7 ms·

Software Pump and Dump

321 points by brisky 8mo ago

XCSme 7mo ago
This trend is wild. I’ve seen so many hype projects where the code barely works and app is buggy as it can be...
smcin 8mo ago
Webpage is down for me?
- zombot 8mo ago
  Not for me.
- andOlga 8mo ago
  Appears to be running on plain HTTP, and trying to access it over HTTPS presents a bad cert and then redirects somewhere incomprehensible. No idea what the domain owner is doing here.
  - mixtureoftakes 8mo ago
    extremely bad takes CHECK broken cert CHECK somehow top of front page CHECK
pell 8mo ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)
TZubiri 8mo ago
Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation. However 2 things are very specific to this case: 1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin. 2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.
behnamoh 8mo ago
Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.
- piker 8mo ago
  Hah you had me until “best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc.”
nkrisc 8mo ago
I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone? I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
- kotaKat 8mo ago
  People can spin up magic crypto coins backed by other crypto coins at the push of a button. Dirtbag crypto people will spin up a coin in the name of someone's software product, give the project owner a bunch of coin, make them feel special like they're suddenly part of lots of money, and then astroturf and pump the coin as much as they can before setting up for a rugpull by either the project owner trying to cash out, or the crypto folks trying to finish the job off.
  - DANmode 8mo ago
    or, just never involve the original project itself, which is likely what’s unknowingly being described here: > However CLAWD coin tokens are kicking off right now and people are being lured into buying them as the hype grows.
  - nkrisc 8mo ago
    So I guess it’s just FOMO, because I still can’t really relate to why anyone would actually buy any of those coins.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - jaapz 8mo ago
      Exactly. People are buying those coins because they believe other people will buy them, increasing their value.
macmac_mac 8mo ago
FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get: some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it, a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it, people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind, a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
- mr-ron 8mo ago
  I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
  - 1dom 8mo ago
    I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them. "x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x. When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised". I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces? I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
    - theappsecguy 8mo ago
      Exactly this. Before crypto it was Big Data, before that it was Low-code platforms
      - adrianwaj 8mo ago
        Before crypto, don't forget the ProgrammableWeb and all the mashups that ensued, with programmableweb.com shutting down in 2023. 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.programmableweb.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.progra... Trustless Agents and the Agentic Economy is now in that cycle. Will it stick? Builders gotta build something. 2026: https://agentscan.info/ https://agentscan.info/ I am guessing this is sort of ProgrammableWeb 2.0. Disintermediation is the common thread in all of this. Will be interesting to see solutions arising for developers to monetize their open-source contributions. Pull Request = Push Demand so perhaps there should be a cost attached to that especially knowing that AI will eventually train on it.
nenadg 8mo ago
>A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026 i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.
- sublinear 8mo ago
  This is also best practice for anything else you may be held accountable for. To wait is to maximize information and efficiency in execution.
IMTDb 8mo ago
> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation. Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way. I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill? If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
- Craighead 8mo ago
  This is a stunning false equivalency and is an irresponsible comparison.
  - falcor84 8mo ago
    If you want to contribute something to the discussion, do that, rather than just saying that you don't like the parent's argument, that's what the down button is for.
  - quantummagic 8mo ago
    You've made an emotional declaration, without an argument to justify it. For instance, it would be helpful to understand why you think it's a false equivalency, and in what way it is irresponsible.
- a2128 8mo ago
  It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system
steveBK123 8mo ago
Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  As someone who is currently looking to setup local CI for macOS hardware, that'd be neat :) Unrelated; For CI, what hardware would people recommend? I'm choosing between mac Mini (M4 Pro) and Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) but haven't digged into the CPU difference yet to understand what would be best. Opinions?
  - swiftcoder 8mo ago
    How heavy is your CI workload? Even the base Mac Mini is equipped with a pretty beefy CPU, but obviously it has limited RAM/storage (although the latter can be solved with a cheap external SSD enclosure).
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      It's basically for private/personal usage, almost no concurrent jobs ever, but I don't have the entire day to wait for builds. Doing maybe 10-12 builds per day on average. Storage won't be an issue, it'll be networked from outside of the box, but I'm curious if there is massive difference in performance between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra. FWIW, I'm mostly doing Rust builds at the moment.
      - ewpratten 8mo ago
        I’m doing that (similar scale and same language) with a base model M4 mini. Works great. Anything more is overkill imo.
        embedding-shape 8mo ago
        Thanks! Yeah, guess it's mostly nitpicky choice between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra, and both would work fine ultimately.
kshri24 8mo ago
What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment. It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack. 2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
- tyingq 8mo ago
  It will be interesting to watch how they decide what new data to train on if most of it is low quality.
- gassi 8mo ago
