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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/
1597•happosai•12h ago•649 comments

CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun

https://fulghum.io/self-hosting
504•websku•11h ago•325 comments

JRR Tolkien reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)

https://www.openculture.com/2026/01/j-r-r-tolkien-reads-from-the-hobbit-for-30-minutes-1952.html
64•bookofjoe•4d ago•9 comments

Himalayas bare and rocky after reduced winter snowfall, scientists warn

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyndv7zd20o
100•koolhead17•6h ago•50 comments

39c3: In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be? [video]

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturing-from-scratch-how-hard-can-it-be
74•fried-gluttony•2d ago•18 comments

This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser

https://iczelia.net/posts/snake-polyglot/
180•snoofydude•10h ago•50 comments

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

https://antirez.com/news/158
953•todsacerdoti•22h ago•1127 comments

iCloud Photos Downloader

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader
422•reconnecting•13h ago•188 comments

I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il-TXbn5iMA
301•imagiro•3d ago•37 comments

Sampling at negative temperature

https://cavendishlabs.org/blog/negative-temperature/
159•ag8•13h ago•47 comments

The next two years of software engineering

https://addyosmani.com/blog/next-two-years/
124•napolux•11h ago•74 comments

Gadget Exposed a Spy Camera [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
43•rib3ye•8h ago•22 comments

Conbini Wars – map of Japanese convenience store ratios

https://conbini.kikkia.dev/
19•zdw•5d ago•2 comments

FUSE is All You Need – Giving agents access to anything via filesystems

https://jakobemmerling.de/posts/fuse-is-all-you-need/
124•jakobem•11h ago•49 comments

Uncrossy

https://uncrossy.com/
58•dgacmu•7h ago•19 comments

Xfce is great

https://rubenerd.com/xfce-is-great/
170•mikece•4h ago•116 comments

Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc
202•HansVanEijsden•3d ago•137 comments

Garbage collection is contrarian

https://trynova.dev/blog/garbage-collection-is-contrarian
41•aapoalas•2d ago•1 comments

Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6Lacc7wx4yYkBQ3r/insights-into-claude-opus-4-5-from-pokemon
70•surprisetalk•5d ago•14 comments

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

188•david927•16h ago•590 comments

Elo – A data expression language which compiles to JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL

https://elo-lang.org/
76•ravenical•4d ago•17 comments

Show HN: An LLM-optimized programming language

https://github.com/ImJasonH/ImJasonH/blob/main/articles/llm-programming-language.md
31•ImJasonH•5h ago•16 comments

Poison Fountain

https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
195•atomic128•15h ago•118 comments

A set of Idiomatic prod-grade katas for experienced devs transitioning to Go

https://github.com/MedUnes/go-kata
126•medunes•4d ago•20 comments

Erich von Däniken has died

https://daniken.com/en/startseite-english/
75•Kaibeezy•13h ago•119 comments

Moving Scratch generation to Python on browser

https://kushaldas.in/posts/introducing-ektupy.html
36•kushaldas•3d ago•10 comments

Show HN: Engineering Schizophrenia: Trusting yourself through Byzantine faults

72•rescrv•11h ago•10 comments

Which programming languages are most token-efficient?

https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages-are-most-token-efficient/
87•tehnub•7h ago•58 comments

Code and Let Live

https://fly.io/blog/code-and-let-live/
453•usrme•2d ago•172 comments

Quake 1 Single-Player Map Design Theories (2001)

https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive//teamshambler.planetquake.gamespy.com/theories1.html
61•Lammy•1d ago•11 comments
Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•7mo 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•7mo ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•7mo ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•7mo 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•7mo ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•7mo ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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?