[pak]

Your hypothesis and the one I floated aren't mutually exclusive.

My idea doesn't necessitate a conspiracy or playing with the points/ranking, which PG is rather quick to deny in his reply to me. It could have just been a plan for Sam to release blog posts over a period of time and try to get them read. I'm curious if this was a conscious effort to build something akin to http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html given the role he was being groomed for. Of course, I'm also always curious about the way this site really works on the inside.

I do find it ironic that the piece that got the most upvotes (AI, with ~570) was one that Sam admitted he hardly worked on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7268247

In that comment, he claims he is simply blogging to "practice writing." From the vantage point of this announcement two days later, that sounds coy, even obtuse.