Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs.
Were steps taken to disincentivise Gauntlet AI from posting a similar not-a-job-ad again? If there's one company that will gladly exploit that gray area, it's them.
Gauntlet AI I believe is correlated originally with Lambda School (YC S17). YC founders I believe are able to post job postings on Hacker News, although this might stretch the definition a bit...
Austen Allred started GauntletAI after his Lambda School bootcamp (now BloomTech) was fined, banned from participating in lending activities, and became too toxic to escape their old brand.
It's not clear to me why he gets to post privileged ads on Hacker News. Is GauntletAI a division of BloomTech, and therefore considered a YC portfolio company?
These aren't even job ads. GauntletAI is a recruiting play. They make money by getting strong candidates to apply and then collecting recruiting fees from companies for placement. They really do have people travel to Austin for some disorganized vibecoding classes with their vibecoded output used for resume building to increase their odds of getting placed (and therefore GauntletAI getting paid).
It's just the evolution of their bootcamp model updated for AI and the fact that their founder was banned from participating in lending agreements due to their deceptive practices. Now they're trying to collect money from the companies instead.
So this isn't even a job ad. It's a recruiter soliciting candidates. I didn't think YC companies were allowed to use their postings to advertise services.
As one of Austen’s haters, he’s fun to follow. End of last year he announced that he was going to relaunch a bankrupt company called Marin Software and have a documentary crew follow them and do it all with AI in a month or something.
A few weeks later, wow, they’ve booked $1.2m of revenue! And then he never mentioned it again. Documentary never surfaced. Website doesn’t work.
Very weird I cannot flag it. It's definitely a scam. Normally one cannot flag ads. Did HN pay for this advertisement? Is this a YC company? I really doubt they would be funding a company like this.
When I saw this, I thought it was a paid advertisement on HN. yuck. At least when other companies do the jobs post it always includes "is hiring" to make it clear what it's for.
Some YC companies have more creative/curiosity gap titles for their hiring ads, which I dislike. There was once a job ad which was just a terminal command that pulled their job information, which was one of the few times I had to email hn@ycombinator.com to suggest that HN not encourage users to run arbitrary code.
I could be wrong, but I thought the "is hiring" posts are from a mechanism specifically for Ycombinator companies (which is why they also don't have comments on them)
Jobs post guidelines previously communicated are only for YC funded orgs. Rules often exist on a continuous spectrum of applicability, severity, or context and potentially change over time, with no notice.
They claim that they do not charge you anything. So, how can they scam you? Of course, besides your hours and the potential outcome (code). Just curious.
I have enough admiration for him to be willing to hear the argument and have my mind changed, but they clearly have friends at YC and on the surface it doesn't look good.
Gauntlet AI was a mask of BloomTech initially at least.[1] BloomTech was a mask of Lambda School. Y Combinator funded Lambda School. And Paul Graham admired Austen Allred's persistence to scam people.[2]
The sycophancy in the replies to Graham gives me second-hand embarrassment. I haven't used Twitter since the mid naughties, but I see that startup culture of ingratiating yourself to whomever is successful in the space is still alive and well.
I saw the original post first and thought it looked fishy so wanted to see what the comments looked like. My muscle memory for immediately clicking the last link on the right under the post to check out the comments just hid the post, and I figured nothing of value was lost and moved on (to this post which was right underneath it).
I can vouch that this is not a scam. My wife enrolled with them and went through the first weeks of their program, though she couldn't complete due to some exigency. They were trained on how to vibe-code, and then asked to build complex apps using AI with all the costs borne by Gauntlet. Her friends did fly to Austin and went through the complete program.