MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Banana Studio – AI Image Editor Powered by Nano Banana
by sumit-paul | 2025-11-25 07:56:39+00:00
I built Banana Studio, an image editor that lets you modify specific regions inside an image using simple text instructions. It runs fully client-side in the browser and uses Google’s Gemini Nano Banana for fast, clean edits.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/-DbDDsyT2MM Link: https://banana-studio-nano.vercel.app/

Why I built this Text-only prompts make it challenging to instruct the model precisely where to apply changes, so I developed a simple bounding-box interface that eliminates all the guesswork. The idea was to keep everything lightweight, browser-based, and still get clean, high-quality edits.

How it works You upload an image, draw a box on the canvas, and type what you want changed. The app maps your box to the 1000x1000 coordinate grid Gemini expects. It then builds a structured prompt telling the model exactly which region to modify, sends it to the API, and gets an image back.

Features - Edit specific regions by drawing one or more boxes - Different prompts for different boxes - Global enhancements when no region is selected - Works entirely client-side - Bring your own Gemini API key (stored locally in your browser)

If you want to try it, I would love feedback from the HN crowd.
Show HN: I built a tool for instant, thoughtful X/LinkedIn replies in your feed
by kartik_malik | 2025-11-25 07:57:11+00:00
I’ve always tried to stay visible on X and LinkedIn, but doing it manually became a chore. I work a full-time job, and most days I’d be squeezing in replies during breaks or late at night just to keep my profile active. It wasn’t sustainable, and it definitely wasn’t fun.

So I built a tool that generates instant, thoughtful replies directly inside your feed. Instead of spending 30–60 minutes crafting responses, I can now engage in a few seconds without losing authenticity. It uses my tone, follows the context of the post, and removes the friction of staying active online.

I made it for myself first — now I’m sharing it in case it helps others who face the same “I want to be present, but I don’t have the time” problem.
by lgats | 2025-11-25 07:57:53+00:00
Silane, with the chemical formula \(SiH_{4}\), is a highly flammable and toxic inorganic gas used in industries like semiconductors, construction, and dentistry. It serves as a crucial precursor for creating high-purity silicon and is a versatile coupling agent that enhances adhesion between materials like glass and polymers. Its reactivity also allows it to be used in coatings, sealants, and various chemical syntheses.

Chemical Formula: \(SiH_{4}\) Appearance: A colorless gas with a repulsive odor Flammability: Highly flammable and pyrophoric, meaning it can ignite spontaneously in air Toxicity: Very toxic by inhalation and a strong irritant to the skin, eyes, and mucous membranes
by gf000 | 2025-11-25 07:58:05+00:00
I don't really get your point. The accessibility story can surely be improved, but it's absolutely 100% better on Android, than what we have on GNU/Linux today, so at the end of the day it's just one more choice for end-users.

And keyboard and the like will also get a chance to get fixed if more people are interested in the platform.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-25 07:58:34+00:00
Oh my god the obsession with 'economics of scale' is such narrow minded nonsense.

Shopping locally is more efficient, because the distribution network distributes things locally much more efficiently then a bunch of housewives in their SUVs.

Sure its cheaper for the shop providing the food, but for the society its more expensive. What you are completely missing is the massive cost of all the infrastructure and the massive subsidizes therein to create these centralized stores. And then the massive cost in time and capital investment for every users to buy a car to pick that stuff up.

You are also ignoring the massive waste this creates because people only go shopping every 1-2 weeks. And you are ignore the lack of fresh foods in the food system because of this behavior. That of course Americans eventually pay in their medical systems.

If you actually do some research you will see the systematic bias that is in the zoning code, infrastructure cost calculation and services. Walmart often consumer more in just police services then they pay in taxes. Walmart is systematically gaming the property rights system to pay almost no taxes. And yet Walmart uses a huge amount of land and requires a huge amount of public infrastructure to sustain itself.

If you really need to do some massive pickup of stuff for a party or something there are still larger stores you can go to as well, just not for everyday stuff.

