News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jeffreportmill1

Re:Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:40PM (#50329630)
I agree - I almost feel guilty holding characters to such a high standard that I don’t often match myself. Conversely, I worry that our willingness to embrace so many anti-heroes in media has affected us adversely. Too many shows like Breaking Bad and The Apprentice may eventually take its toll.
Re:Casio Watches of the 1980s on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:09PM (#50317956)
Okay, AI found it for me. I can’t believe they didn’t add it to that page:

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6ae62084ab4081918e5fa21a4ec916a2

Re:Casio Watches of the 1980s on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:06PM (#50317929)
I had a Casio in 1985 that I swear fell out of a time portal. It had a large touch screen face and allowed me to enter 50 contacts (name + phone) and had calculator functionality via touch screen (no key pad). It is not shown on this Casio page and I’ve never seen a reference to it despite it being years ahead of its time.
My running joke for the last couple years is "Nobody knows how to write software anymore" (even about a bug in my code). The problem is almost certainly complexity. Apps are like a house of cards, and we keep adding to the stack with new features, external dependencies, etc. My apps 30 years ago used one language, one library, one process, one thread and shipped on one platform. Now it uses Java, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SQL and has a dozen linked libraries, talks to a couple servers, has dozens of threads, and runs on desktop, browser, tablet, phone and car console. It's a wonder anything works at all.
Re:Maybe you should learn something on Saturday July 04, 2026 @12:05PM (#48786411)
I struggle with the same feeling - though maybe I’d say I don’t find honing my craft as rewarding anymore. For years it’s been the gradually creeping expansion of the world - the more I develop new skills, the more I find there are so many others that (seem to) have done it better and faster. Then all at once I find that chatbots seems to be better and faster. It has sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s depression or anhedonia, but I probably need to spend more time figuring it out.
Re:Why I Stopped Arguing with People on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @10:10AM (#48747112)
I suggest you keep arguing - but make every effort to concede opposing valid points. If you disagree, you're an idiot and little different than Hitler.
Re:Reading the news is the new smoking on Friday June 26, 2026 @09:43AM (#48686584)
Smoking is not the best metaphor, because staying informed on the issues and events of society and community is essential to a well lived life. News in some form is more like food - and the author makes a good point that too many of us are suffering adverse health effects of consuming vast quantities of poor quality content, myself included.

Our society is under attack and changing rapidly in dangerous ways. Staying informed might not be the same as enlisting and heading overseas to fight the good fight, but we owe our current pax americana to those who did. So I stay informed so I can occasionally enter the fray in our contest of ideas. The worst of what is happening now is because too many people are under and ill-informed.

Re:Today's Layoffs on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @11:49AM (#47504452)
The CEO is worth 7B+. 1000 employees at 100k/yr would cost him 100M - less than his net worth fluctuates on any given day and only 20% of other costs savings they have identified.

Executives care little about the stakeholders: the employees, the customers, the community. It's their company, too. They only care about investors and themselves. People who "own" pay a lower tax rate than those that "work". Let's fix that and make things great again.

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026) on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @04:51PM (#46967414)
Excellent work on Tribal Trouble. I'm a huge Java fan and I had no idea this existed (usually you only hear about Minecraft and RuneScape). I wonder how much OpenGL/LWJGL code there is. It could maybe run in the browser with CheerpJ or TeaVM if that code could be ported to WebGL.

My labor of love is SnapCode: https://reportmill.com/SnapCode . It has a small interface (camera + vertex buffer) that can run on either desktop or in browser.

This would also be a great candidate for JDeploy (https://jdeploy.com), too, to provide a nice download package for multiple platforms.

Because of Trump, and just like Trump, this is a perfect storm. Unrestrained AI and crypto are causing a surge in demand at the same time Trump is spitefully and recklessly killing wind and solar installations and subsidies.

Trump-licans - the party of mean and stupid and self-destruction.

