Posted by freddykruger 1 day ago
Cluely did the ChatGPT wrapper to cheat on interviews then sold the customer data to recruiters. The whole company promise is a scam, and useless since we have LLMs.
HockeyStack held contests for people to win cars etc and never delivered. They also lied about having revenues and a product when they had nothing built. Along with Greptile they were doing 7day weeks of unpaid labor from “trial periods”.
Scams all around.
Also they were part of the cohort forcing workers to stay minimum until 9PM.
Like every AI company, their "product" is a Next.js website, OPENAI_API_KEY, and a Stripe checkout page.
They were not paid at all, they were working long-term on a "trial period". And yes it's very illegal. I was there and saw it first-hand.
The guys they had on trial periods - though I'm sure they were very intelligent - were not really firing on all cylinders if you know what I mean.
Mods didn't touch either thread except (1) we merged the duplicate discussions and (2) we rolled back the voting ring penalty so that the story would be on the frontpage.
This is in keeping with the principle that we moderate stories less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story. That's been the case since the beginning, and I've posted about it dozens of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
I would imagine that's what happened here.
Edit: 10% of the votes came from resubmissions of the URL. The other 90% came from other sources.
There are a number of reasons why this is the case. One is that it is true. Another is that we've always treated the good will of the community as by far the biggest asset—in fact, the only asset—that HN has.
Really great vetting there, guys.
Had you checked the other thread during that "good minute", you'd have seen that all the comments were intact.
I hate that I've become this cynical, but it's gotten to the point where reading the "no x, no y, just z" construct makes me assume that writing is AI generated (and then I immediately stop caring about reading it)