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
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”.
>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.
This is also best practice for anything else you may be held accountable for.
To wait is to maximize information and efficiency in execution.
> 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.
I don't think that most research starts with the idea of being a crypto rugpull. Many research labs and startups fail, and that is fine, you dont have to double down and drag a bunch of people into the mud with you because of that, which is what a lot of the example the author points to.
In some sense I just feel like this is another way to gamble, which in general is seeing an unprecedented growth with Polymarket and the likes. There is less faith in white-collar skills making you rich, so you just try your luck.
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
> but from the lessons learned along the way
When the published "lessons" don't match up with what the experiment actually did, that's when people start asking questions. Is not just "boo it didn't work", but there is a vast mismatch between what the research actually answered, and what they claimed it answered.
> Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
I thought only AI bots were born yesterday.
This is a stunning false equivalency and is an irresponsible comparison.
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.
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.
Lmaooo
You think the 30 billion dollar VSCode fork company is vibe coding a broken browser because it’s fun?
Cute.
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.
> I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
I get that feeling. I suppose it's more about crypto than AI, where the first translates into "pyramid scheme" and the second to "hype".
Any kind of defraud must be rooted in someone's greed. In this case that's FOMO about some presumably magic discovery that's gonna change the world.
So nothing special you might have missed about AI or cryptocurrencies. It's just that those are relatively cheap and accessible technologies to create and transfer (presumed) wealth.
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.
Fraudsters are essentially buying the "whitepaper" (technical/business legitimacy) in the classic crypto pump and dump scheme.
So I guess it’s just FOMO, because I still can’t really relate to why anyone would actually buy any of those coins.
Exactly. People are buying those coins because they believe other people will buy them, increasing their value.
Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully
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?
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)
It’s hard to take a post like this seriously:
> 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.
Is the author arguing that a startup running experiments, sharing the source code is a “pump and dump” that is akin to a crypto coin pump and dump?
Cursor did not “use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.” We can argue whether Cursor’s valuation is too high or not - as investors who put money into them in November 2025 at a $29B valuation take all the risk on it. A January 2026 experiment simply is ridiculous to paint as a “pump and dump” then attempt to conflate it with crypto.
Same with all other analogies in this post - which somehow tries to assume that a dev shipping something open source is connected in any way with crypto coins - which coins are clearly worthless, and whoever buys/sells them is doing the same crypto sh*t coin game as we have seen for the last decade.
This post basically argues that this “pump and dump” concept started a few weeks ago, with no crypto connection, just someone releasing a research results and open source code? Then tries to tie it into crypto - where pump and dumps have been a thing for a decade or more?
Please, how is this post on the front page and gathering so many comments?
I am baffled.
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.
It will be interesting to watch how they decide what new data to train on if most of it is low quality.
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.
Hah you had me until “best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc.”
Webpage is down for me?
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.
extremely bad takes CHECK broken cert CHECK somehow top of front page CHECK
Not for me.
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.