MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a Nano Banana 2 (Gempix2) playground for 4K AI images
by bryandoai | 2025-11-18 07:39:21+00:00
I’ve been building a small playground on top of Nano Banana 2 / Gempix2 and would love feedback from HN.

Quick context: “Nano Banana 2” is the public name of a next‑gen image model; Gempix2 / GEMPIX2 is the internal codename on the Google side. I don’t run the model myself – the app sits on top of the fal-ai/gempix2 endpoint and tries to make the model actually usable for day‑to‑day work.

What it is

- A web UI and workflow layer for Nano Banana 2 / Gempix2: https://www.gempix2.site

- Focused on 4K images, 10‑image fusion, and non‑English (especially CJK)text inside the image

- Comes with a small prompt library (400+ prompts) for portraits, product shots, infographics and CJK use‑cases: https://www.gempix2.site/prompts

Why it might be interesting

From my tests and research, this model family is good at:

- Native 2K generation with true 4K export (useful for covers, posters,large screens)

- Up to 10‑image fusion for collages, product walls, comparison shots, or simple storyboards

- Much better text rendering for Chinese / Japanese / Korean, plus mixed‑language prompts

- Strong prompt following for practical stuff like “blog cover”, “ecommerce grid”, “simple infographic”

One early case: a 3‑person ecommerce team went from ~8 hours per product (shoot + retouch + layout) to about 45 minutes by moving most of their visuals into Nano Banana 2 workflows: 10‑image fusion for multi‑angle product walls, direct “text‑on” promo posters in Chinese, and simple data infographics.

How it’s built

- Frontend: Next.js + React + TypeScript + Tailwind

- Backend: Next.js API routes, Postgres + Drizzle ORM for tasks and credit accounting

- Image generation: @fal-ai/client talking to fal-ai/gempix2 (queue API, webhooks, status endpoints)

- Extras: Stripe for payments, some basic credit/refund logic around long‑running jobs

What I’m unsure about

- Are the workflows (covers, infographics, product images) actually useful to people who ship things, or am I over‑fitting to my own use cases?

- For those who work with Midjourney / DALL·E 3 daily: what controls do you miss here (seed control, finer composition tools, etc.)?

- If you regularly need CJK text in images, what would a “dream” Nano Banana 2 / Gempix2 UI look like for you?

Links again:

- App: https://www.gempix2.site

- Prompt library: https://www.gempix2.site/prompts

Happy to answer technical / product questions here, and I’d really appreciate blunt feedback on what feels useful vs. unnecessary.
by safety1st | 2025-11-18 07:40:08+00:00
Gemini is a reaction to all the negative changes that happened to the web. Their premise is that the design of the web was fundamentally flawed because it was extensible. You see this in both the protocol and the community where the dominant idea is basically, make it super hard to ever extend or change Gemini. HTML is clearly a failure from this perspective, because HTML changed.

Personally I don't have much use for this attitude, the main problem I have with the web is when faced with the choice of empowering the publisher vs empowering the user, we kept on choosing to empower the publisher. The standards and browsers were owned by the web publishers, no one represented the user, and now instead of having a "user agent" installed on your machine to browse the web, you have a piece of spyware, better referred to as "Google's agent."

I don't really need to trade Google's Agent for Drew DeVault's Agent, give me software that does whatever I want it to do, fuck the publishers. But what do I matter, I'm not building any of this stuff.
by nathanscully | 2025-11-18 07:40:46+00:00
I found a similar tool called nail-parquet[1] which has some nice query functions. I packaged[2] it up for nixpkgs but it’s stuck in merge limbo…

[1] https://github.com/Vitruves/nail-parquet [2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/449066
by beAbU | 2025-11-18 07:42:03+00:00
I want to commend you for making this actually musical. Too often these basic synths aimed at kids are little more than a noise maker unless you really know what you are doing.

