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.

This is the story about how I almost got my first job.

Early in the year I met a founder during a meet up organized by an startup at a bar. She mentioned the project she was working on, introduced me to the team and I actually thought what she was doing was quite cool.

During the year she sent me a message via LinkedIn to know if I was interested in a position as a software developer. It looked pretty generic and I was busy so I didn’t even bother in replying. A few days later I see a survey on their Facebook page, so I fill it out just to do a good thing.

A week after that, I received an email from the startup, saying that they were giving away t-shirts to the ones who fill out the survey and I happened to won a t-shirt. I still don’t know if I was lucky or she was just looking for a way to brought me to the office. But now looking back I guess I probably was the only one who filled that survey.

I thought it was a good opportunity to see how the startup was doing so I mailed her to arrange an interview.

During the interview she told me the future plans of her company and asked me to join them. I said no at first but after a couple of minutes I accepted to do a couple of hours of work a week. The following day, I was attending an event in the office where her company was being accelerated at so we talked a bit and I can clearly remember she literally said: “I’ll email you, you start on Monday.”.

She didn’t mail me.

I sent her an email to clear all the details, she replied that she was working on a few things out with her CTO and told me to wait. I did never hear from her again.

As I was quite busy with college (and a bit offended) I didn’t mail her again. A couple of weeks later I went to Facebook to see how they were doing. They moved to Europe to attend an accelerating process and then the company closed. Aka. they failed.

I don’t know if she was desperate or what, but that would explain why she wanted to hire me without even make me code a few lines of code so I guess she didn’t know what she was doing. It still surprises me how, until you get your first day at the office, you can’t call yourself an employee, at least at startups.

And this lesson apply to HR people and startups in general. You can never be sure.