MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shahmir_ | 2025-08-02 00:35:05+00:00
Hi! I made Thumby AI. It lets you create YouTube thumbnails

- from a text prompt - by modifying existing images - you can face swap a face onto an image

I've been testing AI image generation for a few months now, and when I saw MrBeast launch and then un-launch his AI thumbnail maker, I decided to jump in and make it anyway.

Also, I "vibe-coded" it. I put that in quotes because I did a minor in CS in uni, and also had my brother (a CS grad) help me at times. But for the bulk of the code base, it was generated by AI (gemini 2.5).

The hardest part was not that, though. It was getting good, consistent results - without having each image generation take multiple minutes. That abstraction layer is what I'm most proud of and what I think sets it apart from most AI thumbnail generators (although there's some good competition for sure).

I'm analyzing each prompt and input image with gpt 4o, and then choosing based on the prompt and input selections what model to use. Then based on that, can choose to 4o enhance the prompt and then send it to one of - gpt image-1 - ideogram v3 / v2 - imagen 4 - flux kontext (trained)

Sometimes, I have to send it through multiple models. For example, gpt image-1 already costs the most and takes the longest - and only supports 3 aspect ratios for output, none of which are 16:9. So I have to run those images a second time through ideogram v3's reframe model to expand it.

The final images are also shown to 4o once to ensure they're not NSFW or obviously broken in some way, before showing to the user.

With all that, limitations:

- face swapping is hard. I wanted to offer a simple, "add a selfie to get a thumbnail" process, which eliminates training a model on a bunch of faces (which, in my testing, was not any better anyways). So far, gpt image-1 + 4o to scan the both the base & target face and use that to enhance the prompt gets (very) good results, but takes up to a minute or more (and needs further processing) - text. Sometimes it's messed up, especially when using face swap. It's possible to avoid it by face swapping first and adding text second, or by modifying an image with broken text later on. I'm trying to add something for this in the generation pipeline but the time addition for each additional check is unfortunate - style analysis is best for copying art style, not structure. This is temporary, since I've got a pretty good idea for fixing that (feeding a channel's recent thumbnails into a vision model, outputting as json and then exploring a consistent thumbnail layout and appending that as instruction for the style copied image) - GIGO. a bad, nondescriptive prompt will give bad / random results.

Anyway, I'd love it if you guys could check it out and let me know what you think. It's my first time making anything and I'm sure I've made plenty of mistakes. I don't mind criticism <3

thumbyai.com

- Shahmir
by throw0101d | 2025-08-02 00:35:22+00:00
From a related article:

> BLS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.

> “The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger,” said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. “Fifty percent is just not enough.”

[…]

> “We are seeing these cuts to funding for government agencies affect their ability to collect and analyze economic data,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “And for all of the reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting, there is likely to be more volatility going forward.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...

From William Beach, the Trump-appointed predecessor to the just-fired chief (and Heritage Foundation fellow):

> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...

* https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m

Beach was on an April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":

> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
by k310 | 2025-08-02 00:35:27+00:00
Speaking as a coffee drinker, I saw Philz distribute through retail stores far away from SF, and expect enshittification (figuratively) in the future.

For other Tesora addicts, the house brand Italian roast at Safeway/Von's is very similar and a lot cheaper.

I can't imagine what changes are coming. Probably Son of Philz AItalian Roast.

It was fun and flavorful.
by reactordev | 2025-08-02 00:35:33+00:00
This, except when it comes time to actually brew, it goes to a 5.25” slot to heat up, then you can determine the best delivery mechanism for your build. Shot/Kup, drip, pour over, just don’t build a french press PC.

And have a reservoir large enough to replenish the closed loop circuit when you press the button.
by zem | 2025-08-02 00:36:38+00:00
there are at least two separate use cases I can think of;

1. there are certain dependencies that it was natural to access as global state - e.g. there is typically one stdout in a program and most code just prints to it 2. a class often hard codes constructors for its internal state, e.g. if you have a Graph class it would likely have associated Edge and Node classes that it calls internally to create new edges and nodes.

the big issue with both those is testing; if you want to mock the behaviour of the print statement, or you want a graph to hold nodes that track their own creation, or whatever, you have no way of overriding the internal constructors your class uses. hence dependency injection, the idea that e.g. a graph class would be defined with a node interface and you would pass it a concrete class when constructing it (some languages have type parameters for this, but even if they do you might not think to make something as simple as the node class used internally by the graph a type parameter, and more importantly you might want to set it at run time rather than compile time).

the issue was not that ruby didn't need dependency injection the concept, it's that it didn't need the sort of dependency injection frameworks that more rigid languages like java needed, you could use ruby's built in features to do the same thing.
by gnat | 2025-08-02 00:36:46+00:00
Thanks for that. https://archive.is/84YPk for folks without a Bloomberg subscription.