My spouse and I are into music and we are pretty serious choristers. We have our first little one on the way this December, and we definitely want to expose them to making music from a very young age. Your synth looks like an excellent way to do that, as it does not seem possible to get it in a state where it's just making horrible noises, every state will be some new pleasant little jingle.

Bravo!
by NilMostChill | 2025-11-18 07:43:41+00:00
Isn't the whole point of amphetamine based treatement for ADHD to correct(or beneficially alter, depending on your point of view) an non-standard brain chemistry?

AFAIK some neurodivergent brains deal with amphetamines differently and the baseline levels of chemical affected by amphetamines is different.

Wear and tear might be a thing, i don't know, but the analogy of putting NO2 in their car feels a bit off.

It'd be more like finally putting premium unleaded in your car after years of "back of the lorry" pseudo-unleaded.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-18 07:44:16+00:00
Man, I don't know about you, but:

Here in the States, when I go to the store I don't just face the aisles -- I do it right and make sure I pull all of the product forward, and that it's all facing the right way all the way back. I check the dates and rotate stock where that's necessary. If stock is running low of an item, I make a note of that.

And I don't mean just for the stuff I touch -- I do it all. There's a glorious spectacle of unbridled order on the supermarket shelves that are left in my wake.

After I'm done shopping, I bag my own groceries and roll them out to the car in the cart. And then I return the cart and any others I see all the way back to the front of the store for shoppers to use directly so that nobody else is burdened by this task.

And since I'm already back to the store, I find a drymop and make a quick pass of every aisle, while making a note of anything wet or sticky. The wet stuff gets flagged right away for safety, and both the wet stuff and the sticky stuff gets a solid scrub with a wet mop.

When I return the mop bucket I check the backstock against my notes for anything that was running low, and bring that out and shelve it so other customers are best assured of a good selection.

After I close and wash down the deli, I make one final check of the cooler temperatures and I thank every single employee by name for helping me today. I feel like I should be thanking them each at least thrice per visit for all of their hard work, but I don't want to appear to be over-appreciative.

And -- finally! -- on my way out, I vacuum the rugs in the entryway. On my watch, not even a footprint is left behind.

I don't know why more people aren't like this. We all know that in a truly functional society, it is everyone's job to help out.

I really wish I could do more, but I only have time to run the floor machine, sort produce, and help the manager with scheduling on Wednesdays and Sundays.

(I guess some people are just indefensibly narcissistic or something.)
by shakna | 2025-11-18 07:44:27+00:00
> NVDA looks like it is open source, it shouldn't be too hard to port.

Yup. Just gotta invent a Win32-compatible Wayland first. This... Is sorta a "whole fucking owl" moment.

> As explained above NVDA relies heavily on Windows specific API's and cannot be converted to run under Unix based systems without a lot of work. Given how small NVDA development team is spending time on making NVDA work under Linux at a level at which Orca works currently would take years and mean much less development for the version for Windows. In short the more reasonable course of action is to spend time on improving Orca or other Linux screen readers rather than porting (which in practice would mean almost rewriting from scratch) NVDA to run under a non Windows system. [1]

Accessibility in Wayland is still in staging. [0] There is not the APIs you need, to port anything to using them.

X-Windows only supports Class 1 info over AAC. Class 2 was only ever semi-implemented, and is the more important class of information for the user. You basically need an Optacon, and too bad if you don't want tactile.

NVDA does work under Wine! But only with well-behaving programs running under Wine. It won't work for the rest of the system.

Gnome's Orca only works with Gnome-aware apps. It is supposed to work with Plasma for KDE things, but its a dice roll. It works with Firefox, Chrome, etc, because they go out of their way to make accessibility work better.

But Orca is about half as decent as JAWS or NVDA. Its a step ten years backwards.

Voxin (paid) used to work well, but seems to now be unmaintained. Certs expired, no updates for two years, etc.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mwcampbell/wayland-protocols/...

[1] https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/13196
by mythz | 2025-11-18 07:45:06+00:00
> There is hardly anything that isn't available in .NET, the main problem is being willing to pay for tooling.

