Ranking #1 on HN in the December Dead Zone

Lspace Diaries retrospective

For those who weren’t aware (you would be if you were subscribed on email!), I started a separate AI blog, L-space Diaries, this year to 1) try out Substack in anger and 2) create a focused feed on a topic rather than a person (I also started DX Tips for devtools/devrel writing, but have been accordingly distracted).

Yesterday my first piece to hit 1st place on HN happened and I figured I would share some stats for those who cared.

Stats

It was on front page of HN for 15 hours on Dec 28: https://hnrankings.info/34165522/

I had mild traction on Twitter and Mastodon as well but nothing to write home about.

It was also featured on the Ben’s Bites daily recap (currently at 15k subs) today.

This brought in 27k views and 150 new subs, vs 7k/62 for a “normal” issue.

Feelings and Behind the Scenes

The piece probably took about 12 hours to write in total, from doing the initial work on Notion AI, to writing it up (which involved a complete repro of the work to create the reverse prompt engineering tutorial) to publication and post-publish social support.

I’ve been enjoying the AI blogging as it is The Current Thing, but feel quite a bit of impostor syndrome since I have no background for it and the knowledge here is very steep.