The jobs data comes from surveys of businesses and consumers. Fewer of each category are responding, continuing a long-term trend of declining response rates. Cuts affect their ability to collect data with about 15% of the sample "suspended" -- i.e. not done "to align survey workload with resource levels" in the words of the announcement linked from the Bloomberg article.

> "The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger," said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. "Fifty percent is just not enough."
by AngryData | 2025-08-02 00:37:21+00:00
I don't really find anything in those sources convincing. One is a researcher for an anti-knife crime advocacy group that makes vague statements about how it will reduce injuries, but don't specify how much, and says their research still needs to be validated before publishing. And the other stuff is just statistics of how many people get stabbed with kitchen knifes with the assumption that if everyone had blunt knives instead that either less people would be stabbed or their stab wounds would not be so serious, which is the point I find suspect to start with.

Yes if you wear enough cloth it can block blunt stabs okay, but I very much doubt peoples regular clothes are going to do anything except drag some dirty cloth into the wound unless they walk around with thick work bibs on all the time or 3-4 layers of denim. And even that is still very limited protection to someone actively trying to stab through it. A screwdriver is even more blunt than these blunted knives and it would have no problem going through any clothes except maybe a reenactors linen gambeson.
by susiecambria | 2025-08-02 00:38:03+00:00
I've not studied this, but my guess is that the liberal arts education as the foundation is necessary to allow young people a chance to figure out who they are. I certainly found this to be true for me and would guess for my closest college friends.

If a young person is exceptional, do we force them into a liberal arts box? Surely there is value in literature and history. But this one young woman had found her passion. I have to believe that is she found out about something else, she would take that on.
by spauldo | 2025-08-02 00:38:13+00:00
I suspect the similarity is just a coincidence.

There was a lot of social pressure in the past for permanent marriages. That doesn't mean they were happy marriages. With the social changes in the west in the 1960s, divorce became more socially acceptable. Legal changes meant women had the ability to join the workforce and support themselves. People in unhappy marriages had options to seek happiness elsewhere. Those options didn't exist before.

For job retention, the problem is that changing jobs is often the only way to advance. I lost my best worker because the suits wouldn't give him a raise. He now makes more than I do at a different company. He liked his job with us, but he tripled his pay by leaving. My coworkers all tell the same story. I'm one of the lucky ones that managed to move up in the company, and that's only because I had the boss over a barrel.
by fragmede | 2025-08-02 00:38:13+00:00
> If you were an engineer would you want to be assigned this project?

If you're high flying, trying to be the next Urs or Jeff Dean or Ian Goodfellow, you wouldn't, but I'm sure there's are many thousands of people who are able to do the job that would just love to work for Google and collect a paycheck on a $150k/yr job and do that for the rest of their lives.
by bsoles | 2025-08-02 00:38:23+00:00
But I have also seen people trying to use deep networks to identify rotating machinery faults, like bearings, from raw accelerometer data collected a high frequencies like 40 kHz. Whereas the spectrum of the data from running FFT on the signal contains fault information much more obviously and clearly.

Throwing a deep network on a problem without some physical insight into the problem has also its disadvantages it seems.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-02 00:39:12+00:00
Simple: you don't get promoted for maintaining legacy stuff. You do get promoted for providing something new that people adopt.

As such, developing a new API gets more brownie points than rebuilding a service that does a better job of providing an existing API.

To be more charitable, having learned lessons from an existing API, a new one might incorporate those lessons learned and be able to do a better job serving various needs. At some point, it stops making sense to support older versions of an API as multiple versions with multiple sets of documentation can be really confusing.

I'm personally cynical enough to believe more in the less charitable version, but it's not impossible.
by tptacek | 2025-08-02 00:39:27+00:00
No, I don't think New Mexico PBS is lying. I think it's much more likely that we don't understand the stat we're arguing about. Uh, I'm just going to come out and say it: even in 1995, at the height of linear television, 80+% of the NM market was not watching PBS. Sorry, this doesn't pencil out.
by heavyset_go | 2025-08-02 00:39:56+00:00
I spent over a week in an area that went without electricity and most utilities after a widespread disaster. By virtue of living through one previously, I had a generator hooked up to the gas line, so I still had power during and after this disaster.

