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The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
- t0astbread 2y agoNow we can place bets on personal blogs! $50 that xeiaso.net will overtake justine.lol this year. (Kidding of course, they're two of my favorite sites.)
- AndrewStephens 2y agoI just can't help myself - I always search for my own blog in lists like this. As expected, I am nowhere in the top 5000.
- soupfordummies 2y agoWell I clicked through and bookmarked it :)
- kstrauser 2y agoTap of the beer glass to my similarly low-ranking compatriots.
- jll29 2y agoIt may console you: in some sense, the top 4900 are more valuable than the top-100. Why? Everybody here knows Paul Graham. I know Krebs and Schneier, most of you will, too. In a long tail distribution like this, the top entries (left) are the obvious ones, the lowest frequented ones (right) might be noise (artifact of the methods e.g. bugs in the data cleaning), but the middle part is really where the value is: blogs we don't know but would like to know. In search engine ranking, people needed a lot of time until the late Karen Spärck Jones finally discovered IDF (inverse document [collection] frequency) in 1972, the "Yang" to raw term frequency (TF), which had been the "Yin" that was missing a counterforce to retrieve truly relevant documents when balanced in the TFIDF formula. So, plea to the OP: please release the rest of your list (101-100000).
- lisper 2y agoAt the bottom of the screen you will find a pulldown that lets you show up to 5000 entries.
- infecto 2y ago+1 to this. I'd also argue that some on the list are unapologetic self-promoters like Simon Willison. Nothing wrong with it but it shows and I think it's much more impressive to be below that cohort but still only a reasonable distance away.
- dredmorbius 2y agoFYI, in my May 2023 survey of HN's archived front pages (under the "past" link in the HN titlebar) ... horse.sheep doesn't appear at all. That's looking at just the top <=30 stories per day. Your high-water mark seems to have been 2022-12-19, with 88 points / 32 comments, appearing on the 3rd page of the daily archive, ranked #73: <https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2022-12-19&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2022-12-19&p=3>
- gavinhoward 2y agoTop 1600. Yay! Edit: wait, that is actually how many points I got. Eh, I am still on the list.
- soupfordummies 2y agoLOL, enjoyed your most recent two posts. Too true buddy.
- gavinhoward 2y agoI am glad I am not alone with AoC. :)
- avg_dev 2y agohmmm, prog21.dadgum.com is James Hague, not John Carmack. interesting site.
- mtlynch 2y agoAh, fixed now. Thanks! https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/19 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/1...
- Retr0id 2y agoWhere does the "bio" field come from? Mine says "Developer and writer" and I suppose those are both things that I am, but not very close to what I'd have put there.
- serviceberry 2y agoI'm guessing it's annotated by an LLM. Would be a lot of thankless work otherwise, so don't really blame the author, but it means you get the occasional nonsense summary. Edit: yeah, the "methodology" page confirms this.
- KomoD 2y ago> Would be a lot of thankless work otherwise So just don't include them, rather no info than completely incorrect LLM hallucinations
- mtlynch 2y agoAuthor here. They're about 95% accurate, so not completely incorrect. I think the value of the correct ones is higher than the few incorrect ones. I manually review and fix them, but for just a fun tool, it's not practical to write 5000 eight-word bios.
- KomoD 2y agoCompletely incorrect as in an entry being completely incorrect, not all the entries.
- mtlynch 2y agoI started by writing them by hand, but it was taking forever to read enough of each author's blog to write a summary and topic list, so I used an LLM and then spot-checked. I just updated yours, but let me know if you'd like something different. https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/20 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2...
- azhenley 2y agoMy blog is both #142 and #274, nice! (Used to use a university domain.) The combined score puts me at #71 all time or #31 since 2019 when I started writing. Very cool.
- mtlynch 2y agoAh, I didn't realize that your blog had moved. I've merged them, so now you're #74 of all time.
- lapcat 2y agoMy blog is 76 all time in the list, except... the author is wrong and the bio is half wrong. 21 the last 12 months.
- mtlynch 2y agoSorry about that. Fixed now! https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/18 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/1...
- lapcat 2y agoMy name is correct now, but I'm not a security researcher. ;-)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mtlynch 2y agoDon't you do a bunch of original security research? [0,1,2] If there's a descriptor you'd prefer, I'm happy to update it. I'm just going by what I know of the blog and a review of the most popular posts. [0] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/disclosure2.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/disclosure2.html [1] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/disclosure.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/disclosure.html [2] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/7/1.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/7/1.html
- lapcat 2y agoI'm an Apple software developer. :-)
- mtlynch 2y agoOkay, updated! https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/40 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/4... But privately, I think of you as a security researcher, and there's nothing you can do about it. : ) Thanks for your writing and your security findings!
