MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d4mr | 2025-04-24 20:28:14+00:00
I just finished rearchitecting a core service at work to use NATS for distributed state. Really unsure about the viability of NATS as an open source product if Synadia stops contributing. It's making me reconsider our architecture change, maybe we should stick with a more stable (albeit less aligned) alternative.

summarising some context for folks;

From Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter:

> As should be clear, the NATS.io project has failed to thrive as a CNCF project, with essentially all growth of the project to date arising from Synadia’s efforts and at Synadia’s expense. It is for this reason that Synadia requests to end its relationship with the Foundation and receive full control of the nats.io domain name and Github repository within two weeks.

From Synadia's exit proposal:

> We propose that NATS.io exit from the CNCF Foundation effective immediately... Upon leaving CNCF, Synadia will adopt the Business Source License (BSL) for the NATS.io server... specific use cases (such as offering NATS as a managed service or integrating it into specific commercial offerings) will require a commercial license.

From CNCF's response:

> Let's be clear: this is not a typical license change or fork. It's an attempt to "take back" a mature, community-driven open source project and convert it into a proprietary product—after years of growth and collaboration under open governance and CNCF's stewardship.

Primary sources:

- Synadia's Cease and Demand Letter: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...

- Synadia's Exit Proposal: https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/documents/nats/...

- CNCF's Response: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/04/24/protecting-nats-and-the-...
by rezonant | 2025-04-24 20:28:14+00:00
Since the title has changed since you wrote this, it may be prudent to include the title at question in the future for clarity.

The original title was:

> Google blocked Motorola use of Perplexity AI, witness says

The new title is:

> Google contract prevented Motorola from setting Perplexity as default assistant

The new title definitely addresses this issue, but since you're at the top of the comments, you're likely to get a lot of people responding with disagreement and/or downvoting.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-04-24 20:28:24+00:00
The part that's really weird is that on modern CPUs predicted branches are free iff they're sufficiently rare (<1 out of 8 instructions or so). but if you have too many, you will be bottlenecked on the branch since you aren't allowed to speculate past a 2nd (3rd on zen5 without hyperthreading?) branch.
by CalChris | 2025-04-24 20:28:45+00:00
So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a public good and what we’ve seen is a result of Facebook’s perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the perverse incentives? That’s kind of difficult when Citizens United represents regulatory capture by corporations.
by ksec | 2025-04-24 20:29:14+00:00
It wasn't a mess so to speak. It was simply not competitive, price, policy or any other resources.

But it is great at least some MSM are finally brining some history lessons back. Steve really wanted the whole NeXT or even Mac to be Fully Manufactured in the US and Full Automated as in Dark Factory. He was again way ahead of his time.

Manufacturing requires Supply Chain expertise. And they are company's closely guarded secret they dont let outsider knows. Unless the US hire a few true professional as advisors they are not going to get anywhere or get anything done.
by lauriewired | 2025-04-24 20:29:21+00:00
The three “flaws” that this post lists are exactly what the industry has been moving away from for the last decade.

Arm’s SVE, and RISC-V’s vector extension are all vector-length-agnostic. RISC-V’s implementation is particularly nice, you only have to compile for one code path (unlike avx with the need for fat-binary else/if trees).
by crazygringo | 2025-04-24 20:29:25+00:00
Oh, I see. I mean yeah, I totally missed that too.

I mean, when we see something we recognize at a glance, we don't usually double-check if it's exactly correct, because we assume the speaker isn't trying to trick us.

I make typos in ChatGPT prompts all the time, and I'm consistently impressed because it answers what I actually meant to ask. So to me, this feels like a feature not a bug.

I followed up with:

> So the first five words are, "a man and his cousin" -- not his son. Does that change the riddle?

And got back:

> Great observation — yes, that wording does make the riddle more subtle.

Let’s break it down:

• “A man and his cousin are in a car crash.”

• “The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the emergency room.”

• At the OR, the surgeon says: “I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.”

So if the cousin is the one taken to the OR, and the surgeon says he’s my son, then the cousin is the surgeon’s son.

Seems fine to me?
by bearjaws | 2025-04-24 20:30:12+00:00
Google / Alphabet will be a strong contender going forward in generative AI. Vertex AI is a pretty decent platform, but Gemini 2.5 pro and Gemini Flash are excellent.

I've been leveraging 2.0 Flash for processing help desk type tickets with long comment chains and its speed / performance is excellent. The only thing I find strange is multi-turn prompts tend to fall apart.
by simonw | 2025-04-24 20:30:33+00:00
It may lose against other models on prompt-to-image, but I'd be very excited to see another model that's as good at this one as image+prompt-to-image. Editing photos with ChatGPT over the past few weeks has been SO much fun.

Here's my dog in a pelican costume: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lneuquczzs2...
by hammock | 2025-04-24 20:30:34+00:00
>I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening

What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-04-24 20:30:53+00:00
There's multiple reasons why what you said is just wrong.

First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.

Second, most academic scientists do not do anything relevant to Musk's companies. Do you expect a chemist to pivot to self-driving cars? Or a pure mathematician to whatever X.ai is doing?