Internet access was down, cable was down, cell service wasn't there or was overloaded 2G that was useless, but I had did have OTA DTV. The local PBS partner station covered pertinent information about what was going on, recovery efforts, when/where to get fuel and other assistance, what kind of disaster relief to expect and when, etc.
by twothreeone | 2025-08-02 00:41:16+00:00
> many subs deployed at all times

Yeah I guess the point being that by playing those (previously "unknown") deployments as an open hand now you demonstrate strength. My understanding is that there are always a number of mid/long range defensive deployments in the Mediterranean as part of NATO contracts with Spain/Portugal (through AEGIS ballistic air defense systems on destroyers), but no (sea-based) long-range nuclear deployments. So explicitly deploying attack capabilities into a "suitable region" does represent an escalation. Though I'd say it's still pretty much on the (rather) low end of the spectrum of escalatory responses.
by mmasu | 2025-08-02 00:41:43+00:00
we tried to build something similar lately for outbound calls (for simple reminders to partners) and faced massive issues using gpt-4o-realtime-audio. Noise detection, turn detection, random telephony issues (we were using Twilio too), prompt not holding together, and more.

We dropped the project because it would have resulted in a terrible experience for the person on the other side of the phone. Building these things is non trivial.

The plan would have been to A/B test and see what the response would have been (watching NPS and business metrics uplift). Human handoff was always the plan in case things got too tricky for the LLM to handle.

I see some hostility here towards this project and while I share many concerns, it is very naive to think that these services won’t be massively leveraged going forward. An AI agent can handle things as well as humans (not in our case but there are good services out there, i.e. Parloa) and the key elements are the same as all the other agentic based workflows:

- narrow use cases

- human in the loop ready to pick up/steer/correct

we will see a lot more of this and as LLM capabilities improve, it will only get better - it is inevitable at this point and might (_might_) result in a better experience for customers in some cases.

Nevertheless I also see the possibility that we will go full circle and we will always reach for a human, maybe showing up in person in a physical office to make sure cases or requests are handled well… or not :-)
by travisgriggs | 2025-08-02 00:41:48+00:00
> is progressing slowly but steadily

This is one of the things that has made me like Elixir so much. Every time I update my Android or Apple apps with a few months in between, I have to figure out what things they've thrown in the language now.

The Elixir community seems to be less in search of "what's the hot programmer item that we have to have this week" and instead be more at peace with it's simple approach to computing, and just work off of that.

Slow and Steady is nice these days; better than Hot and Volatile.
by phonon | 2025-08-02 00:42:46+00:00
"Today, a federal court found that the federal government’s ongoing immigration raids in Southern California and its denial of access to counsel for arrested immigrants likely violated the Constitution, and issued two temporary restraining orders (TRO) prohibiting the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from continuing its unlawful actions in Los Angeles and surrounding counties.

The first TRO bars immigration agents from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from relying on four factors – alone or in combination – including apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in a particular location like a bus stop, car wash, or agricultural site; or the work the person does. The second TRO orders DHS to provide access to counsel on weekdays, weekends, and holidays for people who are detained in B-18, the federal building in downtown Los Angeles."[0]

"A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s administration from revoking deportation protections for tens of thousands of immigrants from Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua.

A searing 37-page ruling argued that a decision by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to cancel those temporary humanitarian protections appeared partially rooted in “racial and discriminatory animus.”

“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” stated the ruling from District Judge Trina Thompson, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden."[1]

[0]https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/court-prohibits-...

[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
by chriscbr | 2025-08-02 00:44:28+00:00
On my current team we run a centralized task scheduler used by other products in our company that manages on the order of around ~30M schedules. To that end, it's a home-grown distributed system that's built on top of Postgres and Cassandra with a whole control plane and data plane. It's been pretty fun to work on.

There are two main differences between our system and the one in the post:

- In our scheduler, the actual cron (aka recurrence rule) is stored along with the task information. That is, you specify a period (like "every 5 minutes" or "every second Tuesday at 2am") and the task will run according that schedule. We try to support most of the RRule specification. [1] If you want a task to just run one time in the future, you can totally do that too, but that's not our most common use case internally.

