I started writing this while one of my blog posts was at the top of Hacker News.
This feels weird. My hand’s aren’t shaking, but I’m a little lightheaded up here, atop the front page of Hacker News that also notes the GPT-4.5 release. I dethroned it. (Not really. But let me flap toward the sun here.)
My gut reaction:
- Attention! Wow! I’m getting attention!
- [Takes screenshot]
- I wrote something HN deemed worthy of being read. I am so valid.
- Should I be converting this into a following? Into attention for [the thing I do for a living]?
- Slow down. Write about this. Make sense of it so you can remember it.
So here I am.
Why care about HN? Smart people seem to hang out there. As someone who is occasionally smart and deeply interested in tech, I’ve been hoovering articles and HN comment threads for (checks oldest HN account — whoa, been that long?) more than a decade.
Like any popular place online, HN is prone to self-flagellation, excessive criticism, misdirected rage, hype cycles, etc. But, for such a broad offering of ideas, HN directs mass scrutiny more productively than anyplace else I’ve been digitally.
I’ve long glided in the tailwind of some great ideas lifted from personal blogs, many of which I discovered on HN. It feels good to write something HN users found useful.
One last thought. I intentionally made this blog somewhat anonymous. It should stay that way. It’s good for both of us. It means you have to read the work before you can judge the author. And, being distanced from judgement I am clearly too fragile to personally endure, it divorces my ego from the output. That’s helping me be a better, less hesitant writer.
Now, as I write these words, the post is third from the top.
How fun was that?
The day after: The plateau
The post is lingering on the front page. I continue to collect supremely validating internet pellets called upvotes. A few kind comments have been the most meaningful.
Just for an idea of traffic in the first 24 hours: 20k sessions, 30k pageviews, 20k minutes spent on the website. Almost two weeks of human attention directed here in 24 hours.
What’s funny is that this rat king of ideas almost never made it out of my Apple Notes. I had written most of the article years ago. About a month ago, I finally published it as part of a large backlog of ideas. I forced myself to publish Kupajo to organize my thoughts. And to lecture myself on paper as a way to vaporize my urge to lecture my daughter as she grows up. She may never read this. But maybe an LLM she talks to someday will have read it.
Anyway, if I could shout back through years, I’d say this to myself: Share it now. Work out loud. It may help someone.
Let the naive and incomplete stuff embarrass you. No one cares. No one will eat you.
Anyway, I got coffee this morning and the barista didn’t even recognize me.
Two days after: The takeaway
It’s odd. I’ve written in private for years. Then I post something and 20-some thousand strangers are suddenly peeking through my window. Something about this unsettles me. Obviously, I want the attention — I posted it publicly after all. And here I am writing something else I’ll probably post publicly.
Enough handwringing.
This has been cool. But writing has given me more value than internet attention will.
So I’ll just keep writing.
You should, too.