Here you're saying .NET has nearly everything, you just need to pay for it sometimes.

> And even so, there are .NET bindings for a few of those libraries like PyTorch, OpenCV and ONNX Runtime.

As apparently AI is no problem for .NET either since it has some bindings. So I really didn't need to use Python if I was prepared to pay for some tools as "There is hardly anything that isn't available in .NET" - misrepresent the situation much?

As if that does anything to help the different Python packages you need. Yeah you could rewrite every Python package built on top of it, or you know, shell out to a process or API.
by Aeglaecia | 2025-11-18 07:46:15+00:00
i understand your perspective viscerally and as such i understand the push back ... the argument is that there is nothing wrong with someone labelled 'adhd' , rather that the modern western system both a) does not handle adhd behaviour properly and b) exhibits conditions where non-adhd individuals exhibit adhd behaviour ... when taking into account that speed will motivate anybody (both adhd and non adhd) , and that demotivation is a natural response to a hopeless scenario , i do not see adhd as a disability in and of itself ... recommend to look up the effect of hope on drowning rats ...
by dpark | 2025-11-18 07:47:28+00:00
The principles covers more about users. But it still does not set the same priority hierarchy as W3C.

https://whatwg.org/principles

I’m not surprised they focus on implementors in “working mode”, though. WHATWG specifically started because implementers felt like the W3C was holding back web apps. And it kind of was.

WHATWG seemed to be created with an intent to return to the earlier days of browser development, where implementors would build the stuff they felt was important and tell other implementors how to be compatible. Less talking and more shipping.
by atoav | 2025-11-18 07:49:50+00:00
I mean technically it isn't wrong that (1) how you come across to the other person is important and (2) you need to be with the other person to connect with them.

And that is part of the problem, because the underlying reason why people connect when you do the mentioned things is that these are usually signs that you are in fact an empathic person, that can put themselves in their shoes and thus care to some degree about how things will pan out for them, meaning they may think they can open up to you, etc. This is in a stark contrast with the phrasing of "playing their game" that frames this type of behavior as a superfluous, silly endavour, when in fact it might be the polar opposite:

In a society of social apes (humans) one of the biggest danger to your and your kins life, bodily autonomy, freedom has historically always been other humans. Meaning that judging the intentions of others is not some silly game, but a survival mechanism of existential importance. And not only that, many people derive a lot of ehat makes their lifes worth living from these feelings of mutual understanding and empathy.

So to most empathic people the idea that a seemingly empathic person could feel nothing at all underneath and potentially sell them down the river is something tingling a gutural fear. Many media depiction of evil serial killers will play on that exact fear (among others).

Master conmen, manipulators, cult leaders (so generally horrible people) are all good at understanding the internal processes (thoughts and feelings) of their victims. This understanding is also essential for true empathy, the way it is applied is very different. If a hacker finds a weak point in a system they can exploit it for their own gain, or they can deal with it in a way benifiting all. The skill of understanding the internals is one thing, the skill of understanding what these internals mean and what are the right actions to derive from that knowledge is something else entirely.

That being said, I think the personal journey the author is on is certainly one that may benefit both them and the people around them. I can just imagine how hard parsing all the complexity of human behavior must be if you can't feel it yourself. This is already hard for people who can, as countless cultural artifacts from all of humanities history proof.
by zywoo | 2025-11-18 07:50:46+00:00
This analysis is interesting, but I think there’s a small self-reference problem hidden in it: what exactly counts as an “impossible goal,” and who gets to decide that?

It’s obviously true that some people chase almost “fantasy-level” ambitions. But for most of us, the reason we keep going is that, somewhere in the background, we still believe our goals are possible, possible enough to justify the time, effort, and even psychological pain. If some external standard comes along and declares “this is impossible, you should give up,” that can reduce stress in the short term, but it may also plant a long-term regret that keeps growing with age.

