Bots of some kind crossed my mind. I find it interesting there has been no announcements from dang about the change in behaviour - unless I've just missed them.
I went hunting for stats of topic trends on HN as the whole AI thing has gone bananas. Looking at the "ChatGPT" keyword chart [1] the volume is crazy and seems to line up time wise. It is a correlation but not sure if it is the right one.
My co-founder and I are looking to apply but it looks like I might have a baby due during the 3-months-in-SV stage and hence need to be close to base (Australia). Looks like I'll be hanging out for the following round. Good luck to everyone applying!
The explore page offers a great snapshot. The search page is totally awesome too (seriously, it works really well) but only when you are looking for something in particular. It feels like there is a mind-boggling amount of potentially useful things sitting there that no one ever knows to play with because the people behind the projects aren't very good at PR or aren't looking for high usage of their product. I guess the main barrier to testing out projects/apps is the difficulty of installation. You have to know you want the product a lot to go through with the effort to get it up and going. I guess that's why recommendations can be a good guide to making sure it's worth the effort.
It's interesting too that despite the author's posting of an Analytics screen shot (of visitors I take it) there is no proof that the auto following itself has brought about the spiked traffic. For all we know it could be due to the author posting spam-links in other social media platforms that has produced some mild interest.
Open sourcing Flash would definitely be in Adobe's best interests. The only possible thing holding them back is shoddy coding practices (using security-through-obscurity) which would result in more exploits and the Flash player gaining an even worse reputation.