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A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

https://github.com/tldev/posturr
200•dnw•2h ago•81 comments

Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems

https://www.diljitpr.net/blog-post-postgresql-dlq
48•tanelpoder•2h ago•12 comments

A flawed paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/22/aking/
475•timr•9h ago•249 comments

Doom has been ported to an earbud

https://doombuds.com
167•arin-s•5h ago•46 comments

ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds on Medicaid Data

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palantir-tool-feeds-medicaid-data
58•JKCalhoun•29m ago•5 comments

Web-based image editor modeled after Deluxe Paint

https://github.com/steffest/DPaint-js
73•bananaboy•5h ago•6 comments

Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-sideloading-android-high-friction-process-3633468/
457•_____k•5d ago•450 comments

Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes

https://dlt.github.io/blog/posts/introduction-to-postgresql-indexes/
198•dlt•9h ago•11 comments

Show HN: Bonsplit – Tabs and splits for native macOS apps

https://bonsplit.alasdairmonk.com
125•sgottit•6h ago•17 comments

World’s most powerful literary critic is on TikTok

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2026/01/the-worlds-most-powerful-literary-critic-is-on...
4•insistey•11h ago•1 comments

ANN v3: 200ms p99 query latency over 100B vectors

https://turbopuffer.com/blog/ann-v3
71•_peregrine_•3d ago•20 comments

Show HN: Netfence – Like Envoy for eBPF Filters

https://github.com/danthegoodman1/netfence
20•dangoodmanUT•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: TUI for managing XDG default applications

https://github.com/mitjafelicijan/xdgctl
67•mitjafelicijan•6h ago•21 comments

Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)

https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/jurassic-park-tablet-device-on-nedrys-desk.169883/
109•exvi•8h ago•39 comments

Nango (YC W23, Dev Infrastructure) Is Hiring Remotely

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Nango
1•bastienbeurier•6h ago

Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches for Enabling Recent Photoshop Versions on Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Staging-11.1
68•LorenDB•3h ago•4 comments

Social Dynamics at Arm's Length

https://www.jenn.site/social-truths-at-arms-length/
6•surprisetalk•4d ago•0 comments

I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck

https://modulovalue.com/blog/syscall-overhead-tar-gz-io-performance/
115•modulovalue•5d ago•53 comments

The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/centralia-pennsylvania-rebirth
44•pbshgthm•5d ago•19 comments

FAA institutes nationwide drone no-fly zones around ICE operations

https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/faa-drone-no-fly-zone-ice-dhs
89•dayofthedaleks•40m ago•54 comments

Bridging the Gap Between PLECS and SPICE

https://erickschulz.dev/posts/plecs-spice/
20•eschu•7h ago•6 comments

A Lament for Aperture

https://ikennd.ac/blog/2026/01/old-man-yells-at-modern-software-design/
186•firloop•4d ago•48 comments

BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries (2023)

https://www.batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries/
53•eswat•2d ago•25 comments

Sony Data Discman

https://huguesjohnson.com/random/sony-ebook/
64•naves•9h ago•9 comments

Back to Bellevue

https://theamericanscholar.org/back-to-bellevue/
9•prismatic•2d ago•0 comments

Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts

https://www.lr.org/en/knowledge/press-room/press-listing/press-release/2026/alarm-overload-is-und...
88•geox•5h ago•55 comments

150k lines of vibe coded Elixir: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

https://getboothiq.com/blog/150k-lines-vibe-coded-elixir-good-bad-ugly
27•InternetGiant•7h ago•13 comments

Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

https://keck.usc.edu/news/adoption-of-electric-vehicles-tied-to-real-world-reductions-in-air-poll...
520•hhs•17h ago•502 comments

Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet

https://netzbremse.de/en/
470•tietjens•9h ago•231 comments

Hands-On with Two Apple Network Server Prototype ROMs

http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2026/01/hands-on-with-two-apple-network-server.html
42•todsacerdoti•9h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Building an agentic image generator that improves itself

https://simulate.trybezel.com/research/image_agent
67•palashshah•8mo 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•8mo ago
Quite interesting, do you have some documentation of your platform and capabilities? Your landing page is quite synthetic
palashshah•8mo ago
hey! we're working with an initial set of customers, and plan to launch full capabilities soon. stay tuned :)
ramesh31•8mo 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•8mo ago
appreciate the compliment! yep, it's definitely necessary and is the bare minimum for building image generation systems in production.
shmoogy•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
dandelany•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Palash this is a great post, I learnt a lot as an image gen noob! Keep writing more :)
palashshah•8mo ago
this is incredible to hear! i plan to keep writing on a weekly basis, and will be posting them on twitter.
t_mann•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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?