- bobbiechen 2y agoI love that dynomight.net stands out with "existential angst" as a very unique category among the top blogs, as well as being written by an anonymous/pseudonymous author. I'm a big fan of their writing. Also quite surprised to find my own site in the top 5000 for the past 5 years! It feels like Hacker News is simultaneously quite large but also a cozy community where you often recognize names from day to day.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoIs there a tool which will show me either: - the blog domains which I tend to comment on (relative to other people, not in absolute terms), or - the people whose comments I most often reply to?
- digdugdirk 2y agoOooo... Can we get an average article ranking?
- mtlynch 2y agoAuthor here. This is something I wanted but I couldn't figure out a way to do it in a way that's meaningful. Authors like Simon Willison publish frequently, so even though he has a lot of high-scoring posts, he has a lot of low-to-no-scoring posts too. It feels unfair to penalize people who publish frequently just because not every post is a homerun. I'm open to suggestions! I'm almost positive Paul Graham would be #1.
- timdellinger 2y agoYou could grab the top 10 posts by each author, and report the average score of those 10.
- mrbluecoat 2y agohttps://sive.rs/ https://sive.rs/ at #20. That's awesome!
- mrbluecoat 2y ago(p.s. that's not me, just someone I really admire)
- serviceberry 2y agoNote that this is gonna be skewed pretty heavily toward domains that have existed for most of HN's history, at the expense of any newer domains that had fewer chances to rack up points. If you look at any 2-4 year period, the ranking tends to be quite different. Well, Paul Graham is there pretty consistently, but everything else changes.
- geerlingguy 2y agoYou can change the date ranges (e.g. just the YTD, or last 12 months, or set a custom range), and it gives an interesting overview of the evolution over time. Like jvns.ca drops off the list entirely for 2025, but was consistently in the top 5 until last year.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoTop 75 :O I've apparently put out some serious bangers to end up in such esteemed company.
- mtlynch 2y agoIf you limit it to July 2021 (when you started blogging) until the present, you're at #16: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?end=2025-03-25&limit=500&start=2021-07-01 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?end=2025...
- rpigab 2y agoI just discovered your blog, love the format and content! Gotta have to try out that search engine too.
- serjester 2y agoNow someone needs to build semantic search over this to find hidden gem authors on any topic.
- jppope 2y agothat sounds like a great idea actually
- pprunty 2y agoThe most popular blog is the owner's blog? What is this, X...? :D
- Mistletoe 2y agoI’ve been thinking of starting an anonymous blog with my thoughts just to record them and any projects I do. I want them to be visible on the internet and searchable instead of behind some facebook or instagram wall. What is a good blog service to use that will be around for decades? I don’t really want to run my own domain. Do things like Blogger and Blogspot still exist and will they continue to in the future?
- akomtu 2y agogithub pages? you get a foobar.github.io domain for free with an option to link it to your own domain
- wonger_ 2y agoBearblog has a lot of momentum and (anonymous) users, and a committed maintainer: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ Ofc GitHub is will probably last longer, and so will running your own hosting/deployment
- jppope 2y agoJust host your own. Now adays using a static site generator is crazy simple, and hosting is free or sub $5 on a ton of platforms.
- OgsyedIE 2y agoI had to fiddle with the dates to find a couple examples of blogs that violate the single-author rule in the methodology (marginalrevolution, ribbonfarm) but it's probably better to have them included. Even though a glance suggests the majority of high-scorers are self-hosted, I wonder if this dataset is valuable for predicting the strength of different blog hosts. Some fiddling did lead to a couple results that are hosted on Blogger or Ghost or Medium, so they are there.
- Swizec 2y agoWow I am the 511th top blog :O No author, bio, or tags though. Sad. Honestly HackerNews has been a great place to grow up. Started posting here back in college when I was 21 or so. Now here we still are at 37. I credit hacker news with getting me from Slovenia to San Francisco. It's been a great journey so far. Some of which has made it to the front page <3
- mtlynch 2y agoFixed now! https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/26 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2... Sincerely, your biographer. : )
- omoikane 2y agoI find it surprising that Ken Shirriff's blog[1] didn't make it to the top 5000. Does it not count as a blog? Looks like it's explicitly excluded[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=righto.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=righto.com [2] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/d32ad80a75eba34830b5b572e374330e273c57b2/data/excludes.txt#L940 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/d...
