Not a single person on the Bun team nor Anthropic has yet done anything egregious to market this as anything but a swap to a more memory-safe language with better compiler guarantees.
Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
My take is that most of the buzz is also tied to recent negative opinions of Anthropic themselves due to some of their recent decisions.
The best kind of marketing is when you don’t need to say it aloud by yourself. Yet, this is constantly in HN front page. Maybe engineered or not but marketing regardless.
rooted in a long 30+ year reality. you can engineer the greatest, most secure, most accessible, most ____ thing but if it doesn’t sell those amazeballs engineers will be talking to their recruiters…
I mean, the phrase "Zig to Rust port of Bun" makes little sense even to many professional developers. They may know Rust, might have heard of Zig, very likely don't know what Bun is.
So the fact that this gets any attention at all says something.
Just like how they did the rewrite. It is not longer a small OSS team trying to survive in the world, it's a corporate entity with unlimited access to Anthropic resources. All the doomsayers who were prophesying that Bun will become sellout were right.
I dunno, I am commenting on it mainly because I find the intensity of the anger and accusations of bad faith to be pretty out of proportion with what's actually happening, and I kind of value pushing back on such things to try to moderate the tone of the discussion (not as a devil's advocate thing per se, but more I am more likely to comment if I feel like the average vibe is unreasonable).
The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to do what you're doing, and say what to do if you have a genuine concern:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Huh, I didn't recall that. FWIW I have e-mailed them in the past and gotten detected abusers banned, but didn't this time because it's just a suspicion. Didn't realise posting about hunches was against the guidelines, though, that's my mistake.
If you can increase your reach, why not do it? Also, HN has better reputation among tech circles than Reddit and is less niche than other resources. Modern marketing hits everything.
HN is enormously influential for programmers and employees within the tech industry. Who happen to be exactly who Anthropic, and other AI companies, desperately need adoption from...
I think HN has an outsized influence in the industry, for its size. There are a lot of big tech employees and startup founders reading it. Account purchasing absolutely happens, I've discovered and gotten banned at least a dozen years-old accounts that were blatantly sold and puppeteered by bots in the past. The comments aren't obviously bot-written this time around, so I can't conclusively prove it happened in this case, but it is a thing that happens in general and something to be aware of. There's also vote selling to promote things onto the front page. Given how cheap shilling on HN is, and the fact that many will perceive it to be organic while always viewing straightforwards ads skeptically, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost:effectiveness ratio probably beats any other form of advertising.
Not a single person on the Bun team nor Anthropic has yet done anything egregious to market this as anything but a swap to a more memory-safe language with better compiler guarantees.
Thus far most of the buzz and marketing has been entirely negative from people who are against AI.
My take is that most of the buzz is also tied to recent negative opinions of Anthropic themselves due to some of their recent decisions.
The best kind of marketing is when you don’t need to say it aloud by yourself. Yet, this is constantly in HN front page. Maybe engineered or not but marketing regardless.
engineering is worthless unless you can sell it
What a terribly anti-human sentiment to have.
rooted in a long 30+ year reality. you can engineer the greatest, most secure, most accessible, most ____ thing but if it doesn’t sell those amazeballs engineers will be talking to their recruiters…
* Spend God knows how many dollars in unlimited tokens to do the rewrite
* Make a huge deal out of it how “Claude Code enabled Bun team to rewrite 1+ mil of Zig lines to Rust” and write a blogpost, VCs are salivating
* Basic checks fail
* Let Mythos rip the codebase to shreds, spend God knows how much more
* Write a separate blogpost
* Charlatans and smooth brains clap and defend against “delusional anti-AI mob”
* VCs orgasm even harder
Clap, clap, clap. That’s how you make money, folks.
And btw, we need to get rid of software engineers now.
They didn't make a huge deal about it though. I distinctly remember Jarred coming on here just last week to say stop making a big deal about it.
What counts as "a huge deal"?
I mean, the phrase "Zig to Rust port of Bun" makes little sense even to many professional developers. They may know Rust, might have heard of Zig, very likely don't know what Bun is.
So the fact that this gets any attention at all says something.
And how is the Bun team supposed to work on a million lines of slop rust code?
Just like how they did the rewrite. It is not longer a small OSS team trying to survive in the world, it's a corporate entity with unlimited access to Anthropic resources. All the doomsayers who were prophesying that Bun will become sellout were right.
I think it’s just a corporate rug pull. Anthropic’s needs are the sole priority, all others be damned.
This is my biggest issue with all this.
It's not that they're using AI, it's the massive rug pull on bun users.
Finally someone gets the point of this.
just as overhyped and disappointing?
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I dunno, I am commenting on it mainly because I find the intensity of the anger and accusations of bad faith to be pretty out of proportion with what's actually happening, and I kind of value pushing back on such things to try to moderate the tone of the discussion (not as a devil's advocate thing per se, but more I am more likely to comment if I feel like the average vibe is unreasonable).
The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to do what you're doing, and say what to do if you have a genuine concern:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Huh, I didn't recall that. FWIW I have e-mailed them in the past and gotten detected abusers banned, but didn't this time because it's just a suspicion. Didn't realise posting about hunches was against the guidelines, though, that's my mistake.
I'm not sure that HN is that influential that buying up a few accounts would matter. To what end?
If you can increase your reach, why not do it? Also, HN has better reputation among tech circles than Reddit and is less niche than other resources. Modern marketing hits everything.
HN is enormously influential for programmers and employees within the tech industry. Who happen to be exactly who Anthropic, and other AI companies, desperately need adoption from...
I think HN has an outsized influence in the industry, for its size. There are a lot of big tech employees and startup founders reading it. Account purchasing absolutely happens, I've discovered and gotten banned at least a dozen years-old accounts that were blatantly sold and puppeteered by bots in the past. The comments aren't obviously bot-written this time around, so I can't conclusively prove it happened in this case, but it is a thing that happens in general and something to be aware of. There's also vote selling to promote things onto the front page. Given how cheap shilling on HN is, and the fact that many will perceive it to be organic while always viewing straightforwards ads skeptically, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost:effectiveness ratio probably beats any other form of advertising.
hn appears in google news now
> I've seen a lot of what seems to be inorganic defense of this, including one post from an account that hasn't posted in over a year.
It’s just a standard Pavlovian response of a bootlicker, it can also be triggered if you mention “tax the rich” and “regulate AI hyperscalers”.