The cost of lies: A Mineserver story

This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings. That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.

• N_Lens · 7 hours ago

  Is that you, Cringely?

  • Thegn · 7 hours ago

    Not unless he's using TCP/IP over Ouija board...

    • CommieBobDole · 7 hours ago

      There has apparently been no confirmation of his death - Wikipedia still lists him as alive and editors there say there's insufficient evidence. If the linked article is true, maybe he faked his death.

      • grimgrin · 5 hours ago

        It would be an amusing troll. I wonder what minimum efforts are to publish here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...

        • my-next-account · 4 hours ago

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49949438 There's also this. Well, RIP.

      • pjc50 · 9 minutes ago

        There's a lot of people who are bold enough fraudsters to fake their own death, but could never give up posting so long as they are actually alive.

• JMiao · 4 hours ago

  Yes, but being a failed dreamer doesn’t entitle you to lie forever.

• atoav · 4 hours ago

  As a hardware guy I often see this one. "But the parts only cost one third of what companies are charging for it", they say and a particular type then believes that must mean they can make a fortune by being cheaper than the companies. Then over the course of a few years they figure out why the price was what it was. If you sell something at 3× the bill of materials (BOM) cost, that just means you will break even on that bill when you have sold a third of the product. And that does not include wages and other fixed costs like e.g. running your website, customer service, rent, cleaning, RND budget for future products, ... Meaning that very often if you know everything that is involved, you realize that the product is not actually expensive, it is just as expensive as it needs to be to operate at that scale. If it is a small company selling to a small market that scale will of course be different. E.g. if we talk audio equipment, you totally will not be able to build yourself a cheaper mixer than Behringer (assuming the same features and specs) — even if we assume you work for free — just for the simple reason that Behringer builds audio equipment at such a scale, they get the parts for a fraction of the price you would have to pay. On the other hand if you want to build that boutique fuzz pedal sold by one guy in his shed in Minnesota, you can easily go cheaper than him simply for the reason that he has to pay the bills and you don't (and because the electronic parts of the pedal amount to pocket change in a fuzz pedal). His market aren't people who are being economical about fuzz pedals. His market are guitar afficionados with deep pockets that love to have something a bit more special and less off the shelve. So I am always a bit careful when I see people with the knee jerk reaction of "I could do that cheaper". Yeah sure, but you can also jump of a bridge like a cliff jumper, the tricky part is not the jumping, the tricky part is to walk away unharmed every time . Similarly the tricky part when running a business like that is not to be cheaper than the competition, the tricky part is to be cheaper and be able to grow the business in a sustainable way.

In Sikhism, God is understood as 'Truth' ("The name of God is Truth" is the first line in their holy book), and to be aligned with God is to be aligned with the Truth. I don't claim to be a paragon of honesty or virtue, but through my experiences I've generally understood that lack of virtue can and does trap one in cycles of misery, anxiety & suffering.

• CaptainZapp · 2 hours ago

  I agree. But there seem to be a bunch of people with sociopath tendencies, mostly in finance, tech & politics, which don't seem to be affected at all by this.

  • N_Lens · 2 hours ago

    I believe sociopathy involves disconnecting from parts of oneself. While initially this may seem like an advantageous 'adaptation', but if the process continues, it can result in a fragmented self, painful pathology and intense suffering. There's a reason people joke about schizophrenics innately recognizing psychopaths. "What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"

  • socalgal2 · 2 hours ago

    There's also a ton of people that simply don't get that others could have a valid different point of view and instead view everyone who does something different than they would have as "must be evil sociopath"

    • N_Lens · 2 hours ago

      I mean people like Thiel or Musk are on record saying stuff like "Maybe evil isn't bad" or "empathy is a weakness". People get lost in conditional existence, advancing their own agenda, morals changing by degrees, until they end up in very difficult positions.

    • pjc50 · 11 minutes ago

      It's all fun semantic games until it causes other people actual harm or loss. Which in this case is fairly small (failed kickstarter fraud, those are ten a penny), but for the big political leaders can have a large body count. Today I'm thinking of the recently deceased convicted perjurer and world's most successful prison author, Lord Jeffrey Archer.

>Cringely posted pictures of the boards, the SD cards that would hold the open-source Minecraft server software, and the plastic shells etched by a laser cutter that would serve as the cases. For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.

• degamad · 6 hours ago

  That's the ambiguity in the way we use some words like "server". If I say I'm going to "build a web server", you don't know if I'm developing software to compete with nginx, or building an x86 box and installing nginx on it.

