Show HN: Nuts – pip/NPM for Java with first-class workspaces, JDK provisioning
3 by thevpc | 0 comments on Hacker News.
My frustration with distributing java apps didnt show up recently.
I remember having implemented my first network jar downloaded back in the 2000's because i needed applet like feature support with desktop full control.
Years after, the problem is the very same. Webstart didnt really took off and the only mean i had in my projects was the ugly fatjars, including the (for me) uglier spring-boot repackaging that changes the application classloading behaviour and hence giving me by time some headackes i was not prepared for. So basically nuts started as a response to this frustration 9 years ago, but from now i think its mature enough (used in production) to be shared, and forecebly i am more keen to need suggestions and help from fellow contributors.
Hack Nux
Watch the number of websites being hacked today, one by one on a page, increasing in real time.
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Meadow Notes – extract and publish microsites from your Markdown graphs
Show HN: Meadow Notes – extract and publish microsites from your Markdown graphs
2 by gmccreight2 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be better if I'd never bumped into Andy Matuschak's ideas. But I did, and basically got one-shotted by his concept of "evergreen notes", which are notes that are similar to well-factored code. They're small, conceptual, and densely-linked. They're also really hard to share with people, because those links form a complex graph that goes all over the place. You could share individual notes, but since the notes are small and have a lot of links there's not a lot of utility in sharing single notes. You could share all of them, but who in their right mind would want to share _all_ their notes. I found myself wanting to share little groups of notes with different sets of people reasonably often. None of the existing publishing tools I encountered supported automatic curation where it would suggest a candidate graph that I could then modify. Also, none were geared towards publishing lots of little sites. I've spent about a year part-time developing the project so far, and in that time I've probably published about 50 sites. Each time I learned something and improved the tooling. I like it pretty well now, so I'm sharing. It's open source, but also has a "we host for you" option. You can publish 3 sites to the meadow-notes.com site for free, so you can try it out. I'd love to know what you think.
2 by gmccreight2 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be better if I'd never bumped into Andy Matuschak's ideas. But I did, and basically got one-shotted by his concept of "evergreen notes", which are notes that are similar to well-factored code. They're small, conceptual, and densely-linked. They're also really hard to share with people, because those links form a complex graph that goes all over the place. You could share individual notes, but since the notes are small and have a lot of links there's not a lot of utility in sharing single notes. You could share all of them, but who in their right mind would want to share _all_ their notes. I found myself wanting to share little groups of notes with different sets of people reasonably often. None of the existing publishing tools I encountered supported automatic curation where it would suggest a candidate graph that I could then modify. Also, none were geared towards publishing lots of little sites. I've spent about a year part-time developing the project so far, and in that time I've probably published about 50 sites. Each time I learned something and improved the tooling. I like it pretty well now, so I'm sharing. It's open source, but also has a "we host for you" option. You can publish 3 sites to the meadow-notes.com site for free, so you can try it out. I'd love to know what you think.
New Show Hacker News story: Show HN: Command Center, the AI coding env for people who care about quality
Show HN: Command Center, the AI coding env for people who care about quality
7 by Darmani | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re Jimmy and Ray. Jimmy is a Thiel Fellow with a Ph. D. from MIT who has worked on programming tools for 15 years; Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19 and has built side-businesses vibe-coding. Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so. As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( https://ift.tt/eGbzfoW ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems. Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files…. This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?” With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop feature We’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is weakest. We have users who do all their coding in Zed or the Codex app, and then jump over to Command Center for a walkthrough when it finishes running. There’s even a skill that will pop open a Command Center walkthrough from the environment of your choice. Or you can just keep Command Center running while you do your work elsewhere, and if your AI deletes anything, you have Command Center’s snapshots to the rescue. We launched quietly last year and have been refining since. The quality and usability have kept going up, and Command Center is now ready for a lot more attention. Since our quiet launch, we’ve seen at least a dozen other agentic coding environments appear….approximately all of which have the same feature set focused on the part which is already easy (generating the first version of the code) and with at best a shoddy answer to the hard part (everything that comes after). Command Center’s focus is making the hard parts easy. Here’s what our users have to say: “[The refactorings] give your LLM taste. I’ve never seen an LLM write code this good before.” — Doug Slater, Staff Engineer, Climavision “With Command Center walkthroughs, I can get through a 400-line diff in less than half the time.” — Prateek Kumar, Platfor Engineer, Sumo Logic This product is not for everyone. If you’re someone who preaches “the prompt is the source, the code is the compiler output,” then you probably won’t enjoy Command Center. But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.
