Hacker News: momojo

New comment by momojo in "Zero Hour: Telling time was a matter of survival and strategy during WWI (2014)"

momojo — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:54:28 +0000

> “Wristlets,” as they were known until the 1920s, were designed for women. As the name implies, they were essentially bracelets designed for showing off jewels (and shapely wrists), and were equipped with a tiny watch face for decoration rather than practicality. It would take one of the twentieth century’s greatest rebranding campaigns to persuade military men to strap time to their wrists.

TIL

New comment by momojo in "Images 2.6"

momojo — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:28:56 +0000

What's the state of the art for image gen? I'm far removed and pretty happy with the free Gemini tier but its notable to me that I rarely see boasting about being "the best image generator yet" and I wonder if that's because they're all just good enough?

New comment by momojo in "Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen"

momojo — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 23:06:17 +0000

The more I ponder this, the more I wonder: They're always after higher, more signal-rich tokens. What could be more rich than its own weights?

New comment by momojo in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

momojo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:12:33 +0000

As someone with friends in the mathematics community, they've expressed similar sentiments.

I have to wonder if this is the equivalent of teleporting back in time and finding Marco Polo or any of those early explorers who traveled for the love of the game (and fame and money), and opening up Google Maps on your phone and showing them the zoomed out world. And showing them any island or village they could name.

New comment by momojo in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

momojo — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:51:11 +0000

A factor I don't see mentioned that I think is relevant: Repricers

Google "FBA repricer" and you'll find companies like https://goaura.com/ and https://sellersnap.io/.

These are a must for any mid-size seller. Their goal is to pretty self-explanatory; reprice your ASIN, live, to hit maximum sales. If your competitor is selling the same mug for $10.00, the repricer sees that and immediately reprices your mug for $9.99.

Its one of those "Well, if I don't use one, others will" situations.

New comment by momojo in "AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots"

momojo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:27:30 +0000

Thank you for replying. Yes I also think its lame that we have to use the "YC" sticker or "SF-based" heuristics to determine a company's validity but we live in world full of snake oil and vaporware and signal:noise nowadays is crazy high.

Props to you for going out and making things happen but given what I know about your company from your

a) claude-coded website b) faceless twitter

most people or investors would conclude you're a bot at best, a scam at worst.

I don't say any of this with condescension (on rereading my first post, I'm sorry if the tone was harsh).

New comment by momojo in "The value of not getting to the point (2015)"

momojo — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:34:47 +0000

Thanks to whoever posted this 11yo gem. I've never read it. Its humbling and encouraging to see someone willing to post his fumblings even in his 50's. I feel like he'd been lambasted or mocked had he posted this today on substack or twitter.

As a younger man I was more of the "Just say what you mean, get straight to the point" kind of guy. I think what changed for me is that I learned that people are often much more interesting than their opinions. Going to someone wanting one-word answers to everything (outside of a work context) can become very impersonal and extractive. Its reductionist. It's assuming you're the only one with deep thoughts, conflicted feelings on certain topics, and interesting opinions.

New comment by momojo in "AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots"

momojo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:04:02 +0000

They don't even do the robotics, they just do the data gathering.

New comment by momojo in "AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots"

momojo — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:53:24 +0000

How is this on the front page? Its not a YC company. They have no internet presence besides a Claude website. 0 followers on X/twitter. No public mentions of funding or votes-of-trust. No names to vouch for them.

Can OP or founders comment?

New comment by momojo in "5x faster Edge Functions: V8 isolates to Firecracker MicroVMs"

momojo — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:23:25 +0000

1. What's the node + aws story? Did you stick with aws or stay but try a different serverless tech? 2. Is lambda/serverless overhyped? I'm worried about reaching for it too soon.

New comment by momojo in "OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev"

momojo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:55:44 +0000

I'd also add that they're hoping Jevon's Paradox also leads to a whole new segment of users who would have never reached for a classifier in the first place, given the barrier to entry.

New comment by momojo in "Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5"

momojo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:34:56 +0000

> "[I don't understand what it's actually doing under the hood, or why we should be excited.] Jev feels more and more like a glorified if/else block"

You should be excited because there's so many low-hanging classification problems (e.g. "Is this email spam?", "Is this yelp review happy or sad or neutral?") that a "cheap" LLM is overkill for. It really should be this cheap, and now Jev is the first to do it well and do it at scale.

If I was explaining it to my mom, I'd say "Classifying 1000 yelp reviews used to cost $50. Now it costs 5¢, at similar accuracy"

New comment by momojo in "Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]"

momojo — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:16:47 +0000

This is one of those masterpieces that I'm surprised hasn't been scooped up by Netflix and turned into a movie.

Its not that I don't like it as a game, but it's just so chock full of character.

The premise alone is so compelling; in the Land of the Dead, even dead men chase money. Even with the literal afterlife a train ticket away, you have conmen and good guys living (or dying?) like there's no end of the line.

Love it. One of those rare pieces of art that continues to live in my head rent-free.

Sub-Agents Are Just Wrong

momojo — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:57:08 +0000

Article URL: https://polylane.com/blog/sub-agents-are-just-wrong/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715388

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

New comment by momojo in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

momojo — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:22:04 +0000

I don't think this is a perfect analogy, but i think it's closest to the original articles declaration.

I wish they had stayed this as the very first paragraph.

Maybe I'm too stupid to grok the original declaration. Does anyone have a better summation?

New comment by momojo in "Desert Ant Labs: local, fast models that run on device"

momojo — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:58:51 +0000

Cellpose[0] and Stardist[1] are the two you'll see most heavily run and talked about on the forums[2]. They're classic CNN's, but it just feels like they (and any modern models) are swept up in "Go out and buy a 4090.But these guys will give you plenty of mileage before you have to reach for the bigger ones.

[0] https://github.com/mouseland/cellpose

[1] https://github.com/stardist/stardist

[2] https://forum.image.sc/

New comment by momojo in "Desert Ant Labs: local, fast models that run on device"

momojo — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:39:34 +0000

> The world ships more than a billion capable phones, tablets, and laptops a year, most with a chip built for exactly this work, paid for and idle most of the day. Run the model there and the economics flip: no per-call cost, no round-trip, and nothing leaves the device.

This. I run small models (>50MB) for bio-imaging/biotech applications, it feels like every README implies that you need a discrete GPU to get started. While some do, many, especially the most useful ones, do not. Sure it matters if you're also going to do fine-tuning, but I believe your typical user just wants to detect some nuclei and get some cell-body ratios.

The laptop on your desk won't be running Meta's SAM, but it has more than enough compute to crunch 100's of your H&E slides overnight.

New comment by momojo in "Mercury 2.5"

momojo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:00:57 +0000

Anyone here use Mercury 2.0? Curious what your experience with the model is.

New comment by momojo in "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"

momojo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:23:50 +0000

Same. Love oneshotting or sanity checks. Which fortunately is a lot of my workflow (lot of long tail stuff fits in one prompt).

New comment by momojo in "Malleable software = solid bases and custom code"

momojo — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:54:42 +0000

Love this take. In the bio-imaging space, Napari is a great example of this. Wonderfully solid base, but extremely extensible since its just python all the way down.

There's something wonderful about having my coworker walk up with an issue, and being able to bang out a Napari plugin that solves their exact problem before lunch.

My order of 'tool escalation' usually goes: - Can I solve their problem from napari's inline terminal? - Can I solve it with a one-off script? - Can I solve it with a one-off script that creates a one-off plugin interface? - Should I add the plugin to our company-wide repo since this problem seems to occur a lot?