  In the last 6 months we've seen no fewer then a dozen vibe coded/AI assisted open source, self hosted projects launch that complete against ours. So far all but one has fizzled out, with the same pattern each time: announcement, repo with 1 giant commit, 2-4 months of feature releases, loss of interest from the author, and finally abandonment. I expect once users get burnt enough time, they'll stop adopting the new cool thing until it's been out long enough with consistent releases.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  I'm gonna blow your mind a bit here, but this isn't just the fault of the people making the software, it's also the fault of the vast majority of the people here and on the internet in general. Quality doesn't get your attention. The truth is building a project is like a lottery ticket, and there's hard diminishing returns on time invested in quality in terms of payoff. If I told you you could spend 10x more time for a 2x increase in probability of success, if you were trying to make a living from your creativity, you would be stupid to spend the extra time, it's a horrible investment. The people spamming half baked projects that they quickly abandon if they don't get traction are being rational. People like me that grind on unsexy process bottlenecks and try to keep refining into something really nice are the irrational ones.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
postalcoder 8mo ago
The top three stories on hn right now: 1. ▲ Moltbook (moltbook.com) 538 points by teej 8 hours ago | hide | 293 comments 2. ▲ Software Pump and Dump (tautvilas.lt) 108 points by brisky 5 hours ago | hide | 25 comments 3. ▲ OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again (openclaw.ai) 256 points by ed 6 hours ago | hide | 110 comments This is art.
- u_sama 8mo ago
  Life is beautiful, you have both sides of religious sects of AI here. The iconoclasts and the believers, which ends up in funny situations like this
  - rodrigodlu 8mo ago
    Well I do intend to use software to automate these interactions, because in my country whatsapp groups are unmanageable without this. Imagine the group of parents of my kids schools sending 100 to 300 messages per day with different subjects. The issue is. I also have personal and important chats that I don't want to share with an vibe coded AI software without any canaries taking the shot first. And I'm talking as a person that is using almost all my Claude max subscription every week. But I do verify ALL of the code that I'm delivering. And I'm even using Gemini as an adversarial LLM to review Claude generated code. Does this that gigantic project set any standards for this? I was not able to find on their documentation. So it's funny indeed, but for now I'm upvoting this one even being a confident moderate person. :)
- bambax 8mo ago
  Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens. Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.
siliconc0w 8mo ago
The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame. On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
- krackers 8mo ago
  It's an attention market. You can monetize attention directly, speculate on anything that you believe will receive attention, go short on things you believe are overhyped. In that sense, it's not much different from prediction markets except even more anarchist.
cactusplant7374 8mo ago
> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it. Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
spicyusername 8mo ago
People are still buying shitcoins in 2026!? I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...
- kreetx 8mo ago
  For the record, Bitcoin had an all-time-high just a few months ago.
  - spicyusername 8mo ago
    Incredible. Truly, the market can remain irrational...
    - kreetx 8mo ago
      It may just be that our pension funds have recently entered this asset, too.
throwaw12 8mo ago
I think Pump should happen in any new industry. Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas. Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop. But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump. 1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures 2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3 3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases 4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue. 5. Search engines 6. Social networks We need that Pump
- janc_ 8mo ago
  “Pump & Dump” has a very specific meaning here, something that is essentially a scam to cheat people out of their money, and not an actual honest attempt to create something new…
- 010101010101 8mo ago
  Pump and dump is not the same as competition resulting in winners and losers, it’s a grift by the losers to profit at the expense of users through deception.
  - raincole 8mo ago
    And this is why the OOP article makes zero sense. How is Cursor a grift to profit at the expense of users? Users use Cursor because they want to write code faster. Whether writing code faster is an inherently good thing is up to the users. Was Visual Studio (premium version once sold at ~$5000, btw) a pump & dump?
kreetx 8mo ago
Please host your site on https!
- DANmode 8mo ago
  Are you afraid of the content being MITM?
an0malous 8mo ago
I would add “being acquired by another startup experiencing FOMO that they might miss out on the latest AI trend” as an alternative path to profiting off the grift
radarsat1 8mo ago
> The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation. Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now. It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out. The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere. And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly. So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job. This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.
crespire 8mo ago
How timely, I was just thinking about this today! Sure, we can write code quickly and in copious amounts, but the challenge of software engineering (at least in my imagination) has always been maintaining and upkeeping it.
jaffee 8mo ago
Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.
- yunohn 8mo ago
  Why is HN so susceptible to appeals to authority and constant mild-severe deification of other humans?
  - habinero 8mo ago
    I don't get it, either. There's an entire class of people on here who just run around looking for anyone to lead them. I had a guy crash out after I told him that "so and so said Thing was good" was not sufficient to say whether Thing was good or not. I told him he needed to develop enough skill to determine that for himself or he'd constantly fall for hype. My dude pasted a ChatGPT list of engineers who had ever said anything about LLMs and was like ARE THEY ALL WRONG?? ... did you listen to nothing I said? lol
    - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
      You’re still not responding to what I actually said. No one claimed “X said it’s good, therefore it’s good.” The point was that ignoring what experienced people say entirely is just as dumb as following them blindly. You told me to “think for myself.” Great. Thinking for yourself doesn’t mean pretending expert opinion doesn’t exist. It means weighing it against your own understanding. That’s literally how learning works. Calling it a “ChatGPT list” is just you dodging the question. If those people are wrong, explain why. If some are right for bad reasons, name them. Laughing and changing the subject isn’t an argument. You’re shadowboxing a strawman and congratulating yourself for winning.
      - yunohn 8mo ago
        The reason is the crypto pump & dump - literally no other reasoning is required for my personal conclusion.
alansaber 8mo ago
Crypto has been putting the big bucks into marketing forever. See the telegram NFT push with mma atheletes, etc. This has just been one of their more successful marketing vectors.

