8 ms·

The original discussion about the project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746163) is very weird. Lots of c

by pu_pe 10d ago

The original discussion about the project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746163 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.

larodi 10d ago
The whole original conversation was very smelly from the very start, 20k stars included on the GitHub page with lost history.
- monster_truck 10d ago
  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
  - deleted 10d ago
    [deleted]
  - gf000 10d ago
    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?
    - monster_truck 10d ago
      Please do not shill your crypto here, nobody wants to buy snarkcoin
- nylonstrung 10d ago
  Yeah 100% those are purchased/fake Lean4 itself has 9k
  - steego 10d ago
    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.
    - deleted 10d ago
      [deleted]
- marvinborner 10d ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390287 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOQmKTFzYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOQmKTFzYY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaytZOiX3fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaytZOiX3fs
  - bhouston 10d ago
    > ...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.
    - LightMachine 10d ago
      (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
      - jdiaz97 10d ago
        [flagged]
        10d ago
- LightMachine 10d ago
  The history is back...
guhcampos 10d ago
We know what kind of turf that is.
stschaef 10d ago
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
- Gracana 10d ago
  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&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - perching_aix 10d ago
    OOTL, could you give a link to a relevant @dang post?
    - latexr 10d ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140587
  - latexr 10d ago
    > 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?
gps372 10d ago
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?
- ramses0 10d ago
  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...").
  - gps372 10d ago
    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?
    - ramses0 9d ago
      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...)
HNModsSuck2 10d ago
[dead]
LightMachine 10d ago
What about it isn't working for you?
- maroonballoon 10d ago
  [dead]
- gravypod 10d ago
  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.
  - yellowmoonx 10d ago
    [dead]
  - nullbio 10d ago
    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.
    - LightMachine 10d ago
      I think people are genuinely bitter about it, that's usually how my projects are received
  - LowIqHn 10d ago
    [dead]
dwroberts 10d ago
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
- fzeroracer 10d ago
  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.
octoberfranklin 10d ago
The whole thing smells like somebody trying to pull an LLM-fueled Sokal Hoax on the programming world.
jdiaz97 10d ago
>Not even the demo on that release works well. >vibe-coded project many such cases

by pu_pe 10d ago

larodi 10d ago

The whole original conversation was very smelly from the very start, 20k stars included on the GitHub page with lost history.

monster_truck 10d ago
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
- deleted 10d ago
  [deleted]
- gf000 10d ago
  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?
  - monster_truck 10d ago
    Please do not shill your crypto here, nobody wants to buy snarkcoin
nylonstrung 10d ago
Yeah 100% those are purchased/fake Lean4 itself has 9k
- steego 10d ago
  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.
  - deleted 10d ago
    [deleted]
marvinborner 10d ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390287 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOQmKTFzYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOQmKTFzYY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaytZOiX3fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaytZOiX3fs
- bhouston 10d ago
  > ...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.
  - LightMachine 10d ago
    (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
    - jdiaz97 10d ago
      [flagged]
      - 10d ago
LightMachine 10d ago
The history is back...

guhcampos 10d ago

We know what kind of turf that is.

stschaef 10d ago

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

Gracana 10d ago
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&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- perching_aix 10d ago
  OOTL, could you give a link to a relevant @dang post?
  - latexr 10d ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140587
- latexr 10d ago
  > 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?

gps372 10d ago

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?

ramses0 10d ago
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...").
- gps372 10d ago
  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?
  - ramses0 9d ago
    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...)

HNModsSuck2 10d ago

[dead]

LightMachine 10d ago

What about it isn't working for you?

maroonballoon 10d ago
[dead]
gravypod 10d ago
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.
- yellowmoonx 10d ago
  [dead]
- nullbio 10d ago
  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.
  - LightMachine 10d ago
    I think people are genuinely bitter about it, that's usually how my projects are received
- LowIqHn 10d ago
  [dead]

dwroberts 10d ago

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

fzeroracer 10d ago
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.

octoberfranklin 10d ago

The whole thing smells like somebody trying to pull an LLM-fueled Sokal Hoax on the programming world.

jdiaz97 10d ago

>Not even the demo on that release works well. >vibe-coded project many such cases