MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why aren't more developers using AI tools?
by dawie | 2025-08-14 22:00:10+00:00
I’ve worked in both corporate and startup settings and keep noticing that many talented developers I meet don’t use AI tools at all — not even for small things like boilerplate code, tests, or docs.

Why? Concerns about security or IP? Don’t trust the quality? Slows you down instead of helping? Just don’t see the value?

If you don’t use AI tools (or tried and stopped), I’d love to hear your reasons. If you do use them, what convinced you?
by smsm42 | 2025-08-14 22:00:31+00:00
Well, they are not entirely wrong: Tolkien was a big fan of "old England", as he saw it, with its primarily agricultural focus, and held rather dim view on industrialization and modernism. While Soviets of course were fanatics of industrialization and considered the petty bourgeoisie and kulaks (and Bagginses certainly look a lot like kulaks) their mortal enemies. Tolkien was very adamant that he does not do allegories, and yet the Soviets were right to consider him ideologically opposed to them. He was also a devout Catholic and ardent anti-Communist, so whether or not the Red Truth really declared him an enemy, they certainly would have strong reasons to.
by crote | 2025-08-14 22:02:14+00:00
The problem with voter ID laws have rarely been with the ID itself. Very few people would have issue with a voter ID law which also guarantees that 100% of the population can easily obtain said ID at zero cost.

The issue is that those laws are usually linked to very specific forms of ID, which just so happen to be easily available to certain demographic groups.

Imagine a voter ID law where the only acceptable form of ID would cost $50.000 to purchase. Would you consider that fair and nondiscriminatory? What if you could only get the ID on the third Tuesday of the month, between 14:00 and 14:30, at a single location in the entire state? What if the ID required you to pass a certain kind of test, judged arbitrarily by a government official?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-14 22:02:15+00:00
> we wouldn't be talking about Woz today if they had not paired up.

The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
by zbentley | 2025-08-14 22:02:43+00:00
This feels like neglected software to me. It has a strong odor of a product that the owning team does not consider a major priority and takes an ‘is it working well enough?’ approach to issues rather than an ‘is it working well?’ approach.

You can kind of identify other software systems/features of other tech products that are neglected in this same way: it’s the API that flakes out, or the UI that missed the update/reskin and probably runs on neglected legacy backends, or whatever.

And before the inevitable indictment of Google engineering’s failure to consider non-Google-scale systems: that might be the root of the neglect, but it could just as easily have a dozen more mundane reasons, from “team just doesn’t like working on it/hates the code” to “some silly operational constraint makes it very hard to make the needed changes to the system”.

Like, sure, all those things are the maintainers’ (Google’s) fault, and certainly fixable given the maintainers’ resources. This isn’t a defense of Google; just a statement that the specific reasons for goproxy sucking might not be in the list of stereotypical sweeping indictments people often presume about $GOOG.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-14 22:02:47+00:00
California was undergoing non-partisan redistricting, which when they started, republicans actually picked up a seat or two. See https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/

New York actually is less gerry mandered than CA, neither CA nor NY list any party getting more representation than their votes. Illinois, however, is just as gerrymandered as Texas.

States where Democrats have the strong advantage due to gerry mandering:

* Illinois

* Oregon

* Nevada

* New Mexico

NY and CA are both states where representation roughly corresponds to votes. Democrats also have less strong advantages in Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Mississippi (out of all places!). I'm guessing Alabama and Mississippi are just flukes.

States were Republicans have a strong advantage due to gerrymandering:

* Utah

* Kansas

* Texas

* Louisiana

* Wisconsin (??)

* Ohio

* Kentucky

* North Carolina

* South Carolina

* Georgia

* Florida

Arkansas and Oklahoma are moderately biased to Republican. Republicans have minor advantages in Maryland, New Hampshire, and Iowa.

Given that representation is roughly balanced in NY and CA right now, the Democrats could probably get a bunch of seats out of those two states if they decide to gerrymander.
by dmurray | 2025-08-14 22:02:51+00:00
The LLM examples for "Water" surely put it in the top 10% of people (let's say, of adult native English speakers who are literate by UNESCO standards). The average person can't string two written sentences together, never mind write a coherent essay "from an opinionated, individual point of view" in a single draft.

That might still make it the worst candidate in the All Souls exams, because those obviously select for people who are interested in writing essays of this sort.

