Hacker News: skylerwiernik

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Youth Suicides Declined After Creation of National Hotline"

skylerwiernik — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:41:28 +0000

Interesting. What causes this? Could it have to do with the type of person to keep a gun in a safe (has kids, is more cautious in general, etc) or have studies shown that this minor friction is actually enough?

Precise Manipulation with Efficient Online RL

skylerwiernik — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:43:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pi.website/research/rlt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47458010

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

skylerwiernik — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:38:29 +0000

The quotes from those articles (short passages?) are

> He recalls meeting President Trump at an AI and energy summit in Pennsylvania, "where he and I had a good conversation about US leadership in AI,"

> "Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on... This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it."

> "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions. I've seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too." (from a researcher at Anthropic)

I don't think that any of this is particularly damning. Even if you don't like the president, I don't think it's bad to say that you had a good conversation with them. I believe the CEO of NVIDIA has said similar. The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make those companies less trust worthy? What about taking private capital from institutions such as State Street and Blackrock? The last quote seems like more of a reflection than an allegation. It read to me as a desire to do better.

I'm all for not trusting companies, but Anthropic seems to be one of the few that's trying to do good. I think we've seen a lot worse from many of their competitors.

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Signal knows who you're talking to (2023)"

skylerwiernik — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:33:29 +0000

> this feature is very technically complex, and totally useless

Now, to break your confidentiality, Signal would have to have a relatively complex system setup for trying to match up messages and deanonymize people. You could imagine many scenarios where a bad actor (agency) attempts to trick Signal into logging metadata. This now requires a lot more information, and if nothing else would give you a level of deniability.

New comment by skylerwiernik in "M4.6 Earthquake – 2 km ESE of Berkeley, CA"

skylerwiernik — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 11:05:33 +0000

Not public, but some of the factors are listed here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (q2)

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models"

skylerwiernik — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 19:11:22 +0000

> In 2023, Microsoft's Bing chatbot famously adopted an alter-ego called "Sydney,” which declared love for users and made threats of blackmail. More recently, xAI’s Grok chatbot would for a brief period sometimes identify as “MechaHitler” and make antisemitic comments. Other personality changes are subtler but still unsettling, like when models start sucking up to users or making up facts.

Funny that they managed to call out all of their competitors without mentioning any of Claude's bad behavior

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Apple just released a weirdly interesting coding language model"

skylerwiernik — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:02:59 +0000

Here's the paper that they wrote: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20639

It's notable that this was an intern project.

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups"

skylerwiernik — Thu, 29 May 2025 19:41:52 +0000

I wonder if this could be abused by purchasing 2+ refundable tickets, and then canceling all but 1.

Show HN: Kiwii – Query ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more from your URL bar

skylerwiernik — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:22:03 +0000

I found myself often using Google just because it was the easiest to get to, even when there were better tools available, so I built Kiwii. There's no install or extension, just a search link that you paste into your browser settings.

By default !c sends a query to ChatGPT !p sends a query to Perplexity and all other queries go to Google

You can customize your keybinds and add more models in settings. Down the line, I'm planning to build an auto router that will just send your query to the best tool for the job.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44061352

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by skylerwiernik in "OpenAI to buy Jony Ive's io Products for $6.5B"

skylerwiernik — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:08:39 +0000

https://archive.ph/uSXx2

New comment by skylerwiernik in "So Much Blood"

skylerwiernik — Wed, 07 May 2025 22:06:11 +0000

I imagine that they'd get blocked by CORS

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database"

skylerwiernik — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:34:26 +0000

Do you find this to be worse than googlebot somehow?

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Internet in a Box"

skylerwiernik — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 21:41:30 +0000

Someone already thought of this and uploaded all of the contents of the box to a website! You can find it at wikipedia.com

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuck voices"

skylerwiernik — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 15:59:40 +0000

Great video on how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvVSTlbqEI

New comment by skylerwiernik in "NASA Gives 'All Clear' for Asteroid That Seemed to Threaten Earth"

skylerwiernik — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 06:49:11 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20250225043633/https://www.nytim...

New comment by skylerwiernik in "DigiCert: Threat of legal action to stifle Bugzilla discourse"

skylerwiernik — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 06:45:08 +0000

I don't believe that that's a legal filing. DigiCert never filed anything with the courts. That's just a letter to Sectigo threatening to sue.

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs"

skylerwiernik — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:13:56 +0000

New comment by skylerwiernik in "Large Language Models Show Concerning Tendency to Flatter Users"

skylerwiernik — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 23:29:31 +0000

I imagine humans are just as likely if not more likely to do this.

Ask HN: What intelligent forums exist outside of HN?

skylerwiernik — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:16:49 +0000

Twitter has long been declining, and Reddit has recently seemed to get much worse for me. Blind is just for bragging about your salary and making insensitive comments about race and sex.

HN is great, but I’m interested in more than just tech and tech people. Any recommendations?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43011037

Points: 50

# Comments: 48

New comment by skylerwiernik in "California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots"

skylerwiernik — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 02:49:30 +0000

This is clearly undisclosed promotion for vetto.app. alexd127's only other account activity is on this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901553] for the exact same bill.