Corretto is a good choice. Probably similar for Azure and Microsoft's offering.

If you're using JetBrains IDEs and don't mind waiting for the major release (11, 17, 21, etc.), then those aren't a bad choice either.

I've used Azul's Zulu plenty for my own projects. One thing they do different is to provide alternate builds for every JDK version with JavaFX packaged directly into the JVM.

It's pretty easy to pick and choose between them and manage multiple versions from multiple vendors simultaneously using SDKMAN.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Doge Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations"

Shawnecy — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:19:40 +0000

More experience does generally make people better at their jobs.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Vertical farming company Plenty files for bankruptcy after raising nearly $1B"

Shawnecy — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:29:35 +0000

Unsurprising. I'm not sure much has changed since this recording of Bruce Bugbee's talk "Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet". There's nothing surprising there but he does give hard numbers to do the math that shows that vertical farming is not as good as its proponents have made it out to be. Solar energy input dwarfs all other energy inputs to agriculture, and the cost to replace one acre of solar energy with electricity comes out to $400,000 per acre (per some unit of days per a growing season). I don't think the economics have tended favorably since. The space needs for solar panels doesn't favor vertical farming either. He also shows the efficiency of modern agriculture, and why vertical farming has a pretty tall order ahead of it to beat the economics of outdoor farming. It's quite unlikely factors have changed enough since to alter his conclusion: only high-value, high-water-content specialty crops might be economically viable.

[0] = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw

New comment by Shawnecy in "Ask HN: Would You Unionize for WFH?"

Shawnecy — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 13:22:33 +0000

Yes and for other reasons as well.

New comment by Shawnecy in "With New Decree, Trump Seeks to Cow the Legal Profession"

Shawnecy — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 14:24:35 +0000

That's a very slanted way of phrasing "abusing executive powers".

New comment by Shawnecy in "Trump says he's buying a Tesla to support Musk and counter 'illegal' boycott"

Shawnecy — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:21:18 +0000

Nice senseless phrasing, but there is no consumer boycott that is illegal.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Tough trade-offs: How time and career choices shape the gender pay gap"

Shawnecy — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 03:05:37 +0000

The world would be better off without McKinsey[0].

0 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver...

New comment by Shawnecy in "Show HN: Torii – a framework agnostic authentication library for Rust"

Shawnecy — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:12:44 +0000

I think the most similar you'd find for Java are Shiro [0], Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) [1], and pac4j [2].

0: https://shiro.apache.org/

1: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/22/security/java-auth...

2: https://github.com/pac4j/pac4j

New comment by Shawnecy in "Judge Grants SEC Request to Halt Fraud Case Against Justin Sun [pdf]"

Shawnecy — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:38:38 +0000

I'm sure Justin Sun's purchase of $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial has nothing to do with it.

New comment by Shawnecy in "The Amazon Appstore for Android devices will be discontinued on August 20, 2025"

Shawnecy — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:07:30 +0000

This is an absurd false dichotomy. You can pick fruits from the wilderness and not get mauled by bears. Using apps not in walled gardens has nothing to do with attempts to feel morally superior.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Show HN: Interview Cheating Is on the Rise--Here’s How We’re Stopping It"

Shawnecy — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 14:05:42 +0000

Why not just let candidates use AI like they would at work and design your interview test questions around that?

New comment by Shawnecy in "Async Rust is about concurrency, not (just) performance"

Shawnecy — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:10:42 +0000

I agree 100%. Virtual threads have drawn a lot of skepticism but even Rust once had a version with them. They enable the strong structuted concurrency patterns. Async/await works nicely as long as your use case is "do this work on another thread, free this one up, resume here when the async task is done", but I've found that to be most common in UI work, and still not all that common (like if you want to track its progress, you still got some async state management coding to do). And even then you end up with a function coloring problem. People can try to downplay that, bit it is a giant wart resulting from that approach. I'll take Java's virtual threads combined with their structured concurrency efforts over async/await almost every time.

New comment by Shawnecy in "ZType – Typing Game"

Shawnecy — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:14:43 +0000

I just played it on Firefox on Linux just fine.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission"

Shawnecy — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:18:44 +0000

> Everyone has a price,

Speak for yourself.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Java vs. Kotlin: A Developer's Perspective"

Shawnecy — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 14:37:56 +0000

The first case should reduce to a Record for Java.

They give no examples of where Kotlin's extra type inference is of benefit.

They don't compare virtual threads to coroutines.

I stopped reading after that.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Ban on women marrying after 25: the proposal to boost birth rate in Japan"

Shawnecy — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 16:29:04 +0000

Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal was satire. Are you suggesting Naoki Hyakuta's comment was as well? I haven't read it that way.

And just because he prefixed it with a disclaimer of how bad it was doesn't negate his responsibility to not say stupid things.

And it is stupid to think that if you restrict the right for half your population to marry then you'll increase the birth rate.

New comment by Shawnecy in "Bribery is largely subject to circumstance: study"

Shawnecy — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:22:48 +0000

Agree 100%. I recently found that Kant had pretty much introduced this concept as categorical imperative[0]: 'Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.'

[0] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

New comment by Shawnecy in "Tossed Salads and Scrumbled Eggs"

Shawnecy — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 05:52:36 +0000

Another post from this author also appeared on HN recently[0]. What he so eloquently writes I have definitely experienced at more than one of my past large enterprise employers. Especially this weird allegiance to faux-Agile (I'm thinking of things like SAFe) in which their solution to all of the enterprise's problems was adding more process and giving middle managers more boxes to mindlessly check.

0 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42010249