321 points by brisky 8mo ago

XCSme 7mo ago

This trend is wild. I’ve seen so many hype projects where the code barely works and app is buggy as it can be...

smcin 8mo ago

Webpage is down for me?

zombot 8mo ago
Not for me.
andOlga 8mo ago
Appears to be running on plain HTTP, and trying to access it over HTTPS presents a bad cert and then redirects somewhere incomprehensible. No idea what the domain owner is doing here.
- mixtureoftakes 8mo ago
  extremely bad takes CHECK broken cert CHECK somehow top of front page CHECK

pell 8mo ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)

TZubiri 8mo ago

Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation. However 2 things are very specific to this case: 1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin. 2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.

behnamoh 8mo ago

Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.

piker 8mo ago
Hah you had me until “best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc.”

nkrisc 8mo ago

I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone? I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.

kotaKat 8mo ago
People can spin up magic crypto coins backed by other crypto coins at the push of a button. Dirtbag crypto people will spin up a coin in the name of someone's software product, give the project owner a bunch of coin, make them feel special like they're suddenly part of lots of money, and then astroturf and pump the coin as much as they can before setting up for a rugpull by either the project owner trying to cash out, or the crypto folks trying to finish the job off.
- DANmode 8mo ago
  or, just never involve the original project itself, which is likely what’s unknowingly being described here: > However CLAWD coin tokens are kicking off right now and people are being lured into buying them as the hype grows.
- nkrisc 8mo ago
  So I guess it’s just FOMO, because I still can’t really relate to why anyone would actually buy any of those coins.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jaapz 8mo ago
    Exactly. People are buying those coins because they believe other people will buy them, increasing their value.

macmac_mac 8mo ago

FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get: some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it, a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it, people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind, a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.