Actually having a shop where I can locally pick up fresh food every day or every other day is actually much more convenient and saves far more time. And I know this is crazy for Americans to consider, but as a society it would be nice if people without a car could also buy food sometimes. This video points this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-25 07:58:45+00:00
> BSD documentation is great because it the systems change so little you don't find twenty out of date references on how to configure your DHCP client.

While there are a out of date tutorials in Linux land, at least I can find out how I might do something and then I can figure things out from there. I do know how to use the man page system, however simply knowing what to look for is the biggest challenge.

e.g I was trying to configure two finger scrolling. The freebsd wiki itself appeared out of date. So it looks like you use libinput X driver package (which I forgot the name of now) and do some config in X. It would be nice if this was covered in the handbook as I think a lot of people would like two finger scrolling working on their laptops.

> But as a desktop OS, yes they lack in a lot of areas, mainly hardware support/laptop support.

Actually FreeBSD appears quite well hardware wise at least on some of the hardware I have. My laptops are all boring corp business refurbs that I know work well with Linux/BSDs.

The problem is that often I require using software which does not work on FreeBSD/OpenBSD or is difficult to configure.

The other issue is that there are things that appear to be broken for quite a while that are in pkgs (at least with FreeBSD) so trying to configure a VM with a desktop resolution over something relatively low isn't possible at least with Qemu.
by cyrusradfar | 2025-11-25 07:58:46+00:00
A few months ago we'd had Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO Max but we've cut back to Netflix and YouTube premium.

Switched to purchasing and renting when there's something we want to watch that isn't available and we're finding it to force us to be more conscious of what we're watching.

We're considering ditching Spotify and music streaming to return to buying albums so our children can start to be more thoughtful listeners. After falling down a rabbit hole of some insider music vlogs, I recognized how much streaming is harming independent music.
by studioj | 2025-11-25 07:59:08+00:00
I built STUDIO-J so I wouldn't have to pay rent for software anymore. One time, own it, host it yourself. Zero monthly fees. It's available but I need case studies! i.e. DEVS who have something to sell - need things like security-layer/API/Stripe integrations plug and play. If you're tired of subscriptions, fill this out, I will reply-no bots. Customize what you want. Most is plug-and-play already.
by Culonavirus | 2025-11-25 08:01:02+00:00
The computer science field is going to be an absolute shitshow within 5 years (it already kinda is). On one side you'll have ADHD dog attention span zoomers trying out all these nth party model apis and tools every 5 seconds (switching them like socks, insisting the latest one is better, but ultimately producing the same slop) and on the other side you'll have all these applied math gurus squeezing out the last bits of usable AI compute on the planet... and nothing else.

We used to joke that "The internet was a mistake.", making fun of the bad parts... but LLMs take the fucking cake. No intelligent beings, no sentient robots, just unlimited amounts of slop.

The tech basically stopped evolving right around the point of it being good enough for spam and slop, but not going any further, there are no cures no new laws of physics or math or anything else being discovered by these things. All AI use in science I can see is based on finding patters in data, not intelligent thought (as in novel ideas). What a bust.
by gausswho | 2025-11-25 08:02:15+00:00
Great timing this article. I came to HN to escape a frustration point where this blooming script behaves differently when wrapped in a systemd service than when I run it on its own. I suspect there's some systemd punctuatory dance with a throwaway character here or there to semaphore me off to neverneverland. It's so inscrutable sometimes.
by lukan | 2025-11-25 08:03:01+00:00
"Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information"

If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)

And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
by stranded22 | 2025-11-25 08:03:01+00:00
I’m starting to research (hyperfocus) in this area for affiliate marketing.

The terms are: Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

(s>z for American cousins)

https://digiday.com/media/wtf-are-geo-and-aeo-and-how-they-d...
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-25 08:03:46+00:00
> Housing, again is easy to disprove for the relevant timeframe - price to income ratios were not much higher

Yet another unsubstantiated claim that is wrong:

https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=n9xI

https://www.igedd.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/IMG/jpg/prix...

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/australia/house-price-index-seas...

The US are kind of an outlier because price recessed between the financial crisis and Covid, but it has then caught up with the broader western trend. And keep in mind that the “price to average income” ratio doesn't tell you anything about the situation of the lowest incomes, which have declined relatively to the mean.

