Ask HN: Why is there some sort of a scam website being advertised on HN?

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sending a ping to /dang - is this post expected to be where it is at? @dang

Alright, the post is down now.

Even more reason for post-mortem.

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.

This is normal for YC companies launching, though traditionally they would say (YC W26) or something like that

My guess is that they realized that was bad for conversion and just did a regular post

I think more interesting is that the product comes across like a scam and so all those things together make it look like a big scam