The original discussion about the project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746163) is very weird. Lots of call-outs about how the author is some sort of celebrity and random accounts vouching for him, with little discussion on the substance.
Not even the demo on that release works well.
I posted a sharp critique in the original discussion, aiming to be civil while critiquing the project. I may have been a bit terse, and would probably rephrase some of it now to avoid confusion, but I don't think I was ever outwardly disrespectful.
I received several very emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author. They felt very out of place and did not engage substantively with any of the things I said. It was indeed very weird
The author, who I hadn't heard of before yesterday, actually seems like a cool dude. He was quite responsive, normal, and engaged with my feedback, which makes other random accounts being offended on his behalf all the more uncanny
I think people responded that way because you strongly implied he was an unserious vibecoder who was just fooling around, and you called him suspicious as fuck.
Your post and the ones that followed are a good example of the contrarian dynamic that dang often talks about. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
>who was just fooling around
In my own professional life, I've found this to be a very divisive statement. For some, it is a sign of wasting time and effort. For others, they use this to describe themselves when they want to do exploration for the goal of finding improvements, without any clear goal because they have a few ideas but none worth putting forward. I've been told to spend time learning AI and have found that saying "Yeah, I'm playing around with it." was the wrong thing to say because it was seen as not doing anything worthwhile. It doesn't matter that I would also say the majority of my tech skills were developed when I was "playing around".
I wonder if this is purely a linguistics breakdown, or if this is tied to some deeper difference in a person's relationship to tech?
Agree it's divisive, and I would argue it speaks more to a person's perception of work vs play more than a relationship to tech. If (the general) you think that play is for children and work is serious biz, then yeah I could see how you wouldn't take someone seriously when they say they're "playing around with it". It's usually not obvious which attitude a person has though without getting to know them a little bit.
Yes, I think it can be a sign of a very deep difference. When they say "spend time learning AI," they mean work through some teaching materials to learn how to replicate what others are doing. This often doesn't result in a deep understanding, but it can be enough to allow them to do their job.
Ironically, people with this mindset will sometimes ask people who they recognize as having strong skills to share their magic secret, which is assumed to be some books they read, videos they watched, courses they attended, etc. If you tell them that experimenting, playing around, etc. is a key element, they may assume you're just selfishly hoarding your fount of knowledge.
> called him suspicious as fuck
I don’t see anything from your parent commenter on the other thread that deserves that classification. On the contrary, while they initially had suspicious of vibe coding, on later comments they are cordial and even admit their own misunderstanding.
What am I missing? Where does “called him suspicious as fuck” come from?
Edit: Answered below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754311). Thank you.
"you [...] sound sus af" at the end of the comment. sus means suspicious and af stands for as fuck.
Thank you. I did indeed miss that. I did do a ⌘F for the individual words, but it didn’t occur to me they could’ve been written like that.
To be fair, writing "sus af" is different from writing "suspicious as fuck" (just like "wtf" reads differently from "what the fuck", etc).
Not to mention the author themselves say "Yes, there's a lot of vibe-coding in many places [...] We'll prune AI slop over time.", and then they both moved on to discussing the actual questions.
The whole "Wow, looks AI" > "Yeah, some of it is, we'll fix it later" was such a small part of the conversation, but then there are countless of other people chiming in about specifically the "Is It Slop Or Not?", rather than the meat of the conversation. And here we are adding even more meta-comments about it.
OOTL, could you give a link to a relevant @dang post?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140587
> I received several very emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author
I took a look and honestly the replies were a lot more reasonable than I was expecting them to be. I don't think it's that out of place for people to inform you that the author has been in this space for some time and has prior work to look at (pre-vibe coding era). Really there was one reply citing his prior work, you responded to it calling it a very strange reply and were "very confused" why they would point to his history, even though you had just said things like:
>I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering
To me, it makes sense why someone would say the author has been interested in this area for a long time and pointed you to some prior work that was not vibe-coded, given your comment strongly implies they are just messing around and don't know much about the field.
To be clear, I share much of your feelings in your original comment. I just felt the replies weren't so unreasonable either. At least, I was expecting them to be a lot worse.
I don't think it was reasonable to call other poster a bully academic in need of a therapist. Calling the project vibecoded (perj.) and sus is very mild compared to what Reviewer #2 would have to say.
I agree with the other poster that is was very suspicious initially (sus af is not how I would put it, that sounds like a generational term) the author nuked their commit history while simultaneously pointing to a (Fable-written) paper which referenced the commit history in benchmarks. Then they seemingly had no understanding of why that's trust-breaking.
So to me, it sounds like the author didn't even read the paper they wrote, because otherwise they'd have remembered referencing the commit history, and wouldn't be asking us why we'd even care about it. “They” told us care! I'm glad they restored it but apparently that wouldn't have happened without the criticism.