The only thing this will lead to is a destruction of American capacity to carry out independent scientific research.
by 01100011 | 2025-04-24 20:31:08+00:00
Fundamental problem with moderation sites like reddit and HN: discussion is controlled by those with the time to moderate. These are also the least likely people you want controlling the discussion.

If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...

Twitter is, in a way, like that. I can follow, say, John Carmack, and get things he says or has reposted and ignore content from people I don't care about. I think that's why I still find myself there. It's a high signal-to-noise site where I can still participate(and actually have discussions with high achievers and ignore basement dwellers. Vs say reddit where I'm constantly dragged down into debates with the basement dwellers).
by onli | 2025-04-24 20:32:28+00:00
I'm using void. https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/26415 gives an insight, though it doesn't explain the whole problem, if I remember correctly what maintainers wrote elsewhere.

> ROCm is a train wreck to compile from source but can be done with sufficient bloodymindedness.

Yeah, I did that myself. Not impossible, just a bit annoying and time consuming. The issue I ran into then was exactly picking the gpu model (incredible that this is even necessary) and not having the gfx1032 available, see https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/26415#iss... for what I was following back then. I tried to edit the configuration for the gfx1032 anyway, but it did not succeed.

Side note: Already having to know which card corresponds to which code is annoying, and completely unnecessary. They could also just map the consumer facing name. But that would be too easy I assume.
by dzaima | 2025-04-24 20:32:38+00:00
Intel still shares ports between vector and scalar on P-cores; a scalar multiply in the loop will definitely fight with a vector port, and the bits of pointer bumps and branch and whatnot can fill up the 1 or 2 scalar-only ports. And maybe there are some minor power savings from wasting resources on the scalar overhead. Still, clang does unroll way too much.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-24 20:32:57+00:00
When I started programming in the early 80s, it was on an in-house manufacturing system, so I got to know many of the managers and line workers.

* Many mid-level managers were heavy drug users, doing cocaine.

* High level managers had no clue their direct reports were addicts

* I would say about 25 to 40% of the line workers were very drunk after lunch.

* Numbers at Month/Quarter end was everything, not quality. That means as Fiscal End approached and numbers were bad, some managers would "cheat".

* This cheating would alienate our customers.

By the end of the 80s, the company was in bad shape, going chapter 11 in the early 90s.

That was my experience in a rather large company. And from talking with friends at other manufacturing companies, things were pretty much the same there too.

Now here is hardly no manufacturing taking place in my area.

I cannot speak to how things are in sat China, but I kind of doubt it is even close to what I describe above.
by bluGill | 2025-04-24 20:33:35+00:00
Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get.

I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.
by hylaride | 2025-04-24 20:33:47+00:00
iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).

The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.

I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.
by jandrese | 2025-04-24 20:34:11+00:00
It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers could optimize their systems to have total control over the narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the time and resources to act on it.

He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to go nuts.
by jjcm | 2025-04-24 20:34:22+00:00
Recraft also has an svg model: https://replicate.com/recraft-ai/recraft-v3-svg

One note with these is most of the production ones are actually diffusion models that get ran through an image->svg model after. The issue with this is that the layers aren't set up semantically like you'd expect if you were crafting these by hand, or if you were directly generating svgs. The results work, but they aren't perfect.
by hintymad | 2025-04-24 20:34:46+00:00
> When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t look back at my life and wish I had worked harder.

An inconvenient truth is that not everyone can find a meaningful career in their own eyes. Case in point, to me tech industry is such a wonderful industry. We are paid exceptionally well. We get to be creative every day. We largely control our own output. We blend product design with engineering design and implementation. We get to geek out on college maths and statistics. We build things that get used by many people, if not millions of them. The list can go on and on. Yet, I'm sure everyone on HN knows at least a group of tech people who are miserable doing their jobs.
by ummonk | 2025-04-24 20:37:00+00:00
It’s clearly not the same font (you can see visible differences between the letters), and therefore not pirated. The appearance of a typeface can’t be copyrighted in the US - only the digital instructions used to render them (e.g. if someone visually inspects a font and clones it that is perfectly alright, as long as they don’t directly copy from and adapt the underlying font file).
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-24 20:37:28+00:00
One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused.

In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end.

During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned.

Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech".

And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself.

Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them.

[0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules.

[1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow.

See also https://xkcd.com/898/

[2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-24 20:37:41+00:00
> pops and everyone can go back to thinking carefully using their brain

I am sorry I have to burst your bubble, but that is not going to happen, ever.

This is the new normal now. We have to accept that reality and adjust accordingly. Maybe with new hiring filters or similar. Hopefully these filters won't be just a LLM hallucinating random things, but realistically speaking... Yeah, it's gonna be that, isn't it?
by krisoft | 2025-04-24 20:38:20+00:00
Oh, i absolutely get you! Was not intending to pen-shame you in any way. Just used it to illustrate that the postal process worked (eventually, and with a lot of inconvenience) even though you were not best prepared for it.