Looking back on my own life, the goals I abandoned for internal reasons (“this no longer fits who I am / I don’t want to pay this price anymore”) are the ones I can live with. I learned from those failures and even feel a bit stronger because of them. The painful ones are the goals I dropped mainly because someone else convinced me they were impossible. Those still feel like open loops.

So maybe the more useful takeaway isn’t “giving up is good,” but: keep reassessing your goals realistically as you grow. If, after a sober look at your skills and constraints, you still feel a goal is worth the cost, then commit and try. At least when you’re old and sitting in a chair somewhere, you’ll be less haunted by “I never even gave it a shot.”
by shmaplex | 2025-11-18 07:51:07+00:00
Yeah, these are all valid concerns. Thanks for the feedback.

1. Revenue should not be a fixed number. Consider adjustable indexing as a solution as you mentioned. 2. The revenue in USD was for modelling only. Anyone can change this based on their locale and pick their own currency as their laws permit. 3. Good point and these need to be considered, maybe there is a clause or something that can be added to cover this. Will look into it. 4. You as the repo or project owner make those decisions. That’s not for the license to decide I believe. “This also adds management and accounting overhead to the open source project, which isn't great.” there are plenty of software that handles this. Probably even some open source ones that could solve these hurdles.
by cast4 | 2025-11-18 07:51:25+00:00
As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared in her interviews, particularly about working on the cancelled Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?). She said that she still had a CD of the gold master on her shelf. I really fear that work may never see the light of day now...
by DonaldPShimoda | 2025-11-18 07:53:10+00:00
Totally agree, I don't think em dashes are a particularly useful AI tell unless they're used in a weird way. Left to my own devices (as a native English speaker who likes em dashes and parentheticals), I often end up with at least one em dash every other paragraph, if not more frequently.

On another note, it may be useful to you to know that in most English dialects, referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth, and it may mark your speech/writing as non-native. It is generally preferable to use nationalities as adjective rather than nouns (e.g., "as a Chinese person"). The two main exceptions are when employing metonymy, such as when referring to a nation's government colloquially (e.g., "the Chinese will attend the upcoming UN summit") or when using the nationality to indicate broad trends among the population of the nation (e.g., "the Chinese sure know how to cook!"). I hope this is considered a helpful interjection rather than an unwelcome one, but if not, I apologize!
by robocat | 2025-11-18 07:53:59+00:00
> "owners" own only the home and pay an exorbitant land rent each month. So, unlike a traditional home where the land appreciates

Isn't this the same as many apartments with body corporates that lease the land they are on? Called "Stratum in Leasehold" in New Zealand (although uncommon except for some inner city - I think because riskier so harder to get a mortgage).

Leasehold isn't common for residential in New Zealand AFAIK. And mobile home parks are uncommon too.
by mk89 | 2025-11-18 07:55:39+00:00
> Of course, ancient battle wisdom from the East tells you how to approach issues - saama, daana, bhedha, danda - that is - make friends, negotiate, divide and rule, use force.

That's probably something you learn in India. In the West that'd be Machiavelli (and countless Roman/Greek philopsophers/generals, etc), for whoever went to school.

Anyway, all this is somehow unrelated to the article.

The main issue is that people nowadays have somehow internalized a weird "alpha male, never give up, don't cry, just shut up an resist, impossible is nothing" mindset. The issue is that many parents don't want to create "weak" grownups, with the side effects of creating potentially sick ones, who will grow and will have kids and "won't repeat the same mistakes as my parents".

In my experience the smartest and possibly most successful (not rich, but successful in terms of satisfied/happy/in a good state financially) people are the ones that know when to change course. Finding the sweet spot (the "when") is just pure talent. This is extremely difficult for a parent to understand: when to jump in and tell your kids "it's OK, do something else" without shame.
by vidarh | 2025-11-18 07:56:12+00:00
It seems to be gone from the repo, and doesn't seem to be worked on any more? A shame.