But I'm also curious whether the LLM could compete given a suitable prompt. If it was told to write an idiosyncratic, opinionated essay, and perhaps given a suitable source material - "you are Harry Potter" but someone less well known but still with a million words of backstory - couldn't it do it? The chat bots we have today are bland because we value blandness. Customers are willing to pay for the inoffensive corporate style that can replace 90% of their employees at writing. Nobody is paying billions of dollars for a Montaigne or a Swift or even a Paul Graham to produce original essays.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-14 22:03:02+00:00
Von Rossum moved to the US and Python actually got US government funding pretty early. Lerdorf did PHP in Canada so America. Ruby is kind of the exception being Japanese but it’s pretty niche - nearly as much as Ocaml - and is mostly popular for Rails which was started from Denmark but by someone working for, you guessed it, a US company. Torvald announced Linux on a US usenet list and moved to California soon after.

Ocaml difference is that the core development is done by INRIA, a French public institution and the people in charge had zero interest in moving to the US or chasing the US market.

It’s funny because Ocaml became a bit more popular when people from the UK (Cambridge, JaneStreet) started doing more outreach.
by andy99 | 2025-08-14 22:03:09+00:00
This was good, the tldr point is LLMs suck at natural writing, particularly long form. Or more abstractly they don't have complex original ideas, so can't do anything that requires this.

It's not surprising as it's very hard to train for or benchmark.

Also should add I don't think anyone serious thinks that long form writing or ideation is what they're for - assuming an LLM would be good at this is a side effect of anthropomorphism / confusion. It doesn't mean an LLM isn't good at summarizing something or changing unstructured data into structured or all of the other "cognitive tasks" that we expect from AI.
Show HN: xstack – Passive eBPF Linux stack profiling without tracepoints
by tanelpoder | 2025-08-14 22:03:18+00:00
Here's the latest eBPF performance tool of mine - xstack. It's a minimal tool, just 165 lines of eBPF C and under 500 lines of userland C code (including all comments and boilerplate!). It uses the libbpf and (Rust) BlazeSym libraries though (which are a lot of code).

The point (and difference) of this tool is that it can sample both the kernel and userspace stack traces of all threads in your system.

Traditionally, the "bpf_get_stack()" helper can not read userspace stack traces of other tasks in Linux, but since Linux 5.18 we can combine sleepable eBPF task iterator programs with a new "bpf_copy_from_user_task()" helper to read whatever we want from the userspace memory of any other process.

That includes stack areas - so currently whenever the target executable was compiled with frame pointers enabled, you can easily do passive-sampling stack profiling - without slowing the other processes down - at all!

Despite the Linux kernel 5.18 requirement, it actually works on RHEL 9.5+ (and clones) too. RedHat apparently ported the entire eBPF 6.8 subsystem to their RHEL 9.5+ 5.14 kernels. Feedback and testing results appreciated.
by egypturnash | 2025-08-14 22:03:48+00:00
Anyone in the US really, they were mostly a Spectrum shop and that machine absolutely bombed in the US. C64 ports of their games exist, and some c64 exclusives, but I never saw ads for them in the three or four US c64 magazines I subscribed to.

Outside of the occasional software pirate, nobody in the US heard of them until they'd become Rare and been eaten by Nintendo.
by jaysonelliot | 2025-08-14 22:03:58+00:00
"Today, you still find airbrush-inspired art in advertising that’s done digitally rather than with ink on paper. The digital art is a little too perfect though — the gradient blends are flawless, while an airbrush would give you the slightest inconsistencies that made it look more genuine."

I feel that way about so much digital painting and illustration now. Artists can work faster than they can with physical media, but the end result is always missing something when there are no happy accidents.
by altruios | 2025-08-14 22:04:20+00:00
I have trouble reconciling this point with the known phenomenon of hallucinations.

I would suppose the correct test is an 'infinite' Turing test, which after a long enough conversation, LLM's invariably do not pass, as they eventually degrade.

I think a better measure for the binary answer of "have they passed the Turing test?" is the metric of 'For how long do they continue to pass the Turing test?"...

This ignores such ideas of probing the LLM's weak spots. Since they do not 'see' their input as characters, and instead as tokens, counting letters in words, or specifics about those sub-token division provides a shortcut (for now) to failing the Turing test.

But the above approach is not in the spirit of the Turing test, as that only points out a blind spot in their perception, like how a human would have to guess a bit at what things would look like if UV and infrared were added to our visual field... sure we could reason about it, but we wouldn't actually perceive those wavelengths, so we could make mistakes about that qualia. And it would say nothing of our ability to think if we could not perceive those wavelengths, even if 'more-seeing' entities judged us as inferior for it...
by wvenable | 2025-08-14 22:05:59+00:00
No solution is perfect but we already have secure boot. It doesn't even have to mandate some pre-approved image; it just has to be an image that I approve and lock. This is already a well solved problem for corporate environments.