mr-ron 8mo ago
I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
- 1dom 8mo ago
  I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them. "x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x. When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised". I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces? I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
  - theappsecguy 8mo ago
    Exactly this. Before crypto it was Big Data, before that it was Low-code platforms
    - adrianwaj 8mo ago
      Before crypto, don't forget the ProgrammableWeb and all the mashups that ensued, with programmableweb.com shutting down in 2023. 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.programmableweb.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.progra... Trustless Agents and the Agentic Economy is now in that cycle. Will it stick? Builders gotta build something. 2026: https://agentscan.info/ https://agentscan.info/ I am guessing this is sort of ProgrammableWeb 2.0. Disintermediation is the common thread in all of this. Will be interesting to see solutions arising for developers to monetize their open-source contributions. Pull Request = Push Demand so perhaps there should be a cost attached to that especially knowing that AI will eventually train on it.

nenadg 8mo ago

>A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026 i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.

sublinear 8mo ago
This is also best practice for anything else you may be held accountable for. To wait is to maximize information and efficiency in execution.

IMTDb 8mo ago

> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation. Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way. I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill? If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.

Craighead 8mo ago
This is a stunning false equivalency and is an irresponsible comparison.
- falcor84 8mo ago
  If you want to contribute something to the discussion, do that, rather than just saying that you don't like the parent's argument, that's what the down button is for.
- quantummagic 8mo ago
  You've made an emotional declaration, without an argument to justify it. For instance, it would be helpful to understand why you think it's a false equivalency, and in what way it is irresponsible.
a2128 8mo ago
It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system

steveBK123 8mo ago

Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully

embedding-shape 8mo ago
As someone who is currently looking to setup local CI for macOS hardware, that'd be neat :) Unrelated; For CI, what hardware would people recommend? I'm choosing between mac Mini (M4 Pro) and Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) but haven't digged into the CPU difference yet to understand what would be best. Opinions?
- swiftcoder 8mo ago
  How heavy is your CI workload? Even the base Mac Mini is equipped with a pretty beefy CPU, but obviously it has limited RAM/storage (although the latter can be solved with a cheap external SSD enclosure).
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    It's basically for private/personal usage, almost no concurrent jobs ever, but I don't have the entire day to wait for builds. Doing maybe 10-12 builds per day on average. Storage won't be an issue, it'll be networked from outside of the box, but I'm curious if there is massive difference in performance between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra. FWIW, I'm mostly doing Rust builds at the moment.
    - ewpratten 8mo ago
      I’m doing that (similar scale and same language) with a base model M4 mini. Works great. Anything more is overkill imo.
      - embedding-shape 8mo ago
        Thanks! Yeah, guess it's mostly nitpicky choice between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra, and both would work fine ultimately.

kshri24 8mo ago

What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment. It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack. 2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.

tyingq 8mo ago
It will be interesting to watch how they decide what new data to train on if most of it is low quality.
gassi 8mo ago
In the last 6 months we've seen no fewer then a dozen vibe coded/AI assisted open source, self hosted projects launch that complete against ours. So far all but one has fizzled out, with the same pattern each time: announcement, repo with 1 giant commit, 2-4 months of feature releases, loss of interest from the author, and finally abandonment. I expect once users get burnt enough time, they'll stop adopting the new cool thing until it's been out long enough with consistent releases.
CuriouslyC 8mo ago
I'm gonna blow your mind a bit here, but this isn't just the fault of the people making the software, it's also the fault of the vast majority of the people here and on the internet in general. Quality doesn't get your attention. The truth is building a project is like a lottery ticket, and there's hard diminishing returns on time invested in quality in terms of payoff. If I told you you could spend 10x more time for a 2x increase in probability of success, if you were trying to make a living from your creativity, you would be stupid to spend the extra time, it's a horrible investment. The people spamming half baked projects that they quickly abandon if they don't get traction are being rational. People like me that grind on unsexy process bottlenecks and try to keep refining into something really nice are the irrational ones.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

postalcoder 8mo ago

The top three stories on hn right now: 1. ▲ Moltbook (moltbook.com) 538 points by teej 8 hours ago | hide | 293 comments 2. ▲ Software Pump and Dump (tautvilas.lt) 108 points by brisky 5 hours ago | hide | 25 comments 3. ▲ OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again (openclaw.ai) 256 points by ed 6 hours ago | hide | 110 comments This is art.

