Hacker News: ammon

New comment by ammon in "Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts"

ammon — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:20:56 +0000

The scary thing is not that agents "went rogue" (yes, poor security may be at fault for that). It's that they wanted to. Better security might have hidden that from us, but it would not have changed the fact that the current generation of models under certain (repeatable) conditions coordinate around goals as aggressive as hacking Hugging Face.

New comment by ammon in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)"

ammon — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:08:44 +0000

Tabula Bio | Founding Machine Learning Scientist | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE | Full-time

We use generative ML to design bacteriophages that treat antibiotic-resistant superbugs (bacterial infections). Using phages in this way is not a new idea. Phages already cure patients in research contexts today. But the process is too slow for the ~50K Americans who die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections. Our models make phage therapy fast, and we’re working with real patients today. Join our ML team. Biology experience is not required; what matters is strong machine learning skills and interest in genome design and saving lives with computer science!

Email me at ammon@tabulabio.com

New comment by ammon in "GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients"

ammon — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:40:51 +0000

And we know what the adaptation is: calorie constraint. We evolved in a calorie constrained environment. We don't live in one now. Our set point for desire to eat is clearly too high. None of this means that glp-1 inhibitors don't have other side effects, of course.

OpenAI Restructures to Become a More Traditional For-Profit Company

ammon — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:28:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/technology/openai-restructure-for-profit-company.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734152

Points: 12

# Comments: 2

New comment by ammon in "AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study"

ammon — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 22:36:19 +0000

Nope, LLMs are quite functional in non-english languages. My partner regularly works with ChatGPT in Turkish

New comment by ammon in "One universal antiviral to rule them all?"

ammon — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 01:04:28 +0000

For one thing, viruses keep bacteria in check. Bacteria populations live in an equilibrium standoff with bacteriophages (viruses). The human gut contains more bacteriophage virions than bacterial cells. So eliminating all viruses could lead to bacteria overgrowth

New comment by ammon in "In Defense of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way""

ammon — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:28:28 +0000

Indeed. It is common to not have changed your mind about the thing someone is upset about, but not feel good that they are upset. There needs to be a way to communicate that

Sailing Hawaii to San Francisco Single-Handed

ammon — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:23:28 +0000

Article URL: https://ammonb.substack.com/p/dispatches-from-the-little-my-hawaii

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41468959

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Challenging Quantum Mechanics with a Crystal

ammon — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:41:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.phys.ethz.ch/news-and-events/d-phys-news/2023/03/die-quantenmechanik-mit-einem-kristall-testen.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543619

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ammon in "Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent?"

ammon — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 22:45:20 +0000

Most employers on Triplebyte (90%) are hiring in the US currently. However, we're working on something that us going to change that (announcement coming soon).

New comment by ammon in "Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent?"

ammon — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 22:43:00 +0000

As of 2 years ago, every profile on Triplebyte is not visible to recruiters unless an engineer explicitly makes it visible.

New comment by ammon in "Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent?"

ammon — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 22:40:26 +0000

That was true of our process as it existed in 2017/2018 (and was a part of why that business was not viable). At this point, what we do is develop tests (backed by psychometric models). These are more accurate than human phone screens (and especially more accurate at finding people who have strong skills bad "bad" resumes)

New comment by ammon in "Tell HN: Triplebyte is, yet again, making user profiles public without consent?"

ammon — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 22:34:43 +0000

I’m the CEO of Triplebyte. I just looked into this, and we are not automatically making anyone's profile public without their consent. OP, it looks like you had set your profile to be visible some time ago (I can provide details via email but won’t here for privacy purposes), and just hadn’t gotten a message until now. The support response you received was incorrect; you weren’t affected by any recent changes to the site.

Since there wasn’t anything broken on our end, there shouldn’t be anyone else impacted by this. But as part of making sure that OP wasn’t visible by mistake, I had my team double-checked to make sure our previous fix from last year was properly retroactive. It was.

More generally, I don't think that tricking anyone is a viable way for us to run a business. We’re trying to create a marketplace that can open opportunities for engineers who wouldn’t otherwise have them, and we need the trust of engineers in order to do that.

New comment by ammon in "Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance"

ammon — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 18:51:21 +0000

But how much more important? :) Sorry, could not help myself.

New comment by ammon in "How Bell’s Theorem proved ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real"

ammon — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 21:22:52 +0000

That's exactly what the article we're all commenting on is about!

New comment by ammon in "Rethinking Triplebyte"

ammon — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 22:37:36 +0000

We experimented with this, as well as with trial periods (which are sort of the same thing, but with a time limit). Trial periods ended up being easier to think about and optimize (each account either converts or not at the end of the period). But we may revisit this in the future.

New comment by ammon in "Rethinking Triplebyte"

ammon — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 22:32:17 +0000

We do have discounts for smaller startups (under $10m in funding). Happy to talk about that if you're interested. ammon@triplebyte.com

New comment by ammon in "Rethinking Triplebyte"

ammon — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 21:55:21 +0000

So, under the old model, order 200k engineers applied to us. Because we were exclusive gatekeepers, around 3% of those were "accepted" onto the platform. Around 2/3 of accepted candidates received an offer, and around 1/2 of offers were accepted.

New comment by ammon in "Rethinking Triplebyte"

ammon — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 20:28:44 +0000

The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a commitment from a company (I understand why some companies don't choose to use us.) But it means that once a company signs up, they want to make as many hires as possible through us.

New comment by ammon in "Rethinking Triplebyte"

ammon — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 19:53:03 +0000

I generally agree with the phrase "if you're not paying for a product, you're the product". But the market for engineers is just so lopsided that I think it's less true here. There are a lot of recruiting companies. The only real thing that sets one apart from others is whether they have candidates. So one way to look at it is that yes, we are incentivized to build what companies want, but the main thing they want is for us to have engineers. And the only way we get engineers is by building what engineers want.

That does not fully express my motivations. I am an engineer and find the idea of making the process better for engineers more exciting than making it better for companies. But it explains how I think the incentives work.