- Our scheduler doesn't perform a wide variety of tasks. To maximize flexibility and system throughput, it does just one thing: when a schedule is "due", it puts a message onto a queue. (Internally we have two queueing systems it interops with -- an older one built on top of Redis, and a newer one built on PG + S3). Other team consume from those queues and do real work (sending emails, generating reports, etc). The queueing systems offer a number of delivery options (delayed messages, TTLs, retries, dead-letter queues) so the scheduling system doesn't have to handle it.

Ironically, because supporting a high throughput of scheduled jobs has been our biggest priority, visibility into individual task executions is a bit limited in our system today. For example, our API doesn't expose data about when a schedule last ran, but it's something on our longer term roadmap.

[1] https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-8-5-3-recurrence-...
by deathanatos | 2025-08-02 00:44:50+00:00
Which, unless I'm missing something, undercuts the entire article? The private key, in the generated keypair, is the thing that you can then never commit to your VCS.

When you "register" the public key with whatever the relying party is, you're also likely going to bind it to some form of identity, so you can't leak this private key to others, either. (And I'm curious, of course, how the relying party comes to trust the public key. That call would seem to require its own form of auth, though we can punt that same as it would be punted for an API key you might download.)
by eugenekay | 2025-08-02 00:45:56+00:00
Location: Northeastern United States

Remote: Maybe

Relocate: Yes!

Technology is constantly evolving. Most recently familiar with the PowerShell/C#.NET ecosystem, but not exactly looking to reprise that experience. Worked primarily with Interpreted languages ranging from Perl, PHP since version 3.1, Brainfuck, Python, Ruby, Lua, various flavors of Shell, and many more. Not scared of Compiled Languages or Assembly.

Email: Eugene@Kashpureff.org

Employment History: Upon Request. Most recently at Microsoft - departed for Family Reasons.

I am seeking a Position which is Technically Interesting. I would like to be part of a Team working towards a common goal that improves Society, rather than a collection of Individuals connected only by their Salaries at a megacorporation. I am not searching for any specific Job Title - you may be looking for a Software Engineer, Business Analyst, Technical Manager, Security Researcher, Systems Architect, or maybe just a part-time Consultant. In my career since 1995 I have chased bizarre memory-alignment performance regressions in C code for a Physics library, built distributed database replication systems with leader-election consensus, chased timing issues within Multiplayer game protocols, implemented Financial audit controls to identify untrustworthy employee behaviour, built Monitoring & Active DevOps response systems for “Five-ish Nines” Uptimes of customer Environments, designed and installed redundant Low-Voltage and High-Voltage Electrical systems on Ships (DP2 standards) and in Data Centers, performed physical security penetration testing for Restricted Sites, and participated in a takeover of the Global Domain Name System’s root servers.

If you have any Questions, please send me an Email!
by thomastjeffery | 2025-08-02 00:46:16+00:00
Whoever is first to mass-produce a cheap rubber-dome split columnar keyboard is going to sell a lot of keyboards, and kick the ergo keyboard revolution into high gear. Just imagine selling 90% of a $349 keyboard.io Model 100 for $20, and it only cost you $3 to make. Throw it on the shelves and watch it sell itself. It's a novelty. It's an accessibility tool. It's the first step into a new hobby. You wouldn't even need to advertise; people would buy it just because it's interesting.

I finally made it into a Micro Center yesterday. There isn't one anywhere near my home state, so I jumped at the opportunity. What did I buy? Two ortholinear keyboards. There is a huge market for these things, and even the geekiest big-box store in the nation only bothers to sell 2. Why? Because nobody wants to spend more than $30 on something they haven't ever tried.
by zahlman | 2025-08-02 00:46:21+00:00
On a closer read, TFA shows strong evidence of being AI-generated, at least in parts. Overall it's just super padded and not especially insightful, and it has this quirky writing style that seems... rather familiar. But I especially want to complain about:

> Okay, maybe you want to delay creating the object until it’s actually needed — lazy initialization. Still no need for Singleton patterns.

> Use a simple function with a closure and an internal variable to store the instance:

The given example does not actually defer instantiation, which would be clear to anyone who actually tried testing the code before publishing it (for example, by providing a definition for the class being instantiated and `print`ing a message from its `__init__`) or just understands Python well enough.

But also, using closures in this way actually is an attempt to implement the pattern. It just doesn't work very well, since... well, it trivially allows client code to end up with multiple separate instances. In fact, it actually expects you to create distinct ordinary instances in order to call the "setter" (instead of supplying new "construction" arguments).

So actually it's effectively useless, and will just complicate the client code for no reason.