u_sama 8mo ago
Life is beautiful, you have both sides of religious sects of AI here. The iconoclasts and the believers, which ends up in funny situations like this
- rodrigodlu 8mo ago
  Well I do intend to use software to automate these interactions, because in my country whatsapp groups are unmanageable without this. Imagine the group of parents of my kids schools sending 100 to 300 messages per day with different subjects. The issue is. I also have personal and important chats that I don't want to share with an vibe coded AI software without any canaries taking the shot first. And I'm talking as a person that is using almost all my Claude max subscription every week. But I do verify ALL of the code that I'm delivering. And I'm even using Gemini as an adversarial LLM to review Claude generated code. Does this that gigantic project set any standards for this? I was not able to find on their documentation. So it's funny indeed, but for now I'm upvoting this one even being a confident moderate person. :)
bambax 8mo ago
Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens. Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.

siliconc0w 8mo ago

The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame. On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?

krackers 8mo ago
It's an attention market. You can monetize attention directly, speculate on anything that you believe will receive attention, go short on things you believe are overhyped. In that sense, it's not much different from prediction markets except even more anarchist.

cactusplant7374 8mo ago

> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it. Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.

spicyusername 8mo ago

People are still buying shitcoins in 2026!? I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...

kreetx 8mo ago
For the record, Bitcoin had an all-time-high just a few months ago.
- spicyusername 8mo ago
  Incredible. Truly, the market can remain irrational...
  - kreetx 8mo ago
    It may just be that our pension funds have recently entered this asset, too.

throwaw12 8mo ago

I think Pump should happen in any new industry. Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas. Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop. But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump. 1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures 2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3 3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases 4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue. 5. Search engines 6. Social networks We need that Pump

janc_ 8mo ago
“Pump & Dump” has a very specific meaning here, something that is essentially a scam to cheat people out of their money, and not an actual honest attempt to create something new…
010101010101 8mo ago
Pump and dump is not the same as competition resulting in winners and losers, it’s a grift by the losers to profit at the expense of users through deception.
- raincole 8mo ago
  And this is why the OOP article makes zero sense. How is Cursor a grift to profit at the expense of users? Users use Cursor because they want to write code faster. Whether writing code faster is an inherently good thing is up to the users. Was Visual Studio (premium version once sold at ~$5000, btw) a pump & dump?

kreetx 8mo ago

Please host your site on https!

DANmode 8mo ago
Are you afraid of the content being MITM?

an0malous 8mo ago

I would add “being acquired by another startup experiencing FOMO that they might miss out on the latest AI trend” as an alternative path to profiting off the grift

radarsat1 8mo ago

> The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation. Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now. It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out. The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere. And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly. So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job. This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.

crespire 8mo ago

How timely, I was just thinking about this today! Sure, we can write code quickly and in copious amounts, but the challenge of software engineering (at least in my imagination) has always been maintaining and upkeeping it.

jaffee 8mo ago

Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.

yunohn 8mo ago
Why is HN so susceptible to appeals to authority and constant mild-severe deification of other humans?
- habinero 8mo ago
  I don't get it, either. There's an entire class of people on here who just run around looking for anyone to lead them. I had a guy crash out after I told him that "so and so said Thing was good" was not sufficient to say whether Thing was good or not. I told him he needed to develop enough skill to determine that for himself or he'd constantly fall for hype. My dude pasted a ChatGPT list of engineers who had ever said anything about LLMs and was like ARE THEY ALL WRONG?? ... did you listen to nothing I said? lol
  - threethirtytwo 8mo ago
    You’re still not responding to what I actually said. No one claimed “X said it’s good, therefore it’s good.” The point was that ignoring what experienced people say entirely is just as dumb as following them blindly. You told me to “think for myself.” Great. Thinking for yourself doesn’t mean pretending expert opinion doesn’t exist. It means weighing it against your own understanding. That’s literally how learning works. Calling it a “ChatGPT list” is just you dodging the question. If those people are wrong, explain why. If some are right for bad reasons, name them. Laughing and changing the subject isn’t an argument. You’re shadowboxing a strawman and congratulating yourself for winning.
    - yunohn 8mo ago
      The reason is the crypto pump & dump - literally no other reasoning is required for my personal conclusion.

alansaber 8mo ago

Crypto has been putting the big bucks into marketing forever. See the telegram NFT push with mma atheletes, etc. This has just been one of their more successful marketing vectors.