  • chungy · 2 hours ago

    That's the weird part. It's trivially simple to run a Minecraft server. Slap whatever your favorite variant of Linux is, install Java, run minecraft-server.jar. Make a service for it (heck I made one many years ago, probably still works: https://gist.github.com/chungy/0b2c438c7db90b32701a ). Once you have the Raspberry Pis, pre-installing an operating system to run the standard Minecraft server should be the easy part. Unless, of course, it really was a case of "reverse engineer and reimplement Minecraft to make my own server." Not strictly impossible, but a completely unreasonable goal.

    • stratos123 · 1 hour ago

      > Unless, of course, it really was a case of "reverse engineer and reimplement Minecraft to make my own server." Not strictly impossible, but a completely unreasonable goal. Hasn't that already been done several times? There's feather-rs (fairly mature but reduced set of features) and Pumpkin and FerrumC. And, for that matter, Paper - that one is Java and I haven't checked to what degree it's just borrowing from the original implementation, but I do know that Paper is actually used for real servers.

      • rcxdude · 58 minutes ago

        There are quite a few (the protocol is pretty simple and the client is very forgiving of omissions). They are often not as fully featured as the official server, though. Probably the most significant omission on most of them is world generation (I've seen some suggestions that this is kind of an unofficial line in terms of not catching legal threats).

• stemchar · 1 hour ago

  I've hosted a Minecraft server, reading this I immediately thought that a Pi was just not powerful enough to do an adequate job at running one. Perhaps they figured that out once it was too late?

(2020) I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made. There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced. They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

• georgeecollins · 4 hours ago

  The thing that was / is a drag about Kickstarter was in the early days when some complete randos raised quite a bit more than the mine server project raised to make a “spiritual successor “ to a game I designed. Anyone who knew better knew they couldn’t, whatever they believed. Would have been nice to see that money go to a real game or a real developer.

  • 1potato · 2 hours ago

    What was the game?

• avhception · 3 hours ago

  I feel like a lot of the hounding was more due to the fact that Cringely wouldn't admit the failure and instead chose to lie again and again, and less because of the money.

>There is no scenario where you have enough time to pick up a bunch of clothes but nobody thinks to grab the irreplaceable electronic parts that you spent $90,000 on. Gonna have to disagree on this one. A handful of clothes can be held in your hands. A bunch of electronics can't. That's for insurance to sort out at that point.

• gopher_space · 5 hours ago

  The blindness bit had me wondering why the author didn't just look up info on the subject instead of making things up in the middle of a post about honesty. His gears start slipping halfway through the article and it ends with a weird parasocial vibe.

serial lying is arguably one of the top problems in US politics now, if not the top

• avhception · 3 hours ago

  Feels like the whole western culture is coming apart (I'm saying this as a European, counting myself as part of the culture as well)

  • GolfPopper · 3 hours ago

    Generations ago, we idolized war heroes and astronauts (and, for the nerds, the people working to get the astronauts there). I won't try to argue that was perfect, but for decades now we've idolized power and wealth without regard to cost or honesty. I don't know if that's stuff rolling downhill, just looking in a mirror, or something more complex. But it seems to me we've lost our civilizational self-respect. And I've no real idea how to get it back. The sorts of people who I would think ought to be at the forefront of any sort of positive reactionary movement seem to be bent on making sure that any sort of traditionalism is utterly and rightfully discredited.

    • avhception · 2 hours ago

      When my dad grew up, he wanted to be a locomotive driver. Locomotive drivers were cheered upon by kids and greatly respected. Today, bus drivers complain about kids spitting in their faces. Something went wrong. I'm not sure what.

    • Morromist · 2 hours ago

      Good point. I used to think it was silly to idolize sports stars, but they worked incredibly hard with honest toil and usually a lot of study to be where they are. Heirs of big fortunes, mendacious politicians & influencers and scam artists who hit the big-time are not the same.

      • croes · 1 hour ago

        Many use enhancing drugs

    • simoncion · 2 hours ago

      > ...or decades now we've idolized power and wealth... Have we ? Or is that what the ever-increasingly-consolidated media companies have chosen to talk about, and -because so many of the entities that did in-depth investigative reporting have been strangled to death- there are very few entities who "buy ink by the barrel" left to provide an opposing perspective?

• croes · 1 hour ago

  Isn’t lying the base of capitalism? Fake it till you make it … or you don’t. Or all the companies that lie about the negative side effects of their products.

Richard Garriott, Peter Molineux, Chris Roberts there's a long list of similar "Don't give money to your childhood heroes" stories

• waste_monk · 4 hours ago

  That's why you should give your money to Derek Smart instead - his games were basically unplayable back in the day, and from what I've seen on the steam reviews for the current ones the same is true today. It's a shame, I love detailed simulator type games, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

• Ekaros · 1 hour ago

  Add Tim Schafer to the list. It feels weird to consider how long many in the industry can coast on their early successes. Or keep doing same thing over and over again and no one is wiser...