You miss the point. I want all the power. Let me install and configure a Linux image of any sort and then lock it down. I am root. My kid is a mere user.

There is nothing terribly difficult or even controversial about that.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-14 22:06:12+00:00
This misses the point that you can establish the purchasing power of gold very easily vs a basket of common groceries or consumer goods.

vanity (jewelry, a luxury product)

Jewelry traditionally functioned as a rough store of value because it's easy to sell quickly (albeit at a steep discount), and it makes a remarkably reliable Veblen good, as a glance at the Oval Office will demonstrate.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-14 22:06:38+00:00
The key problem with this entire issue is that it's basically a morality law. There are classes of crimes that, over time, society has discovered simply do not have an enforcement mechanism less damaging than the harm they are seeking to prevent.

An example is Adultery. Most people will agree that it is morally wrong to cheat on your spouse. The reason civilized countries no longer have adultery laws is not because a majority of people support the crime, it's that the level of control a government needs to exercise over its citizenry to actually enforce such a law is repugnant. The state must proscribe definitions of infidelity ( human sexuality being the mess it is, this alone is a massive headache), then engage the state apparatus to surveil people's intimate lives, and then provide a legal apparatus that prevents abuse via allegation. And for what? So that people's feelings are a little less hurt?

The juice simply is not worth the squeeze.

So it goes for age restrictions. Age verification creates massive potential for invasion of privacy, blackmail, censorship, and more, necessitating a massive state censorship apparatus to block foreign content, and for what? So that little Timmy's forced back into trading nudie mags at the bus stop? To save parents the onerous effort of telling their kids "no"?

It's simply not worth it.
by bko | 2025-08-14 22:06:48+00:00
Hard disagree, I think I here are great men and they drive history. Its nice to valorize the every day working man, and I'm likely such a person. I mean a lot to my family and maybe a handful of others but I won't shape history no matter how hard I try. I can only hope to make the world better by bringing up well adjusted children that contribute to society. And that's fine.
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-14 22:07:10+00:00
I do think the flat hierarchy thing is commendable for many reasons.

That said, don't think that just because you (try to) have few bosses that there isn't some form of hierarchy in which people don't take credit for other people's work.

Sure, maybe there's no boss by title that people suck up to and take credit for stuff to look good to them. But there very definitely will be the "alphas" in the group that everyone looks up to and wants to look good to and the taking credit for stuff will be done to impress those people.

So, if you weed out this kind of stuff successfully well enough, again, I commend you. But I doubt it's as complete as you may want to think. It's just a different looking game of favours and sucking up to with less easily visible (can't just look at title to figure out who to suck up to) lines.

For some people this will be positive as they're good at figuring out who to suck up to in that situation while others may need the title to figure that out. I bet many socially awkward / socially less aware people find it easier to navigate titles they can read in an org chart than sniffing these out of the "sociosphere".
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-14 22:07:14+00:00
> If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.

That's true! But neither does the 1% spoil the 99%, or make it unimportant. People are very bad at seeing the good and the bad in a person; they want to distill it down to one single data point of "he was good/bad". But that isn't remotely just, and it's worth pointing out whenever people skew too far towards glossing over flaws or refusing to acknowledge the good.

Right now, the zeitgeist is to refuse to acknowledge the good in someone if they did something the speaker considers bad enough. So, one has to frequently nudge people to not forget the good even as they acknowledge the bad.
by namuol | 2025-08-14 22:07:32+00:00
Ages ago, before I had any real professional experience, I was blown away by Steenberg’s demos and enamored by his tech talks. The demos still impress me and have aged well, but today I’m glad I didn’t fall into the trap of taking his development advice as scripture.

His name has been popping up a lot more recently. I would be worried about the impact he might be having on young programmers, but honestly I doubt his worst advice would survive in industry anyway. I didn’t watch this particular video but his recent talk at Better Software Conference was illuminating, in a bad way.
by l72 | 2025-08-14 22:08:09+00:00
If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want and put on my Jellyfin server. I don’t pirate music because I can buy what I want on Bandcamp (and even mainstream music on apple and Amazon without drm).

But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.

I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.

I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.

I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.
by icw_nru | 2025-08-14 22:08:47+00:00
Hello, some things I want to talk about.

HN discussion of part 1 leaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864419

Ironically, after posting the part 1 leaks, I ran into several censorship efforts directed towards me (both direct and indirect).

I had my Reddit account shadow banned (still in effect) and my hackernews account on a "filtered mode" (they think my posts are too promotional and repetitive).