7 by Darmani | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re Jimmy and Ray. Jimmy is a Thiel Fellow with a Ph. D. from MIT who has worked on programming tools for 15 years; Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19 and has built side-businesses vibe-coding. Last year, we set to answer the question “If AI can write code 100x faster, then why aren’t you shipping 100x faster?” What we learned shocked us — even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code. And much of the rest of the time was spent either de-slop-ping it, or wishing they had done so. As luck turns out, our last two products were a tool that quickly onboards people to large codebases ( https://ift.tt/eGbzfoW ) and trainings that taught deep concepts of code quality to CEOs, YC founders, and engineers at top companies ( mirdin.com ), so we were extremely well-positioned to solve these problems. Command Center is an agentic coding environment focused on quality. With a few keypresses, you can start building 3 features at once and soon have 3 diffs ready, each consisting of 2000 changed lines across 50 files…. This is normally the point where you think “Crap, what now?” With Command Center, at this point you simply click “Refactor,” and watch the vibed slop turn into readable robustness. Then you click “Generate Walkthrough,” and then suddenly, to read a 2000 line diff, instead of scrolling up and down trying to make sense of it, you just press the right arrow key 200 times. See something you don’t like? Click on line 37, type “Do this and all other network fetches in the background Cmd+Enter,” and you have a few more agents getting your code into final shape. Click or type “Commit,” “Push,” “Create PR” — you just shipped a high quality, non-slop feature We’re striving to be the best at every step of the pipeline, but can just try Command Center in pieces wherever you feel your current workflow is weakest. We have users who do all their coding in Zed or the Codex app, and then jump over to Command Center for a walkthrough when it finishes running. There’s even a skill that will pop open a Command Center walkthrough from the environment of your choice. Or you can just keep Command Center running while you do your work elsewhere, and if your AI deletes anything, you have Command Center’s snapshots to the rescue. We launched quietly last year and have been refining since. The quality and usability have kept going up, and Command Center is now ready for a lot more attention. Since our quiet launch, we’ve seen at least a dozen other agentic coding environments appear….approximately all of which have the same feature set focused on the part which is already easy (generating the first version of the code) and with at best a shoddy answer to the hard part (everything that comes after). Command Center’s focus is making the hard parts easy. Here’s what our users have to say: “[The refactorings] give your LLM taste. I’ve never seen an LLM write code this good before.” — Doug Slater, Staff Engineer, Climavision “With Command Center walkthroughs, I can get through a 400-line diff in less than half the time.” — Prateek Kumar, Platfor Engineer, Sumo Logic This product is not for everyone. If you’re someone who preaches “the prompt is the source, the code is the compiler output,” then you probably won’t enjoy Command Center. But if you want to uphold traditional engineering discipline while also shipping 20 PRs a day, then this is the environment for you.
New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do you cope when your startup contracts?
Ask HN: How do you cope when your startup contracts?
5 by jasonephraim | 0 comments on Hacker News.
The same general situation has happened to me twice now and I am wondering if it’s something I can break free from or if it’s just the nature of the Startup beast - or what. There seems to be some kind of bubble that starts drying up investment in a startup where I am a technical lead. Both times, things seem to be going well and then 2 years in there are rounds of layoffs due to factors outside my/product’s control where the result is the same. I end up as the last tech generalist. It falls to me to write as much of the code as I can, manage (if any are left) engineers in my department, running support basically on my own, owning a large part of the product roadmap, working with the customers on support and implementations, working with integration partners, plus a slowly expanding list of responsibilities as new stuff falls on reduced teams. I pick up new domains pretty quick (finance, insurance, compliance), switch contexts well. I’ve always been the person who just figures it out - someone who takes ownership of something and just does it. But, instead of being rewarded, I just get to keep my job while absorbing the work of others less fortunate. During these contractions, the work never shrinks. Same clients, same integrations, same support volume (for now). Something else I’ve noticed is the scrutiny goes up - not down. I think a big factor is you have founders and upper managers stepping in to be more engaged or attempting to cover gaps. This causes all sorts of issues. After this last round of cuts, the company offered me a revised title and job description that focused on managing the department that now was essentially just me down from 6 a year ago. It was full of responsibilities like “leading team to meet targets”. I did kind of want to accept it since it is the sort of role I was hired for and would help in a job search later. Regardless, I couldn’t because I am basically the team. It felt like a trap (or at least, wishful thinking that has been proven as much time and time again due to factors beyond my control.) I could just leave, but the job market and economy look scary as hell. It took me 8 months to find a role last time. This is primarily due to my experience and background. I’ve been involved in engineering, product, support, sales, customer success, integrations and user comms. I look like someone who could/did do everything but that comes off as someone who owned nothing. The reality is I owned way way too much as things evolved. Three things I am trying to think through and could use some help with: 1. Is it just the companies and bad luck? Am I picking startups in industries or with offerings that are just vulnerable to VC trends and hype? They both seemed like great opportunities, and I completely understand there is always risk - but the current/former result as it pertains to my role and situation once cuts were made is surprisingly identical. 