Hacker News: ngomez

New comment by ngomez in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"

ngomez — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:31:58 +0000

You can grind some of the raw silicon out of a finished wafer but I don't think it'd be suitable to use in another batch of product. So instead of having the weights on the wafer like OOP was suggesting, hardware inference has been trending toward having a wafer of lots and lots of smaller cores with fast SRAM.

New comment by ngomez in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"

ngomez — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:17:36 +0000

Using the space of an entire wafer for one chip would result in extremely low manufacturing yields. Even with state of the art silicon cleanrooms, there will still be defects in parts of the output.

With CPUs and GPUs, chip makers can disable faulty cores and bin them as lower SKUs to get some yield out of it. But if you're using an entire wafer to embed weights, and a speck of dust causes a printing defect that makes the weights wrong, the entire wafer is worthless.

New comment by ngomez in "Copy Fail"

ngomez — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:09:17 +0000

The CloudFlare blog discusses that idea when they talk about having an "agent process" to hold cryptographic material, but they list drawbacks like having to develop two processes, implement a well-defined interface, and enforce ACLs. I'm not convinced that "developing two processes" is a reason not to do it, since the kernel is effectively just the second process now, but everything else makes sense.

It's unfortunate though since this is one thing I think Windows does decently well. The Windows crypto and TLS APIs do use a key isolation process by default (LSASS) and have a stable interface for other processes to use it [0]. I imagine systemd could implement something similar, but I also know that there are very strong opinions about adding more surface area to systemd.

[0] https://blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Kambic-Cunni...

New comment by ngomez in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"

ngomez — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:01:35 +0000

Interestingly, Microsoft has been trying to get ahead of this for a couple of years now with their National Partner Clouds program [0], which they describe as:

> designed for scenarios where full ownership and operational independence from Microsoft is required

In France's case, Capgemini and Orange have a joint venture to operate datacenters that Microsoft runs Azure and Office on top of [1]. Moving away from Windows and Teams would still reduce their dependence on Microsoft substantially. But if the core goal is to reduce dependence on non-European suppliers, I would be wary of the French government buying services from "Bleu" when it's mainly Microsoft and a couple of consultancies in a trenchcoat.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sovereign-clou...

[1] https://www.capgemini.com/news/press-releases/capgemini-and-...

New comment by ngomez in "uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store"

ngomez — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:54:35 +0000

I've been trying uBO Lite myself for a few months, and anyone who uses YouTube will absolutely notice that it's worse at blocking. Lite tends to delay playback at the start of a video for as long as the blocked ads would've been, making the site feel slower, and once in a while an ad will slip past the blocker anyway.

New comment by ngomez in "Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest? (2020)"

ngomez — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 05:47:51 +0000

Are you thinking of the Windows 3.00 Working Model?

https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_3.00_Working_Model

New comment by ngomez in "Mustafa Suleyman of Inflection AI Joins Microsoft"

ngomez — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:34:47 +0000

Not the whole thing: a lot of the Windows org chart is still under Rajesh Jha in Experiences + Devices, or scattered around Azure with Scott Guthrie. But they've already been pushing Windows Copilot and Bing Ads and widgets, so I imagine the plan is more of the same.

New comment by ngomez in "Cobble_stone – The texture of your childhood (2021)"

ngomez — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 06:50:29 +0000

It's not just the kids growing up now. I'm sure plenty of millennials who watched YouTube when AudioSwap was a thing will recognize "Dreamscape" by 009 Sound System:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKfS5zVfGBc

New comment by ngomez in "Send your email right to the other person's spam"

ngomez — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 13:10:29 +0000

I think the IPv4 "evil" bit [0] already does this :)

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514

New comment by ngomez in "How long does it take ordinary people to get good at chess?"

ngomez — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 04:31:16 +0000

Whether it's proper depends on who you ask but you can use the singular they.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

New comment by ngomez in "Intel’s future now depends on making everyone else’s chips"

ngomez — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 17:55:36 +0000

Could you elaborate? AMD spun their fabrication arm off into GlobalFoundries a while back, and they seem to be doing okay. I thought that would be a good precedent for Intel divesting its fabs too, but I'd love to hear any counterpoints to that.

New comment by ngomez in "9/11 Material Released in Response to Executive Order 14040"

ngomez — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:15:02 +0000

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28501901

New comment by ngomez in "An update on our security incident"

ngomez — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 06:10:19 +0000

>if a Twitter user was logged in with a dongle but the attacker had access via social engeneered remote desktop access a dongle still could mean access to private data

It depends on the dongle. YubiKeys and similar devices require the user to physically touch/tap it to enable U2F auth, and it automatically powers down after a timeout to prevent remote desktop attacks.

I would hope Twitter already had this kind of setup, but their blog posts about this are all targeted at a more general audience, so I doubt we'll get that kind of detail anytime soon.

New comment by ngomez in "US Constitution – A Git repo with history of edits"

ngomez — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 01:01:54 +0000

This is actually something I've played around with before. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the free time to finish the project.

https://bitbucket.org/nsg-usa/constitution/commits/all

New comment by ngomez in "Apple Is Locking iPhone Batteries to Discourage Repair"

ngomez — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 19:13:23 +0000

What's stopping Apple from selling the parts that they manufacture to third parties, though? If anything this is an argument for right to repair laws, not for manufacturers to further restrict how consumers can use their devices. The Massachusetts right to repair laws for vehicles already provided a good framework for such an electronics repair law.

New comment by ngomez in "Companies outside the tech industry are spinning off internal software"

ngomez — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 16:53:36 +0000

That story sounds similar to Bezos' mandate in Steve Yegge's Google platform rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

New comment by ngomez in "Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?"

ngomez — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 01:25:07 +0000

This doesn't work too well if someone adds Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV or Kendrick Lamar's untitled unmastered to their playlist.

New comment by ngomez in "Microsoft acquires Github"

ngomez — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 18:17:58 +0000

Can you point to an example of telemetry that Windows is collecting that isn't documented and shown?

New comment by ngomez in "Microsoft acquires Github"

ngomez — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 15:51:24 +0000

>they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected

They give you the option to fully inspect all the telemetry data your computer is sending, categorized by use.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/configuration/diagn...

New comment by ngomez in "Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science"

ngomez — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 21:59:00 +0000

I'm also a TA for the class mentioned in this article. We teach Git and have a submission system where students submit patches based on skeleton code; students are required to make at least five commits. We still have a significant number of students who copy code, and while it does help with picking up on that kind of behavior those students also don't seem to care about the increased cost and will pad their commits anyway.