I’ve posted a follow up somewhere else in this thread about how I can retroactively see why some people would read rudeness in my comment. Even though this isn’t intended, I agree I need better choice of words
What I didn’t understand when expressing confusion with the responses, and still don’t, is the personal nature of the response. It wasn’t pushing back against anything I said really, moreso it tried to bring up the credentials of the speaker; and, I guess this feels a nonsequitr
Like, if I say “I have these problems with thing X”, it doesn’t really matter who made X. Sure, it’s context I didn’t have and there is something to be gained in saying it; but, it doesn’t really change any of the critiques I had. Appealing to the authority of the creator doesn’t engage with nearly everything I said
> I guess this feels a nonsequitr
How is that a non-sequitur? You're the one who brought up the topic of credibility in the first place. The comment was simply made in response to that.
It was a fair critique, but if you're looking for feedback I think people were probably responding to your last line.
"I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" comes across as very backhanded and condescending. It sounds like you may have actually meant that genuinely, but it doesn't read that way in text form.
"you sound sus af" is not respectful or constructive in my opinion. It's a description of your own feelings, not a critique of the project, and there's not really any way for the author to respond besides ignoring it or saying "sorry you feel that way" or something.
I think that line undermines the rest of your comment, because I'm left thinking that you don't really expect good answers to your questions and you just think the whole thing is dumb.
Yeah, reading it again it sounds far bitchier than initially intended. Thanks for the response
I was writing the comment very stream of consciousness and not really think about how it may come across
If I were trying to boil down what I’m attempting to communicate, it would be 1. The project seems cool, but it’s also making some very strong claims that I’m hesitant to accept
2. The coolness of the thing is undermined by the presentation of it. It comes across as putting the cart is put before the horse, and the overly strong claims and marketing speak read as trying to rhetorically sway the audience rather than engage with them technically.
3. I genuinely am happy that the creator made this, but modulo the above worries I think it should be reeled in a bit. In part because of the concerns I have about the content, and further because it is the kind of language that I expect others to have a strong averse reaction to. Possibly to the point of also reaching the top of HN with their negative response
To a friend, it might be easy to capture some of this message with “you sounds sus af”, but to a stranger in the internet I see how I just sound like a jerk. Words do matter, and I think I’ll be more careful about this in the future
I'm not familiar with the author, and I'm still mildly offended by your comment.
If I have years of experience on the topic and invested significant time into the project, I'd not be as civil as the author if someone came in and essentially called it vibecoded slop.
There is nothing weird about how others pointed out that the project appears to have merit contrary to how it at first might have looked to you.
You posted a passive aggressive as personam and are (or at least act) surprised for getting called out.
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If this is your first HN account and you haven't seen the site in the prior decade, the "emotionally charged responses centered in the personal credentials of the author" is the SOP. The site has yielded to that attitude because dang never enforced a sensible code of conduct, and relies mostly on favoritism and in-groups. Who says is more important than what is said, and the critiques you give are ranked according to whom you are critical of.
Think of this as a propaganda channel of a VC startup incubator who is brazenly looking for a product-market fit for anything and everything AI. Look at the roster of the recent startups and how many are AI-focused. Adjust expectations from there.
Do you have examples of sites that you prefer that achieve this, or have a relatively high signal to noise ratio that also have a high volume of discussion? (preferrably not an individual's blog + comment section)
Lobste.rs
Hmm.. anything else?
I am relatively new to the site, and I guess I’m just surprised by this. I thought the dweebs here would mostly care about the technical content
But I guess I totally ignored the YC context in that interpretation
The whole original conversation was very smelly from the very start, 20k stars included on the GitHub page with lost history.
The Bend1 launch was very successful, with 1000+ hn upvotes [0] and with several youtube videos with up to 1M+ views [1] [2] - that's where a lot of the popularity came from, I believe. They just recycled the Bend1 repo for Bend2 even though it's a completely different language.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390287
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOQmKTFzYY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaytZOiX3fs
> ...on the GitHub page with lost history.
> They just recycled the Bend1 repo for Bend2 even though it's a completely different language.
Why would you kill the source history of Bend1 completely if it has 20K stars? You can only do that if Bend1 has no users at all right?
Does that meant that Bend1 isn't actually successful in its own right but rather only as a marketing project?
I wasn't one of the suspicious people but I am now.
(author here) Bend1 indeed has no significant active userbase
I don't think that means it was "unsuccessful" in the sense you imply, though, because the project was never meant to be used in production. It was there to display a milestone (running inets on the GPU) and I was very clear it wasn't ready to be used yet. For example, it had only 24-bit integers, a 2 GB memory cap, and other limitations that made it unpractical. I still don't know why it has so many stars. I posted it to hacker news and that just happened. I guess it just went viral without really being ready yet, which got us to where we are now.
Anyway the commit history is back now. I apologize for nuking it
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It _is_ sus, but you should be willing to forgive. It's not like it was done out of animus, and I assume that an academic/foreigner is unaccustomed to how production software conventions work. Their baseline is less important, more important is how quickly they learn/adopt "best practices". Y-intercept, slope, etc.