2. Should I stand my ground? I have a habit of trying to work things out and get scrappy. During the last contraction, I spoke out to the president of the company that I wanted to sit down and look at our team’s responsibilities and projects that were being used/sold and see what was essential, could be covered, etc. That never happened - should I have been more firm and demanded it versus just absorbing it? 3. Ignoring the company, should I lean into the role and try to develop it? Should I accept I am an amazing generalist “jack of all trades, but master of none” and make it a more deliberate role/career? I know these sort of people are needed, but no company can really put out a role description for them. I’m seeing AI helps cover a growing amount of the gaps that I can’t dedicate the time to developing. I also have enough experience and knowledge to know AI is a tool and needs to be closely guided and applied in focused/appropriate areas. (Case in point - I’ve spent the last two hours fighting it from going off the rails in our Go golden test framework because it wants to ignore our test patterns). I’m curious if others out there have found similar issues with Startups. Also, if there are other “Red Mage” technical folks that have a hard time in the job market because they’ve been asked to cover such wide areas?
5 by jasonephraim | 0 comments on Hacker News.
The same general situation has happened to me twice now and I am wondering if it’s something I can break free from or if it’s just the nature of the Startup beast - or what. There seems to be some kind of bubble that starts drying up investment in a startup where I am a technical lead. Both times, things seem to be going well and then 2 years in there are rounds of layoffs due to factors outside my/product’s control where the result is the same. I end up as the last tech generalist. It falls to me to write as much of the code as I can, manage (if any are left) engineers in my department, running support basically on my own, owning a large part of the product roadmap, working with the customers on support and implementations, working with integration partners, plus a slowly expanding list of responsibilities as new stuff falls on reduced teams. I pick up new domains pretty quick (finance, insurance, compliance), switch contexts well. I’ve always been the person who just figures it out - someone who takes ownership of something and just does it. But, instead of being rewarded, I just get to keep my job while absorbing the work of others less fortunate. During these contractions, the work never shrinks. Same clients, same integrations, same support volume (for now). Something else I’ve noticed is the scrutiny goes up - not down. I think a big factor is you have founders and upper managers stepping in to be more engaged or attempting to cover gaps. This causes all sorts of issues. After this last round of cuts, the company offered me a revised title and job description that focused on managing the department that now was essentially just me down from 6 a year ago. It was full of responsibilities like “leading team to meet targets”. I did kind of want to accept it since it is the sort of role I was hired for and would help in a job search later. Regardless, I couldn’t because I am basically the team. It felt like a trap (or at least, wishful thinking that has been proven as much time and time again due to factors beyond my control.) I could just leave, but the job market and economy look scary as hell. It took me 8 months to find a role last time. This is primarily due to my experience and background. I’ve been involved in engineering, product, support, sales, customer success, integrations and user comms. I look like someone who could/did do everything but that comes off as someone who owned nothing. The reality is I owned way way too much as things evolved. Three things I am trying to think through and could use some help with: 1. Is it just the companies and bad luck? Am I picking startups in industries or with offerings that are just vulnerable to VC trends and hype? They both seemed like great opportunities, and I completely understand there is always risk - but the current/former result as it pertains to my role and situation once cuts were made is surprisingly identical. 2. Should I stand my ground? I have a habit of trying to work things out and get scrappy. During the last contraction, I spoke out to the president of the company that I wanted to sit down and look at our team’s responsibilities and projects that were being used/sold and see what was essential, could be covered, etc. That never happened - should I have been more firm and demanded it versus just absorbing it? 3. Ignoring the company, should I lean into the role and try to develop it? Should I accept I am an amazing generalist “jack of all trades, but master of none” and make it a more deliberate role/career? I know these sort of people are needed, but no company can really put out a role description for them. I’m seeing AI helps cover a growing amount of the gaps that I can’t dedicate the time to developing. I also have enough experience and knowledge to know AI is a tool and needs to be closely guided and applied in focused/appropriate areas. (Case in point - I’ve spent the last two hours fighting it from going off the rails in our Go golden test framework because it wants to ignore our test patterns). I’m curious if others out there have found similar issues with Startups. Also, if there are other “Red Mage” technical folks that have a hard time in the job market because they’ve been asked to cover such wide areas?