Hacker News: hector_vasquez

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone"

hector_vasquez — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 19:52:12 +0000

I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone"

hector_vasquez — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 19:44:28 +0000

There have been several companies that tried to sell open mobile devices over the years, but people have shown time and time again that they don't want to buy that product. We can wish it were different all we like, but in general we aren't entitled to money-losing, unmarketable products.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:17:02 +0000

I wonder the lengths smartphone vendors are going to prevent this kind of attack. I cannot imagine it is easy to completely validate hardware in such an elaborate supply chain. I shudder to think about the attack surface in something like a modern car.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:17:48 +0000

Did you steal this metaphor from a written work without compensating the writers?

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:14:38 +0000

The main problem with this clever mad lib is that published works are published for the express purpose of being read, understood, synthesized, and used as context for knowledge. That is literally the whole reason to publish something. That is all fair use and has been for a very long time. Teachers, critics, writers, everyone who reads, use written works in pretty much exactly this way. If I buy a book about fishing I am allowed to teach what I learn to anyone I want, and even charge for it. Anthropic is choosing not to publish some of its products’ internal workings, as is their right. I find all the righteous indignation about this rather insolent.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:55:54 +0000

What we hope for is mostly irrelevant. The enterprises investing vast sums in research will do everything they can to make their products competitive and marketable. Same as ever. The continued existence of this market is basically predicated on stopping distillation. In effect, commoditization of the frontier stops the frontier. We cannot have something as expensive as intelligence both ways.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:45:59 +0000

Opus 5.5 is the best model I’ve ever used. It is certainly not “impossible” to use. The numbers back it up too. If you don’t like a product or the people selling it, don’t use it. The sense of entitlement in this post is remarkable. If you have principles, stand on them. You are not entitled to anything more here.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Claude Haiku 5.5"

hector_vasquez — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:14:11 +0000

My software application uses Haiku in production more or less as a Jev. I do not use it for coding or development.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

hector_vasquez — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:25:48 +0000

Ex-NVIDIA employee here who worked on inference software. When it comes to inference software and models, NVIDIA's strategy is advancing the state of the art in the open model realm. They are building software and services business for those markets that need to be competitive on their own merits, and quantization and precision tuning are techniques they use themselves constantly.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:03:23 +0000

The allegation is that OpenAI explicitly requested that people bring and explain actual prototypes ("show and tell"), and downloading files from iCloud Drive after quitting Apple to join OpenAI. What you're describing is not even remotely on this level.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:47:52 +0000

Man sets out to write article on DK Effect, comes across one skeptical study, confidently writes article refuting DK Effect.

It writes itself.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

hector_vasquez — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:09:00 +0000

If there was ever a time to sell all your stocks and buy gold, this is it. NVIDIA to zero. This will make COVID look like a market hiccup.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:49:42 +0000

Having worked at Apple and similarly giant companies, the idea that "they have enough money to do it" is incredibly naive. Rewriting all the basic software primitives of the iPhone, or the Mac, or iCloud, or CloudKit, or choose whatever massive surface area this legislation impacts, is not a matter of simply spending enough. Doing so requires the time and attention of the very few subject matter experts who are able to competently do it. The true cost is to your strategy, your business plan, and your product roadmap.

So it becomes a purely business decision: Do we risk a 10% global revenue penalty to release this globally, do we release this everywhere the DMA does not apply, or do we simply not build it? And make no mistake, even if Apple moved heaven and earth to try to comply with DMA they are STILL RISKING the full 10% penalty if the EU decides against them.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:32:15 +0000

Releasing the model to bad actors at the same time as the major OS, browser, and security companies would be one idea. But some might consider that "messed up" too, whatever you mean by that. But in terms of acting in the public benefit, it seems consistent to work with companies that can make significant impact on users' security. The stated goal of Project Glasswing is to "secure the world's most critical software," not to be affirmative action for every wannabe out there.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data"

hector_vasquez — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:55:12 +0000

The FTC article links to the federal complaint[0] which names the third-party data recipient as Clarifai, Inc.

"In September 2014, the CEO of Clarifai, Inc. e-mailed one of OkCupid’s founders requesting that Humor Rainbow give Clarifai, Inc. (i.e., the Data Recipient) access to large datasets of OkCupid photos."

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/OkCupid-MatchCo...

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed"

hector_vasquez — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:28:28 +0000

Former Apple employee here. This is a deeper quirk of Apple culture than one would guess.

Each and every Radar (Apple's internal issue tracker is called Radar, and each issue is called a Radar) follows a state machine, going from the untriaged state to the done state. One hard-coded state in this is Verify. Each and every bug, once Fixed, cannot move to Closed without passing through the Verify state. It seems like a cool idea on the surface. It means that Apple assumes and demands that everything must be verified as fixed (or feature complete) by someone. Quite the corporate value to hold the line on, and it goes back decades.

I seriously hated the Verify state. It caused many pathologies. Imagine trying to run a burndown of your sprint when zero of the Radars are closed, because they have to be verified in production before being closed, meaning you cannot verify until after the release. Another pathology is that lots (thousands and thousands) of Radars end up stranded in Verify. Many, many engineers finish their fix, check it in, it gets released and then they move on. This led to a pathology that the writer of this post got caught up in: There is lots of "org health" reporting that goes out showing how many Radars are unverified and how long your Radars stay in the unverified state on average. A lot of teams simply close Radars that remain unverified for some amount of time because they are being "graded" on this.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Nvidia NemoClaw"

hector_vasquez — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:51:51 +0000

> Am I missing something?

You are indeed missing a TON. A lot of Open Claw users don't give it everything. We give it specific access to a group of things it needs to do the things we want. If I want an agent to sit there 24/7 maximizing uptime of my service, I give it access to certain data, the GitHub repo with PR privileges, and maybe even permissions to restart the service. All of this has to be very thoughtful and intentional. The idea that the only "useful" way to use Open Claw is to give it everything is a straw man.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Claude Opus 4.6"

hector_vasquez — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 17:04:41 +0000

I have given the “never trust the judgment of someone who says it should be a one-line fix” so many times I am basically doxxing myself with this comment.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 19:05:02 +0000

PV is fairly unique in that land is not required. It can be installed over existing land uses such as rooftops, canals, parking.

New comment by hector_vasquez in "The Future of Compute: Nvidia's Crown Is Slipping"

hector_vasquez — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:54:36 +0000

> You cannot build a good AI phone without first building a good phone. You cannot build a self-driving car without starting with a good car, etc.

More like you cannot build a self-driving car without starting with a good phone. See Huawei.