But i have been exactly where you are. We were having a book club and trying to vote on the next book to read, and turns out none of us out of twenty literature loving people had a single pen on us. So yeah, that is for sure the current reality.

> usually I just end up drawing a cat on the signature line.

Thats awesome! Do the they accept it usually?
by jchw | 2025-04-24 20:38:21+00:00
The way I read it, the article identifies two problems: the first being the lack of a strong manufacturing culture, and I think that was an issue that the U.S. had been developing by the 80s for sure. The other problem is simply that neither the Macintosh nor the NeXT machines really had the volume needed to make it make sense. Who knows; had they managed higher volumes, maybe the landscape of manufacturing would look different today... Maybe not.

I mean, look. I think we all get it, to some degree. Everything from the land to the labor to the materials is pricier in the U.S., for reasons. It will also continue to get pricier in China. We also know that people don't want to do menial factory work for minimum wage, and that automation isn't quite solving that problem as quickly as everyone hoped. So even if we wanted to bootstrap everything in the U.S., from raw materials to advanced electronics, it's all going to cost more and we're not going to have the labor necessary to do it at the scales needed.

I think we should absolutely work on this problem, but it's a tough one, and it seems like it only gets harder over time.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-24 20:39:04+00:00
In this modern era we heave under the weight of decades of exponential growth. In some cases it’s actually “only” compound growth - but the result has been the same (and very ironic): ossification through stratification.

There are behemoths living among us. There will soon be social media accounts with enough sway to manufacture truth.

What needs to be learned is society is like a national park. Left to its own devices it will end up trashed - people leave garbage, move in and use it for whatever they like. So, we fund a service that keeps parks maintained. We understand the benefits of the National Park Service because they are visible and we are visual creatures. But for some reason we have a more laissez-faire attitude to unchecked accumulation and its downstream effects.

It’s risky for power to be so concentrated. We’re forced to hope for benevolence and there’s no backup plan.

What more can be done to show the orders of magnitude of difference between the most and least powerful?
by dawser | 2025-04-24 20:39:20+00:00
I have released scroll, a new Wayland compositor. It is a fork of sway with a layout similar to PaperWM or niri. It is based on my plugin for Hyprland, hyprscroller.

Aside from the usual scrolling workflow, it remains very compatible with sway's configuration, and adds new features like:

- Workspace Scaling: you can work at any scale. This also supports overview and quick jump modes (like easymotion).

- Content Scaling: you can also scale the content of individual windows. You can zoom in and out, and the content will be scaled.

- Trackpad and Mouse scrolling gestures: scroll the windows of your workspace using the trackpad or dragging with the mouse.

- Portrait and Landscape monitor support: the scrolling layout adapts to your monitor transparently.

The workflow is very similar to hyprscroller on which I based it.

Note that the only layout supported is the scrolling layout. The original sway/i3 layouts have been removed to simplify things.

There is an AUR package if you want to try it out.
by motoxpro | 2025-04-24 20:39:44+00:00
It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop?

Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.
by armedin | 2025-04-24 20:39:44+00:00
Yep, totally fair point and I get the skepticism. Just to be clear, some components are inspired, and some are also patterns and ideas I created myself along the way. There's a lot of work behind the scenes: recreating animations, building variants, styling, packaging for NPM etc. (the code is written using MUI, so it's all original). I'm trying to bring that level of polish to a wider set of devs who may not have the time to build it all from scratch, and I'm giving credits to the original inspirations where due.

Appreciate the feedback though; it's a valid concern.
by thot_experiment | 2025-04-24 20:39:54+00:00
Reflux is fantastic for the basic reference image based editing most people are using this for, but 4o is far more powerful than any existing models because of it's large scale and cross-modal understanding, there are things possible with 4o that are just 100% impossible with diffusion models. (full glass of wine, horse riding an astronaut, room without pink elephants, etc)
by conductr | 2025-04-24 20:39:59+00:00
Reverse also true, many of the big businesses have hundreds of legal entities but only are counted as a single big business

I once worked for a F100 sized healthcare firm that had a separate LLC for each physician it 'employed'. Quotes because the LLC invoiced the parent and then paid the physician, so they were technically an employee of the LLC, but it shielded the company from certain risks and had some tax reasoning and various other mumbo-jumbos
by hermitdev | 2025-04-24 20:40:44+00:00
> I realize this all probably sounds very silly to someone born before 1980

I was born after 1980 and I think you're beating a dead horse, here. You're conflating accessibility with convenience. Not just with this comment, but others you've made in this thread.

> those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.

Grab the pen by the end opposite the nib, give it a good shake for a few seconds, lick the nib, scribble on a scrap piece of paper until it starts writing again. Problem solved. You can't resurrect a dead laptop or computer by licking and shaking it (at least I've never succeeded in doing so).
by epistasis | 2025-04-24 20:42:54+00:00
I know many IP-heavy and health-centric companies are blocking AI use severely. For example, pharma depends on huge amounts of secrecy and does not want any data leaked to OpenAI, and often has barely-competent IT and security staff that don't know what "threat model" means. Those who deal with controlled health data also block with a heavy hand.