frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Your ePub Is fine

https://andreklein.net/your-epub-is-fine-kobo-disagrees-blame-adobe/
393•sohkamyung•7h ago•156 comments

Even more batteries included with Emacs

https://karthinks.com/software/even-more-batteries-included-with-emacs/
88•signa11•3h ago•17 comments

Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing

https://github.com/tamnd/kage
486•tamnd•12h ago•101 comments

Bitsy

https://bitsy.org/
109•tosh•3d ago•3 comments

Prove you're human by winning a claw machine

https://feralui.vercel.app/#/captcha
38•speckx•2d ago•23 comments

21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/12/08/21-years-and-counting-of-eight-fallacies-of-distributed-computing/
54•teleforce•5h ago•9 comments

Firewood Splitting Simulator

https://screen.toys/firewood/
736•memalign•5d ago•228 comments

Why does paper fold so well?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct8k70
15•zeristor•1d ago•1 comments

Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing model

https://github.com/nex-agi/Nex-N2/issues/4
320•unrvl22•14h ago•176 comments

A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

https://www.markhorrell.com/blog/2012/a-short-history-of-cerro-torre/
24•joebig•4d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

https://traceapp.info
138•AG342•1d ago•53 comments

Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

195•david927•13h ago•711 comments

Formal methods and the future of programming

https://blog.janestreet.com/formal-methods-at-jane-street-index/?from_theconsensus=1
233•eatonphil•17h ago•82 comments

Chaosnet (1981)

https://tumbleweed.nu/r/lm-3/uv/amber.html
75•RGBCube•10h ago•8 comments

Write for One Person

https://wizardzines.com/comics/write-for-one-person/
174•evakhoury•2d ago•58 comments

TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder

https://github.com/meta-pytorch/torchcodec/releases/tag/v0.14.0
34•scott_s•4d ago•4 comments

Show HN: Discover Wikipedia articles popular on Hacker News

https://www.orangecrumbs.com/
85•octopus143•12h ago•24 comments

Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-users-are-tired-of-microsoft-accou...
189•josephcsible•8h ago•118 comments

Perlisisms (1982)

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
106•tosh•14h ago•52 comments

Segmented type appreciation corner (2018)

https://aresluna.org/segmented-type/
70•unexpectedVCR•3d ago•16 comments

The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE

https://planetscale.com/blog/the-only-scalable-delete
152•hollylawly•3d ago•54 comments

Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency

https://su3.io/posts/zeroserve-caddy-compat
169•losfair•16h ago•50 comments

I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models

330•iliashad•14h ago•80 comments

FarOutCompany

https://faroutcompany.com/
114•bookofjoe•15h ago•17 comments

USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits

https://www.aptiv.com/en/insights/article/usb-power-delivery-plugging-into-the-benefits
45•mooreds•3d ago•92 comments

The hallucinogenic mushroom that contains no known psychedelic

https://psychedelics.co.uk/news/a-mushroom-genus-that-gets-people-high-but-not-the
59•thunderbong•4h ago•32 comments

How to earn a billion dollars

https://paulgraham.com/earn.html
537•kingstoned•18h ago•1551 comments

The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
222•subset•17h ago•127 comments

Chopped, Stored, Secured – The Story of the Hash Function

https://0xkrt26.github.io/math_behind_security/2026/06/09/the-story-of-the-hash-function.html
34•denismenace•4d ago•7 comments

Lisp's Influence on Ruby

https://blog.tacoda.dev/lisps-influence-on-ruby-6a54f1a7740e
231•tacoda•3d ago•67 comments
Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•1y ago
Hey HN! We recently graduated from YC, and have been building customer personas for large e-commerce companies. We recently expanded into the image generation space, and have been working on research about how to automatically improve the quality of generated images.

Comments

average_r_user•1y ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•1y ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•1y ago
This is a wonderful writeup of building a simple agentic system in general. What OP describes is more or less the bare minimum you should be doing at this point to get good (consistent) results from an LLM; single-shot prompting is a thing of the past.
palashshah•1y ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•1y ago
I'm surprised you landed on using o3 as the judge - we found it way too expensive. I use llm as a judge for generating color variations of products, definitely hoping for some improvements - it can be brutal to get non hallucinated features along with proper final rendering.
omneity•1y ago
Have you tried open weights vision models such as Qwen VL, MiniCPM, PaliGemma...?

I'm also curious how usable are simpler vision models such as Florence in case you explored this direction.

palashshah•1y ago
we're currently in the process of doing this. i think something that could potentially work is to iterate upon the initial image composition / structure using cheaper models, and then upscale at the end. this way you're saving on that iteration cost, but eventually land on a higher-scale image.
shmoogy•1y ago
I actually haven't but nova from Amazon was surprisingly good at things like bounding boxes compared to some others You kind of have to test and measure so many different aspects to get the best at specific tasks Thanks for the idea
elif•1y ago
This is great and provides a good starting point for any similar efforts.

However I think the temptation to lean all tasks on AI is perhaps a little naive if not lazy.

For mask generation, there is really not much reason to use AI. In this example, simple stochastic blob detection, a trivial function you could get from openCV or ask a college sophomore to write would generate much better quality masks.

palashshah•1y ago
totally agreed here. i think my goal primarily with the mask generation was to test out how effective openai's capabilities were.

we're currently working on pipelines that limit the the involvement of AI to various tasks. for example, when generating an ad there's usually logo, some banner text, and background image.

we can use gpt-image-1 to generate the background image, another LLM to identify the coordinates of where we place the logo, and just add the logo onto the image. this is just one example!

jackphilson•1y ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•1y ago
"Simple stochastic blob detection" is an abstraction. You write (or import) a function where the the gnarly logic lives and call `detectBlobs()`. "Use an abstraction" doesn't mean you should use the same abstraction for every task, you should use the right tool for the job.
mentalgear•1y ago
Again another example of "the unreasonable effectiveness of LLMs in a loop". At with time, the tasks for loop become bigger and more complex, until we find ourselves "outlooped" at least job wise.
ramoz•1y ago
Nice retrospective but I guess this process is no longer needed as model's get better; esp as they start enabling features like consistent subjects. Seems like a lot of overhead to correct text for inspirational images, but I can imagine you need to always present some form of _quality_ to your clients.

Feel like control nets and some minimal photoshop work would've been better.

palashshah•1y ago
totally. it got to a point where most of the text generated in our images was incorrect, and so it wasn't a great look showing that to our clients.

we're actually working on some form of what you described where we take images generated from LLMs + add consistent logos discretely rather than generatively.

abshkbh•1y ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•1y ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•1y ago
I was kind of hoping this would be in the 'Dreambooth mold' of finetuning open weights models. I have used that with some success some ~2 years ago, does anyone know what improvements there have been in that direction since Dreambooth?
zahlman•1y ago
It's frankly amazing to me that "ask another LLM to evaluate the image" actually produces useful feedback that results in actual improvement from the first LLM.

But then, I guess it's not much different of an idea from the earlier use of GANs, or of telling LLMs to "stop hallucinating", etc.

palashshah•1y ago
totally. the way i think about it (purely based on intuition) is that asking an LLM to do understanding + image generation is too complex for it to be effective. if we separate out the tasks into discrete steps, the evaluation becomes better, and the generation simply becomes instruction following.
jacob019•1y ago
This is all edited with gpt-image-1? The revised images are amazing. Were example logos provided or is it just working off of it's knowledge of a well known brand?