Building a mineserver today feels like it would be a lot easier with say a N100/N150 mini PC then with all of the modern open source Minecraft software components like Paper or Crafty. The idea was good, just too lofty and underpriced. Also fairly niche. Making it plug and play for nontechnical parents is what made the requirements difficult.

• Macha · 4 hours ago

  Today? The target market wouldn't want to deal with the stock and pricing caused by RAM demand.

Ouch. Thank you for sharing this story. I am stunned but weirdly unsurprised. I encountered several people like this version of Bob in silicon valley. Some of them reached huge liquidity events and that bought them enough credibility that they’re still finessing people decades later. Completely agree with one of the comments under Jeremy’s post: I guess I got fooled by Cringely back in the old days. His journalistic work with Triumph of the Nerds was great, but only because of the subject matter and the people being interviewed. Whenever the topic veered to Cringely himself (which happened more than it should have) the work suffered.

> We won’t do THAT again. Narrator's voice: They will do it again.

He should have just installed the multicraft panel then called the software good. This is less than an afternoon's worth of work. Scam. Also for the price of one of these you could rent over a year of hosting on an actual server instead of an embedded device that is sharing 1 GB of RAM with the OS.

Influencer from ages ago with dubious claims to fame building a hardware project that never sees the light of day? I feel like I've heard this one before. Its the story of the Intellivision Amico & Tommy Tallarico. Weird how similar the two stories are. I wonder if there's a 3rd and a 4th computer-personality-from-the-90s-who-fails-to-build-a-crowdfunded-hardware-thing-and-lies-rediculously-about-it that I don't know about?

So it seems he’s a bad inventor, but a great storyteller. He should have written novels.

Modern chunk generation is enough to make even a dual Xeon sweat. Doing it on a fanless ARM board would have sucked even if he did manage to ship.

Remarkable article. It gets to the heart of the dichotomy between true and false where lies are just deliberate false statements. As the author correctly pointed out, walking extensively in the path of the false comes at an inherent cost. The cost increases with each false statement. Walking extensively in the path of the truth, where one tries to speak true statements all the time, also has inherent costs which is high upfront and gets lower as time progresses. This upfront cost of truth involves embarrassment and usually the work itself required for having stated the truth in the first place. This leads me to hypothesize that progressively lying again and again (accumulated false statements) will inevitably lead to a state where one increasingly loses touch with reality (gradually one at a time like evolution) where necessary life saving precautions are increasingly discarded eventually increasing the odds of premature death itself. The hypothesis effectively explores the compounding cost that affects the liar's relationship with reality (statements that are true - in a platonic world). This hypothesis has implications that span truths, falsehoods, life and death.

For context, whatever the background to the Mineserver story lets set that aside - make of it what you will. What IS worth understanding is that the aftermath is the Cringely was relentlessly and endlessly hounded about this issue by people who can only be described as mentally unwell - they were so fixated, so deeply angry that this happened that they never ever left any Cringely article or post without flooding it with their deep deep anger and righteous indignation. But "it MATTERS" all the trolls and weirdos would say as they carried their stupid grudge for decades. And this guy here who wrote this post is just another one of those mentally unwell permanently angry people. They're stalkers really with the level of ongoing never ending venom they had for Cringely. I feel sorry for their ex-partners who likely also are being hounded by people never ever able to let go of their anger. Can you imagine being so deeply enraged by the failure of a Minecraft server Kickstarter that it becomes your never ending mission to hound that person and to declare them to be the worst of the worst forever - really sad. So if you pile on in the comments and declare Cringely to be some sort of evil person then just be aware you are being manipulated by mentally unwell trolls who want you to behave the same way they do, to amplify their decades old campaign of righteous indignation and online harassment.

• wewewedxfgdf · 2 hours ago

  Just to add to the picture, you can read here one of Cringely's final columns: https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/21/im-writing-again/ Count up the number of comments from Jeremy Reimer - the author of this HN linked article - he cares - a lot about this. The Kickstarter was more than 10 years ago - 2015. It raised $35,452. 10 years and the trolls maintain their nuclear level outrage. Go read the announcement post: https://www.cringely.com/2015/09/29/the-cringely-boys-kickst...

  • akoboldfrying · 24 minutes ago

    The situation seems symmetrical to me. However "easy" it would have been for people to stop hounding him for updates, it would have been the same level of "ease" for Cringely to have simply fessed up that the project was toast.

So why is everyone sure this guy is actually dead?