Some weeks ago my post “How the AI bubble bursts” reached #1 in Hacker News and stayed there for about 3 hours, plus 1 hour on the front page until it ultimately dropped. This came as a total surprise, I expected to get 4 points, like my previous post.

It was certainly an emotional rollercoaster to get that validation from a community I’ve been following since I first got to the internet. It was also hard to not make this my whole personality. It’s crazy to think that, for 4 hours, my writing was the most-read thing in Silicon Valley, that people I admire, from companies I admire, even maybe a billionaire, read my article and got an idea out of my post. It’s almost certain that at least someone from a major AI lab read it.

The aftermath

The post ended up with 372 upvotes and 532 comments, was opened by 16K people the day it was released, and very interestingly, by 4K more the rest of the week. My Cloudflare Pages setup for this blog was able to handle this without blinking, which was a huge relief. As soon as it got to the top, Google Analytics showed me 6K people online. Surreal.

Something I didn’t know is that after a post makes it to the homepage, Hacker News drops the nofollow tag, so Google is able to recognize it as a full link. The article also gets mentioned in the front page archive for that day. It was picked up by the Financial Times as a reading list for the day (also with a full link), and also linked in a dozen Hacker News aggregators. It got backlinks from other posts where they mentioned it, a bunch of shares on subreddits. It got shared about a dozen times on Twitter and it was featured in an AI-generated podcast.

The backlinks gave a boost to the Google rankings, this blog was started just 3 months ago after all, but search traffic dropped back to baseline quite quickly. I thought it was going to push Google to index parts of my site that it was ignoring, but so far that didn’t happen.

Given the numbers, it yielded a remarkably low long-term engagement: only 12 people left their email to subscribe to the blog and I got a grand total of 2 new Twitter/X followers.

But some people reached out on LinkedIn, and even people I knew congratulated me on making it to the top without me telling them I was there, I didn’t really think that many people read HN daily. Some people told me they saw the post shared in group chats.

Most of the traffic came from the US, particularly San Francisco as you’d expect. Second came the UK, Germany and Canada. I think the Europe traffic is significant given that it was posted in a more East-Coast/Europe time-friendly (1pm CET). Even then, San Francisco did 3x more views than New York.

Universities have their own rules and rhythm. Frequently, students stick to the rules of the university which can stifle creativity. Students follow a common path that includes taking the same courses to fulfill majors. Anything that breaks the path is deemed wrong or risky, affirming that at the end of the day grades and exams are what matters. I personally experienced this myself when I considered starting my own business last year. I had a decision to make, and during that time I learned that being indecisive is the worst enemy of productivity and passion. It became evident that doing is more interesting and exciting than studying.

The influence of my teachers were not enough, and I realized I needed to do something worth waking up for. Dropping out was an option. After all some of the most successful people were dropouts, nonetheless I wanted to use college as a runway, using its people and opportunities to increase my chances of success.

The lessons learned in the classroom became tools to start something new from scratch. I realized that college is all about learning lessons, but it is not limited within the classrooms. Entrepreneurship is not something only done after the graduation ceremony.

I finally decided to stay in college, but not to settle. This was not because I did not want to take the risk of dropping out, it was about the challenge of doing both things competitively at the same time.

So far, the opportunities I have come across and the people I have met in the academic area are proving me right. I have learned in this venture that my time is limited, so I have to move fast, as the market and customers expect me to do, but smartly at the same time, choosing carefully the people I want to work with.

Thanks to Dianna Yau for reading drafts of this.