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Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp844kjj37vo
49•onemoresoop•21m ago•7 comments

Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES

https://relaxing.run/blag/posts/top-gun-landing/
183•todsacerdoti•2h ago•70 comments

$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

https://planetscale.com/blog/50-dollar-planetscale-metal-is-ga-for-postgres
52•ksec•46m ago•18 comments

Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide

https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/12/thousands-of-us-farmers-have-parkinsons-they-blame-a-deadly-pe...
187•bikenaga•2h ago•127 comments

Avoid UUIDv4 Primary Keys

https://andyatkinson.com/avoid-uuid-version-4-primary-keys
195•pil0u•6h ago•204 comments

It seems that OpenAI is scraping [certificate transparency] logs

https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/Gxy2qrCkn1Y327Y6D3
74•pavel_lishin•3h ago•51 comments

P-computers can solve spin-glass problems faster than quantum systems

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022239/new-ucsb-research-shows-p-computers-can-solve-spin-glass-proble...
18•magoghm•1w ago•1 comments

Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft)

https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/
28•atomicnature•1w ago•5 comments

Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

https://thenewstack.io/adafruit-arduinos-rules-are-incompatible-with-open-source/
356•MilnerRoute•22h ago•194 comments

DNA Learning Center: Mechanism of Replication 3D Animation

https://dnalc.cshl.edu/resources/3d/04-mechanism-of-replication-advanced.html
58•timschmidt•1w ago•15 comments

Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/robot-vacuum-roomba-maker-files-for-bankruptcy-after...
477•nreece•16h ago•549 comments

MIT Missing Semester 2026

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/
61•vismit2000•4h ago•32 comments

Unscii

http://viznut.fi/unscii/
250•Levitating•13h ago•33 comments

If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-11-30/if-ai-replaces-workers-should-it-also-pay-taxes....
373•PaulHoule•16h ago•590 comments

Optery (YC W22) Hiring CISO, Release Manager, Tech Lead (Node), Full Stack Eng

https://www.optery.com/careers/
1•beyondd•4h ago

Invader: Where to Spot the 8-Bit Street Art in London

https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/invader-where-to-spot-the-8-bit-street-art-in-lo...
50•zeristor•1w ago•17 comments

Arborium: Tree-sitter code highlighting with Native and WASM targets

https://arborium.bearcove.eu/
178•zdw•13h ago•31 comments

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

347•david927•1d ago•1125 comments

Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?

16•hussein-khalil•1h ago•25 comments

Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

https://www.techradar.com/computing/storage-backup/looking-for-a-cheap-ssd-dont-wait-samsung-coul...
38•Krontab•2h ago•17 comments

SoundCloud has banned VPN access

https://old.reddit.com/r/SoundCloudMusic/comments/1pltd19/soundcloud_just_banned_vpn_access/
180•empressplay•14h ago•128 comments

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

https://martinalderson.com/posts/ai-agents-are-starting-to-eat-saas/
280•jnord•17h ago•280 comments

$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop

https://exclav.es/2025/08/03/dinacon-2025-passive-acoustic-listening/
77•gsf_emergency_6•4d ago•27 comments

We Put Flock Under Surveillance: Go Make Them Behave Differently [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W420BOqga_s
31•huvarda•2h ago•6 comments

John Varley has died

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
140•decimalenough•13h ago•54 comments

The Whole App is a Blob

https://drobinin.com/posts/the-whole-app-is-a-blob/
123•valzevul•12h ago•72 comments

The Java Ring: A Wearable Computer (1998)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/javaring-wearable-computer/
35•cromulent•5d ago•30 comments

Common Rust Lifetime Misconceptions

https://github.com/pretzelhammer/rust-blog/blob/master/posts/common-rust-lifetime-misconceptions.md
86•CafeRacer•11h ago•41 comments

Show HN: I wrote a book – Debugging TypeScript Applications (in beta)

https://pragprog.com/titles/aodjs/debugging-typescript-applications/
43•ozornin•1w ago•16 comments

The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America (1963)

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm
80•rramadass•20h ago•74 comments
Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•6mo 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•6mo ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•6mo ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•6mo 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•6mo ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•6mo ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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?