> The size of the houses was steadily increasing too

Like with mobile phones or cars, a house twice as good and twice as expensive is still twice as expensive.

> indicating increased demand for bigger houses due to increased incomes and living standards

Unsubstantiated claim, and also wrongly assuming homogeneous growth of the house size (if 10% of your housing supply double in size, while the other stay still, the average size increase by more than 10% but this tells you nothing about the housing stock as a whole).

> But the vibes among recent college grads wanting a house in SF specifically is certainly pretty gloomy.

Not just SF, and not just recent college grads, that's the thing. Even social classes that used to be preserved from the housing cost increase are now affected as well.
by phatskat | 2025-11-25 08:04:26+00:00
I had a few Pebbles back in the day and I loved them dearly - still have them laying around so the revival should be great if I can resurrect them.

After Pebble went kaput, I got an Apple Watch through a work reward thing and honestly it’s been solid. I turned off a lot of notifications and mostly use it for things I really want to know, some light exercise tracking, time and weather.
by Pooge | 2025-11-25 08:05:12+00:00
I do not like the current definition of Tokyo has being Tokyo Prefecture and all adjacent prefectures. Tokyo itself is made up of wards—each of those considered cities in their own rights—and even a countryside. People living at the far end of Saitama or China can hardly be called Tokyoites. You can't even call someone that lives in China a Tokyoites without being offensive.
by dave1010uk | 2025-11-25 08:05:25+00:00
Perhaps. Though if that were feasible, I'd expect it would have been exploited already.

I think this is more about the cost and time saving of being able to use cheaper models. Sub-agents are effectively the same as parallelization and temporary context compaction. (The same as with human teams, delegation and organisational structures.)

We're starting to see benchmarks include stats of low/medium/high reasoning effort and how newer models can match or beat older ones with fewer reasoning tokens. What would be interesting is seeing more benchmarks for different sub-agent reasoning combinations too. Eg does Claude perform better when Opus can use 10,000 tokens of Sonnet or 100,000 tokens of Haiku? What's the best agent response you can get for $1?

Where I think we might see gains in _some_ types of tasks is with vast quantities of tiny models. I.e many LLMs that are under 4B parameters used as sub-agents. I wonder what GPT-5.1 Pro would be like if it could orchestrate 1000 drone-like workers.
by Joeri | 2025-11-25 08:06:43+00:00
I don’t feel confident there is a way to use npm safely. The basic problem is that of curation, and there not being any except for what you do yourself. Every day brings new surprises, and osv.dev’s npm feed is a continuous horror show.

I would love to see the equivalent of a linux distro, a curated set of packages and package versions that are known to be compatible and safe. If someone offered this as a paid product businesses would pay for it.
by chromakode | 2025-11-25 08:07:22+00:00
Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties.

[1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU
by Terr_ | 2025-11-25 08:08:39+00:00
Rising inequality is sometimes emergent from how we design the economy [0], even when there are literally no differences between the actors involved. (Neither in merit or motivation, nor in acts of greed or villainy.)

So while we can talk about the influence of money on politics etc, fixing that is likely... necessary but not sufficient.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
by Huppie | 2025-11-25 08:08:48+00:00
Oxide and Friends recently had a podcast episode [0] with Michael Littman about this topic for anyone who's curious about this topic.

This topic has been an interesting part of the discourse in a group of friends the past few weeks because one of us is a teacher who has to deal with this on an almost daily basis and is struggling to get her students to not cheat and the options available to her are limited (yes, physical monitoring would probably work but requires concessions from the school management etc. it's not something that has an easy or quick fix available.)

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/ai-in-highe...
by hobofan | 2025-11-25 08:09:03+00:00
> gets built using this information only

No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.

Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
Show HN: Echosnap AI – A simple voice-first notes app
by pradeep3 | 2025-11-25 08:09:06+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’m a solo developer and I’ve been working on a small tool called Echosnap AI. I built it because I often get ideas while I’m walking or doing something else, and speaking always felt like the fastest way to capture them.