This story was immediately filtered after I initially posted it this morning.

Another thing to mention, is that for the first couple of hours after posting the part 1 story, I had the post locked several times, and have had several newly created HN accounts making some not so nice comments directed towards us as opposed to focusing on the story at hand.

Also my post was down ranked to the third page of HN, despite having way more engagement (comments and upvotes) then 95% of the posts on the first page of HN.

So if anyone knows a better way to make these posts without getting banned/filtered, or knows another place that would be interested let me know. I would like to continue posting on HackerNews, but if I have to message the mods every time I make the post, it would be extremely painful. Thanks to Dan, for once again coming to save the day.

Part 3 leaks will probably be either next week or the week after. We are currently collaborating with a news organization to get the story out there first.

Finally, I can answer any questions anyone has about this story.
by Teever | 2025-08-14 22:08:51+00:00
A charitable interpretation of what I have wrote is that if Apple had followed the law then they would have more competition and the market would be a healthier place that benefits software developers and consumers alike.

Apple broke the law because they felt that it was in their best interest to the detriment of others and they will likely continue to do so if they feel it is in their best interest.
by phkahler | 2025-08-14 22:08:51+00:00
>> having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!
by squigz | 2025-08-14 22:08:54+00:00
The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.

Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.
by Lerc | 2025-08-14 22:10:20+00:00
>Whatever your feelings are about OOP and memory management, the reality is that if you choose GTK, you're forced into interfacing in some way with the GObject type system. You can't avoid it.

In the past this has also been my assessment of GTK. It lead me to decide to take the other path, to never directly use GTK. I appreciate the value in having a unified user interface between applications, but I have always thought the features that GTK provides were not worth the penalties paid. I have worked around the edges of GTK in open source apps that are GTK based. That lead me to think that GTK and the GObject system is opinionated in a way that are not terribly compatible with my own opinions.

I don't hate that GTK exists, It is my choice not to use it and I am fine with that. However I also have encountered people who seem to think it is not my choice not to use it. There are a million and one other GUI toolkits out there, of which GTK is one of the most polished. I can't shake the feeling that if GTK were less dominant, some of the resources that go to polishing GTK might have been spent polishing a different framework with a nicer underlying architecture.

Of course what I consider nicer might not be what others consider nicer. Of those who use GTK, how many use it begrudgingly, and how many feel like it is the best tool for the job?
by tomrod | 2025-08-14 22:10:27+00:00
> Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive"

And it was rightfully opposed by the majority and by folks who understand the tenability of our rights to the whims of authoritarians, as many, many, many of the actions of the current administration should be.
by rurp | 2025-08-14 22:10:43+00:00
I think the article gives a much more plausible explanation for the demise of the Turing Test: the jagged frontier. In the past being able to write convincingly well seemed like a good overall proxy for cognitive ability. It turns out LLMs are excellent at spitting out reasonable sounding text, and great at producing certain types of writing, but are still terrible at many writing tasks that rely on cognitive ability.

Humans don't need to cast about for obscure cases where they are smarter than an LLM, there are an endless supply of examples. It's simply the case that the Turing Test tells us very little about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current AI capabilities.
by audiofish | 2025-08-14 22:10:51+00:00
Really cool tool, but perhaps not for the original use-case. I often find myself trying to figure out what call tree a large Bash script creates, and this looks like it visualises it well.

This would have been really useful 6 months ago, when I was trying to figure out what on earth some Jetson tools actually did to build and flash an OS image.
by yarnover | 2025-08-14 22:10:57+00:00
I grew up in Connecticut in the US (east coast, southern New England, adjacent to New York State). I remember Brach's displays in grocery stores, usually placed on an end cap. When I moved to Portland, Oregon (west coast) in 2006, Fred Meyer still had the Brach's candy-by-weight display. It survived until 2010 or so. I miss it. You could buy a piece of candy off the display by placing a quarter in the slot of the tiny attached lockbox. It was perhaps the last vestige of the honor system.
by huitzitziltzin | 2025-08-14 22:10:59+00:00
The funniest thing about the reaction from all of his neighbors is that none of them are willing to do the one thing that really would annoy Zuckerberg and probably make him move: build multi story, multi tenant housing (i.e., small apartment buildings!) on plots he doesn’t already own.

Go to the city and ask for permission to replace two lots with five story apartment buildings with a view into his backyard. He’ll sue immediately and if he can’t stop it he’ll move.

No doubt it’s impossible to even get permission to do so (which is a separate problem!), but if those whiners really want revenge on the guy who they think “ruined their neighborhood” there’s one option they aren’t pursuing.