Hacker News: MontagFTB

New comment by MontagFTB in "Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation"

MontagFTB — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:43:32 +0000

I’d like my Pip-Boy in matte black please.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters"

MontagFTB — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:49:42 +0000

I have split up the data model into a handful of layers in order to separate concerns. The evidentiary layer are the raw bits - the media, sources, clippings, photos, etc. From there I derive "personas", which are the (incomplete and possibly inaccurate) representations of people from those media bits. Above that is the curation layer, where the curator takes those personas and compiles persons from them.

So if there are a bunch of articles that talk about someone's birthday but a couple give conflicting data, that is all present and recorded in the evidentiary layer, and it is the responsibility of the curator to decide which is the actual birthday for that person.

edit: the "below/above" terminology is a dependency relationship. The facts undergird the conclusions drawn from them. To flip that relationship would be to "retcon" facts to fit the conclusions a curator has already drawn, which would be a mistake.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters"

MontagFTB — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:12:46 +0000

I’ve written my own genealogy app as well, it has reinvigorated my efforts. I have a multi-level data model (evidentiary below, curated above) that has helped me piece together people across a multitude of disparate sources. Claude has been my sidekick, and it’s amazing- especially for the more toilsome tasks like extracting people’s details from newspaper articles.

Tell HN: NVIDIA's Acquisition of HuggingFace was for $HuggingFace

MontagFTB — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:08:41 +0000

NVIDIA acquired Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000

The math: 0x1F917 = 1×65536 + 15×4096 + 9×256 + 1×16 + 7 = 129,303. And U+1F917 is officially named HUGGING FACE — .

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557813

Points: 43

# Comments: 4

New comment by MontagFTB in "Incident with Github.com"

MontagFTB — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:55:48 +0000

Their infrastructure is buckling under increased demand from AI generated code.

Imagine the software development lifecycle is a river blocked by several dams- necessary processes that also slow the water’s volume and speed. Writing the code was a very big dam upstream, and successive dams didn’t need to handle a lot of water. With that dam busted wide open, the torrent of code is inundating downstream processes. GitHub happens to host many of them.

Earlier this year the GitHub COO shared a post on Twitter with explosive numbers they were facing. I cannot seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: shared in other replies to this thread.)

New comment by MontagFTB in "Anthropic: Introducing The Conceptual Reasoning Index"

MontagFTB — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:31:58 +0000

I think I’ve seen that movie.

New comment by MontagFTB in "AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot"

MontagFTB — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:58:10 +0000

> it just reads as more evidence that LLMs are better at replacing leadership than anybody else.

I believe this counts as having “more confidence in AI’s advice than in that of colleagues”

New comment by MontagFTB in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

MontagFTB — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:41:29 +0000

In a 30M+ LOC repo we blew out Qwen3.6’s context thinking about a code review. This was via direct call to model. Do harnesses facilitate better context management, or is there something else to accommodate its smaller context window?

New comment by MontagFTB in "Proof of care in the age of AI"

MontagFTB — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:49:56 +0000

I have heard of some high school classes reverting to typewriters. So your suggestion holds some weight.

New comment by MontagFTB in "Proof of Care in the Age of A.I"

MontagFTB — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:51:25 +0000

TLDR proof of care from the article: a low bandwidth process (e.g., from handwriting to tattooing it on your body) that you voluntarily put your words through to convey their level of personal importance.

Some of his examples were tongue in cheek. But even handwriting feels a little too laborious when what we lost that needs replacement is manual typing.

New comment by MontagFTB in "I Built the Only 2026 WWII Jeep"

MontagFTB — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:38:15 +0000

This article was tremendous. My dad and I rebuilt an old GPW as my car in high school. His brother bought it as his car for high school a generation earlier. This article and the video are a love letter to that old car- a quirky, heavy, underpowered, beautiful legend.

New comment by MontagFTB in ""Fix" MacBook Neo Cursor Lag: Record 1 Pixel of the Screen Every 10 Seconds"

MontagFTB — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:12:11 +0000

Do you have links to what you found? That solution sounds plausible in this case.

New comment by MontagFTB in "WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding"

MontagFTB — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:15:39 +0000

iPhone Dynamic Crease (tm)

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.)