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

totally not sus

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 _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 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.