I totally agree with this! Oracle still spends time and money promoting Java client, and the browser is now the largest client platform. They could really revitalize Java client by backing CheerpJ.
I need to check out the tailscale solution, although CheerpJ also makes it trivial to plug in a proxy server, which I currently do in my app that supports cross origin.
I use CheerpJ to do new development that is spectacularly cross-platform, runs native on all the major platforms and everywhere else in the browser with a single code base. I don't think there are too many alternatives for that and I suspect Java + CheerpJ is one of the best.

https://reportmill.com/SnapCode

SnapCode Java 11 IDE in the browser

The latest version of SnapCode supports Java 11 in the browser (the download version supports Java 21). SnapCode offers real native Java Client graphics in the browser and desktop.SnapCode is free and uses the CheerpJ browser JVM to run real Java in the browser. CheerpJ is moving quickly this year to support the latest versions of Java. Java 11 now, Java 17 this summer, and release parity next...

( Read More... | 1 comment | on HN )

SnapCode Java 11 IDE in the browser

The latest version of SnapCode supports Java 11 in the browser (the download version supports Java 21). SnapCode offers real native Java Client graphics in the browser and desktop.SnapCode is free and uses the CheerpJ browser JVM to run real Java in the browser. CheerpJ is moving quickly this year to support the latest versions of Java. Java 11 this month, Java 17 this summer, and hopefully...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
And here's an entire Java IDE with CheerpJ that downloads less than 15mb:

https://reportmill.com/SnapCode

It seems obvious that elon hasn't even showed up for work in years. His only real tesla-related effort has been to try to strong-arm an illegal 50B pay package. The board should be replaced for negligence and he should be fired for malfeasance and fraud. I'll bet the stock would jump 10%+ overnight.

The idea that he's the richest man in the world is a joke. Half his rapidly declining wealth is based on SpaceX, a "360B" company with no profit and < 12B in revenue that blows up and burns up its own products more often than not.

It seems obvious that he hasn't even showed up for work in years. His only real tesla-related effort has been to try to strong-arm an illegal 50B pay package. The board should be replaced for negligence and he should be fired for malfeasance and fraud.

The idea that he's the richest man in the world is a joke. Half his rapidly declining wealth is based on SpaceX, a "360B" company with no profit and < 12B in revenue that blows up and burns up its own products more often than not.

Re:Teaching Java Is Getting Simpler on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:30PM (#43146210)
Nice post! Makes a good case for getting/keeping java in the classroom.

Be sure and check out SnapCode: https://reportmill.com/SnapCode . It also offers a lot of ‘paving the onramp’ features.

Re:JReleaser: quick and effortless way to release your project on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @10:28AM (#42793811)
I'm a huge fan of JDeploy - deployment used to be my biggest headache. Now I just run 'jdeploy' in the command line, change the version in the UI app and hit the 'Publish' button.

SnapCode: https://www.jdeploy.com/~snapcodejava

Re:Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly? on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:10AM (#41904368)
That may be the wrong question, though that might help avoid the sunk cost fallacy ("It's better to burn out, than fade away!"). On the other hand, sticking with things has its benefits, with an eye towards a pivot. The right question may have more to do with speed than scale. Best to try and find partners in your endeavor. Then you can succeed or fail twice as fast, and try more things. And have more fun along the way.
Re:I sold all my Tesla shares (TSLA), here's why on Thursday September 05, 2024 @04:01PM (#41459951)
I divested too, last May. I was really hoping there would be a "Fire Elon" movement to save the company and all the heroes that made it such a success. Nobody else in the world could get away with keeping their job while basically:

- Not showing up for work - Working several other jobs simultaneously - Rigging their pay through scandalous board manipulation (embezzlement) - Alienating the core set of customers - Threatening to move future innovations to competing companies

I love my two cars, and I'm sad for state of the company. They should fire Elon, then file suit to take back what he stole.

I don’t remember much about the work - it was just a quick and dirty app to help me debug PDF for my ReportMill work (10 years ago). I remember thinking there probably weren’t more than 100 people on the planet who would even care about it.
Great work! I'm sorry to be another jerk posting a link to something similar, but here is my solution, running in the browser (just drag and drop your PDF in):

https://reportmill.com/snaptea/PDFViewer/

Older »