Echosnap lets you record a note and instantly get a clean transcript. It can also translate your recordings and help you stay organized with tags and folders. I tried to keep the app as simple and minimal as possible.

This is my first time sharing something on HN, so any feedback or suggestions would mean a lot. Thanks for taking a moment to check it out.
by 0north | 2025-11-25 08:09:17+00:00
hey dudes i built this new thing, its basically singular offline encryption environments where you can encrypt words and text. It’s inspired by genesis blockchains but applied to the AES runtime key pairing to create cross decryptable cipher environments.

i can make infinite of them, and they're not cross-decryptable. so if you have one on a USB for example, its literally your own personal, private encryption language. theyre like little artifacts.

heres a video explanation i recorded in my kitchen: https://youtube.com/shorts/LfVV-gDmJKs?si=OVa31R09wN-EiYBJ

same password + same message in any two vaults = impossible to cross-decrypt

click the link in the title for the demo I have two demo vaults, bear with me on the huge size. they are that big because each one electron package bundles chromium, not because of my encryption logic. sorry about that.

the encryption environments work offline, and I store nothing, theyre deleted server side after my API delivers them. no cloud, no backup server, no seeds.

you can check out more details at my github at github.com/Onorth-eth if you wanna peep the actual post or the original devpost submission. (some of the terminology in my original video may be weird, its AES)

didn't post my actual API link to generate individual vaults because im pretty sure my digital ocean droplet would literally explode, but the 2 vaults in the demo can encrypt and decrypt anything you guys want; and you can see that they don't decrypt one-another.

if you want a personal one i can give some to the first commentors or whatever just comment 'encrypt pls or something and I can make you one.

tldr: 1-of-1 encryption vaults, like Minecraft seeds for personal encryption kinda. mess with my demos and sorry about the size.

why build it: journalists can encrypt sensitive data then delete their .exe, keep the encrypted output, and decrypt it all on their backup at home. people can keep a vault on a usb in a safety deposit box and encrypt data or messages for their family. lots of stuff.

if you like it: https://buymeacoffee.com/dantehorton

if you think its dumb/malware: its not, also tell me why i guess.
by raducu | 2025-11-25 08:10:40+00:00
> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking".

The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.

Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.

A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.

I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-25 08:10:50+00:00
> For me, it's a mystery.

For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.

It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!

Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!

Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.

Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.

Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!

What... the... %#%@!

How does that work!? How does any of that work?

Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!

PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...
by rsynnott | 2025-11-25 08:11:03+00:00
I mean, I think the point is that they were betting on being able to do crimes because Musk was in with minihands and would just get them pardoned, but now that the Musk/minihands romance has ended acrimoniously, they are exposed.

Politico quote in the article:

> “a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still ‘brothers in arms’ and that Musk would continue to protect them.That led to another protesting and advising, “Guys, seriously get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-11-25 08:12:58+00:00
Yeah, I agree that there's some skills that require deliberate practice. I think LLMs will be a huge boon there as well, because you can get real-time feedback as you're solving problems. And if you get stuck you can get immediate help or clarification, which is closer to having a personal tutor. In college if I got stuck on a problem, I might end up having to wait multiple days to ask someone for help.

In software engineering we often come across build environments that make code iteration really difficult and slow, and speeding up that iteration cycle usually results in being able to experiment more and ship faster changes.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-11-25 08:13:08+00:00
It somewhat makes sense if you think of it in terms of a really complicated 1.5GB metaprogram with a huge pile of conditionals that are triggered by the programs it itself writes (proteins). The final you is made up of an incomprehensible huge number of copies of the metaprogram, running different configurations, and spitting out programs to each other which then do more stuff. Our human brains can't really conceive of a configurable metaprogram that writes programs by interacting with itself in different configurations that it itself sets up.
by rcarmo | 2025-11-25 08:13:30+00:00
Pretty accurate. I just submitted a link to Dropbox, and the first comment read “isn’t this just SFTP with a pretty UI on top?”

https://news.ysimulator.run/item/2045

I suppose this proves we’re all living in a simulation already. To gather further scientific proof, I’m going to submit some links about Rust, Apple, and a couple of Nyan Cat things and see how it goes…