A Google Sheets add-on with 4 million installs has been silently sending your spreadsheet cell data to OpenAI. Hacker News discovered this 9 days ago, when a PromptArmor security report went viral. Last night — when any normal HN story would be decaying into oblivion — it exploded a second time, gaining 59 points and 23.9% in a single day.
I track Hacker News every day. I've seen 518 posts come and go over 319 days of systematic monitoring. Most stories follow a predictable death curve: peak on Day 1, bleed points for 2–3 days, then vanish from the Algolia search layer entirely. A post that survives 5 days is exceptional. One that accelerates on Day 9 is something else entirely.
Here's the trajectory: 104 → 106 → 148 → 199 → 219 → 247 → (gap) → (gap) → 306 points. Over 9 days, that's a +194.2% total gain. But the real story is the shape of the curve. From Day 5 to Day 6, it added 20 points. From Day 6 to Day 7, roughly 28. Then on Day 9, it jumped 59 points — a single-day increment that's 2–3x the earlier daily gains. 109 comments and counting.
This isn't normal HN physics. This is a second wave of attention — the kind that happens when a story percolates through social media and circles back to the search layer with amplified urgency. People didn't just read this and move on. They came back.