I say this as literally the first HN comment to call them out on this.
it becomes more sus as the superfans come out
the author here is providing commentary on the vibe coding era, bend is just one example of people having ai build things for them they don't understand or haven't researched sufficiently, at least start with a vibe-search skill before the vibe-coding begins
Ai is only good at a task when the human driver is good at that task, and this is far more narrow than most realize. Someone who knows how to program will still fail on many programming tasks with agents, the field has far too much for any one person to know.
It sounds even worse. Actually far worse. It's a project already in use and the author just nuked the whole git history?
It's a research language, of the more experimental and niche type.
No one uses it seriously, and the author since then reverted the nuking of the git history.
Does anyone know where they bought the popularity and contributors from? I would like to do this for my joke language to fool unsuspecting users into using it seriously
Probably at the same market where they sell snark. You may want to sell your excess of it, especially that as mentioned there were a popular (as in got to HN frontpage multiple times) version 1 and it's all legit and honest work, getting uncalled criticism?
Please do not shill your crypto here, nobody wants to buy snarkcoin
The history is back...
Yeah 100% those are purchased/fake
Lean4 itself has 9k
I don’t they are purchased or fake.
I can unequivocally claim that Victor receives at least two orders of magnitude more social media engagement, while Lean likely has 4-5 more magnitudes of actual users.
Serious users of Lean simply have no need or reason to star the repository.
(Author here) What about it isn't working for you?
Also, wrote a response to this whole thread here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753898
I cannot understand the hostility being directed towards you for this project. It seems very interesting. Your reply was very well thought out. I am very confused.
Seems to be a fair deal of astroturfing going on for some unknown reason. I can't tell if it's intentional to drum up controversy, or it's genuine because people are bitter about this for some reason.
I think people are genuinely bitter about it, that's usually how my projects are received
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Approach itself looked impractical to me for any non-trivial system, like domain centric system of records systems which can have 100s if not 1000s of laws. Though it can be tried as a side parallel thread to see if system is still compliant and following right first principals after a few years from its inception.
I would rather wait to see how it gets adopted, if at all. Anyone aware of early reviews of the adopters of bend 2?
As a matter of fact, I've been poking at this from a slightly different direction: "axioms and invariants" within home automation scenes.
Invariants were like "if outside temp < 40 or inside temp < 65: heater.minTemp( 65 )"
Axioms were like: "if {we're home} and it's {not a holiday} the house should be {comfortable temperature}".prompt
...and then that would get decomposed and translated into interlocking code for the scene(s). I'll have to look at this language a little more closely with those kinds of constraints in mind!
You're kindof translating `*.prompt` to either prolog (yucky!), lisp, lua, or javascript (for inspectability/debuggability), but this whole bend thing might be an exact fit for the problem space! Limited set of objects and states, bounded set of "invariants" (laws), and layering on top the general state modification activities (either "evaluated every 5 minutes and reconciled" or "set the scene xyz...").
Hmm, in your example, temperature is fully measurable but there might be a slight challenge in measuring if "If we are at home". Since for this you need to define more variants with measurements from motion sensors, pressure or weight sensors on beds or sofas, if a device has got connected to wifi, etc.
By the time your first round of beta testing is over, you may have quite a handful of such axioms and variants, which have been humanly validated!
Have you done any such experiment in this space?
It was my "vibe coding playground" experiment. I haven't gotten anything solid fleshed out, but conceptually I wanted the "safety layer" to only permit fully expanded, concrete references.
Then break plain language requests into tool-calling-ish shared functions [atHome(), isHoliday(), comfyTemp(), ...] and basically throw "linker errors" if a concept didn't have a definition, eg: "ERROR: concept 'comfortable temperature' not defined..."
...and yes: be able to highlight overlaps or conflicting instructions at the semantic layer... those being less important than conflicts at the safety/invariant layer.
The idea was to have a bunch of basically "is_comfy_temp.prompt" => "is_comfy_temp.lisp" and be able to right click on any of the prompts and "show source" to understand, debug, simulate, validate, etc.
As you get real trials you end up with a foundational "StdLib" of at least necessary concepts although yours and mine might contain different data/preferences. And being able to edit "comfyTemp()" in one place as opposed to spread out in a bunch of different home automations (eg: isSummer vs isWinter else also: ifHumidity && upcomingWeather || realtimeElectricRates, etc...)
>Not even the demo on that release works well.
>vibe-coded project
many such cases
The whole thing smells like somebody trying to pull an LLM-fueled Sokal Hoax on the programming world.
HN keeps being gamed to keep vibe coded slop on the front page and give it credibility. There was another language project a few weeks ago called ‘Wyzer’ that was just completely generated and largely nonsensical (didn’t do the lofty things the documentation claimed it did) and all the comments were glowing and harshly dismissive of any critique, it was bizarre
The number of times I've looked into something that was highly upvoted and purported to solve a problem only for it to be unreadable crap that barely functions has definitely skyrocketed over the past few years. In a way it's similar to how 80% of people only read the headline, except it's psychosis around the equivalent of a dressed up pile of trash.
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