Hacker News: MontagFTB

New comment by MontagFTB in "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model"

MontagFTB — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:43:50 +0000

Yes, that’s a great video. The Mythbusters used the same model to understand Bay Area current flows during their Alcatraz escape attempt episode.

New comment by MontagFTB in "WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency"

MontagFTB — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:51:10 +0000

Multiple articles mention a vaccine for the Zaire strain but not this one. Is it possible to use one for the other? Does the existence of one make it easier to develop another?

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:35:50 +0000

These changes were part of the Beta program. As far as I am aware the response there was not on the same level as this blog post.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:46:10 +0000

Thank you. Differing opinions of Adobe aside, you sound like the kind of engineer I'd enjoy a beer with.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:39:07 +0000

Thank you for the constructive feedback. I agree power users are a "keystone species" and improving their workflows will benefit everyone.

Improving existing workflows without disrupting them is extremely hard to do, and often "improvement" is in the eye of the beholder. To be clear, I am not excusing issues within the application that we must fix. The team is working hard across multiple departments to gain consensus on how best to move Photoshop forward, including gathering feedback from users.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:25:39 +0000

There is a lot of effort put in to making the application usable, no question. At the same time, we have added a litany of new features and tools since Photoshop 4, many of which I would describe as extremely technically challenging.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:46:34 +0000

Well it depends on how you define it. We have done several re-skinnings. This migration is a transition from one framework to another, which we’ve never done before. The reasons to leave the old framework lie on several axes (eng, design, product, etc.)

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:33:51 +0000

In a word: they were. We do use Photoshop (though not to the level or extent of most users) and noticed the regressions. Shipping software is in perennial tension between getting it perfect and getting it out the door.

Going forward, we would like them fixed, too. Personally my hope is the message from user feedback like this is heard loud and clear, and we respond appropriately.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

MontagFTB — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:59:48 +0000

Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me.

Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us.

These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed.

I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here. If you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Generating a color spectrum for an image"

MontagFTB — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:36:34 +0000

Visually the results are very compelling! It also gives an at-a-glance intuition about the image that the bar-style options fail to convey. I am a fan.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket"

MontagFTB — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:06:52 +0000

Could it be a symptom of high altitude oxygen deprivation?

New comment by MontagFTB in "C++26: A User-Friednly assert() macro"

MontagFTB — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:23:08 +0000

Putting code with side effects into an assert is asking for trouble. Compile with NDEBUG set and the effects mysteriously disappear! Anything beyond an equality expression or straight boolean should be avoided.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

MontagFTB — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:25:29 +0000

It is entirely possible a Rust port could have caught previously unknown memory safety issues. Furthermore, a Rust port that looks and feels like C++ may be peppered with unsafe calls to the point where the ROI on the port is greatly reduced.

I am not trying to dunk on the effort; quite the contrary. I am eager to hear more about the goals it originally set out to achieve.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

MontagFTB — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:07:09 +0000

Before preaching it to others, the writing of a homily or sermon first needs to affect the heart of the one delivering it. Such heart-work is exceedingly difficult if not impossible with AI.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

MontagFTB — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:02:49 +0000

Any word on how much more memory safe the implementation is? If passing a previous test suite is the criteria for success, what has changed, really? Are there previous memory safety tests that went from failing to passing?

I am very interested to know if this time and energy spent actually improved memory safety.

Other engineers facing the same challenges want to know!

New comment by MontagFTB in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

MontagFTB — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:12:34 +0000

> We do [cubic curve fitting] all the time in image processing, and it works very well. It would probably work well for audio as well, although it's not used -- not in the same form, anyway -- in these applications.

Is there a reason the solution that "works very well" for images isn't/can't be applied to audio?

New comment by MontagFTB in "Invader: Where to Spot the 8-Bit Street Art in London"

MontagFTB — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:24:32 +0000

We saw these is Ravenna

New comment by MontagFTB in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

MontagFTB — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:13:08 +0000

What, no Doom running on Voyager 2?

New comment by MontagFTB in "Rethinking C++: Architecture, Concepts, and Responsibility"

MontagFTB — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:33:11 +0000

C++’s name mangling scheme handles some things like namespaces and overloading, but it does not account for other settings that can affect the ABI layer of the routine, like compile time switches or optimization level.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Rethinking C++: Architecture, Concepts, and Responsibility"

MontagFTB — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:27:49 +0000

If the Standard has anything to say about compatibility between different language versions, I doubt many developers know those details. This is breeding ground for ODR violations, as you’re likely using compilers with different output (as they are built in different eras of the language’s lifetime) especially at higher optimization settings.

This flies in the face of modern principles like building all your C++, from source, at the same time, with the same settings.

Languages like Rust include these settings in symbol names as a hash to prevent these kinds of issues by design. Unless your whole team is a moderate-level language lawyer, you must enforce this by some other means or risk some really gnarly issues.