AOT compiling Ruby is hard. I'm trying [1] [2].

Sorbet would be in a good position because part of the challenge of making it fast is that Ruby has a lot of semantics that are rarely used but that makes making compiled Ruby fast really hard. E.g. the bignum promotion adds overhead to every single operation unless you can prove invariants about the range of the values; the meta-programming likewise adds overhead and makes even very basic operations really expensive unless you can prove classes (or individual objects) aren't being mucked with...

So starting with type checking is an interesting approach to potentially allow for compiling guarded type-specific fast paths. If my compiler ever gets close enough to feature complete (it's a hobby project, so depends entirely on how much time I get, though now I also justify more time for it by using it as a test-bed for LLM tooling), it's certainly a direction I'd love to eventually explore.

[1] https://hokstad.com/compiler (not updated for a decade)

[2] https://github.com/vidarh/writing-a-compiler-in-ruby/ (updated now primarily by Claude Code; it's currently focusing on actually passing RubySpec and making speedy progress, at the cost of allowing some fairly ugly code - I do cleanup passes occasionally, but most of the cleanup will be deferred until more passes)
by hilti | 2025-11-18 07:56:18+00:00
Similar tool for JSONL files: I built JSONL Viewer Pro after repeatedly crashing VS Code trying to inspect multi-GB training datasets and IoT device logs with nested objects.

Native Mac/Windows app with multi-threaded parsing (simdjson), automatic nested object flattening, and handles 10M+ rows instantly.

For HN: Use code HN100 for free access

https://iotdatasystems.gumroad.com/

Built with C++ for native performance (~6MB app, not Electron).

Would love feedback from folks working with large JSONL files.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-18 07:56:43+00:00
> What do you consider a better metric for user engagement?

User "engagement" is a rotten metric that doesn't represent what most of us actually care about - results and answers, ASAP.

I'm not claiming this would work but if search engines had a thumbs up/down button next to results I would use it if it informed the ranking algorithm or personalized it for me.
by DonaldPShimoda | 2025-11-18 07:56:51+00:00
I believe parent commenter was referring to recreational use, i.e., use by people without such diagnoses who want a "performance boost". I heard about that sort of thing being popular when I was in college — people would take Adderall to cram for an exam or to study late into the night.

You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.
by nickpp | 2025-11-18 07:56:55+00:00
During communist years here in Eastern Europe, we got to experience the "knowing people in the Nomenklatura and Party" resource allocation algorithm.

It was obvious to us that the "people with most money" algorithm was vastly superior since it made people work harder to get those money, thus enhancing the society. Also, the extra cash strongly incentivized and funded people to create more of the scarce resource.

The other algorithms failed to incentivize to such a degree that in the end we were starving and freezing because nobody wanted to work to create food, heat or any other products and services anymore.
by Lammy | 2025-11-18 07:57:13+00:00
> the country that’s consistently ranked in the top 3 countries with the most gun related deaths

I am begging you to learn what “per-capita” means, and to not deceptively include self-inflicted deaths in your public-safety arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
by watwut | 2025-11-18 07:57:34+00:00
> Is it really a bubble about to burst when literally everyone is talking about AI being in a bubble and maybe bursting soon?

Yes, it is even one of necessary components. Everybody is twitchy afraid of the pop, but immediate returns are too tempting so they keep money in. The bubble pops when something happens and they all start to panicking at the same time. They all need to be sufficiently stressed for that mass run to happen.
by cycomanic | 2025-11-18 07:57:42+00:00
The way I understand it from people working in the field, is that the issue isn't really that lakes/rivers are running dry, but more that most hydropower is produced on the South Island while most consumption is on the North Island and the connection is woefully inadequate (typical NZ problem, never invest in infrastructure just keep bandaiding it). That said installing wind and solar (both of which are plentiful) would do a lot towards alleviating the problems, but there are the issues of the existing generators lobbying and the political climate, where the conservative party still has a significant number of politicians who think climate change isn't real.