- kens 2y agoThat's weird that I'm excluded. Thanks for watching out for me :-) Hypotheses: 1. it's an error. 2. I have powerful enemies. 3. Someone from the future is trying to stop me. 4. My blog triggered the FDIV bug and needed to be excluded.
- winwang 2y ago5. steganographic subliminal messaging :P
- raphlinus 2y agoThere are a lot of odd exclusions on that list. Just spot-checking, I see blog.plover.com, the blog of Mark Jason Dominus, who by the way is looking for a job[1]. Also, dtrace.org is excluded, which hosts four individual blogs that surely should qualify. [1]: https://mastodon.online/@mjd@mathstodon.xyz/114223189504272175 https://mastodon.online/@mjd@mathstodon.xyz/1142231895042721...
- mtlynch 2y ago>I see blog.plover.com, the blog of Mark Jason Dominus, who by the way is looking for a job Whoops, that was a mistake. Fixed now: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/23 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2... >Also, dtrace.org is excluded, which hosts four individual blogs that surely should qualify. I didn't realize the authors were on distinguishable URLs, so I've now added them back and canonicalized them to their new subdomain URLs.
- Havoc 2y agoTIL Krebs is a personal blog! I had assumed it is a team
- tathagatadg 2y agoWouldn’t it be nice to have a planet like rss feed from these?
- ProAm 2y agopaulg's blog shouldnt count as for its an extension of this and more of a long game sales pitch tailored for different purposes. Not a bad thing, but I just wouldnt consider it a blog.
- jppope 2y agoI think that is wholly unfair. If Paul Graham is anything its a writer/creator first. Those articles have also been extremely influential to many entrepreneurs and people in the business world. I'm personally appreciative of them, even if I don't always agree with him.
- bdangubic 2y agooh it is most definitely a blog, by every possible definition of it
- codazoda 2y agoWhoa, I made the list, but just barely, #4752. HN has been a fantastic community for me.
- goostavos 2y ago4443! Heck yah. Although, it's weird that I'm listed as having "career advice." Nobody should listen to me. I have no idea what I'm doing.
- larsiusprime 2y agoWoo-hoo, # 265 :) FortressOfDoors.com But my name is Lars Doucet, not Keith Burgun (that's KeithBurgen.net) Happy to be included!
- mtlynch 2y agoSorry about that! Fixed now: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/17 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/1...
- larsiusprime 2y agono problem, thanks :)
- larsiusprime 2y agoInteresting that if you were to combine AstralCodexTen and SlateStarCodex it would be around top #20. Even with the traffic split he's in the top 50 twice.
- jppope 2y agoHappy to be included at #4429. thank you!
- softwaredoug 2y agoIs there a meta tag I’m missing on my blog to have my name be consumed into something like this? Curious how they get the names
- mtlynch 2y agoAuthor here! I explain the methodology here: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo... If you'd like to add your metadata, I'll happily accept a PR here: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/master/data/domains-meta.csv https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
- throwawayk7h 2y agoSlate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten should probably be combined. Also, it's odd that while ACX's author is listed as "Scott Alexander" (his long-time pseudonym), SSC's is listed as "anonymous." He went by Scott Alexander even in the days of SSC.
- mtlynch 2y agoYeah, that's a good point. I was trying to be respectful of the author's wishes around pseudonymity, as it seemed intentional that when he lost anonymity, he switched domains, so I didn't want to "out" the author, but it's kind of silly since it's very public now. I think you're right that it makes sense to identify him by his pseudonym rather than just "Anonymous" so I've updated it: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/25 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2...
- MartijnBraam 2y agoOh wow I did not expect to make it into the top 500 :D It's only barely there at 480 but still.. that reminds me it's been too long since I've written a post.
- jcrben 2y agoSnapshot for posterity: https://web.archive.org/web/20250326005255/https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250326005255/https://refactori...
- hyruo 2y agoA simple statistics of the top 5,000 blog domain names shows that 54% use .com, 14% use .org, 7% use .io (40% of which are github.io), and 6% use .net. These five together account for 81%.
- baby 2y agoI'm top 2049 with cryptologie.net !
- rietta 2y agoI am #3133! Fun.
- mtlynch 2y agoAuthor here. I tried submitting this as a Show HN a couple times but it didn't take, so I'm happy to see some interest! I caught this just before bed, but I'm happy to take any suggestions or questions, and I'll answer in the morning. If you'd like to improve the metadata, I welcome PRs here: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data
- jppope 2y agothank you! Pull request submitted :)
- throw0101c 2y agohttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/ https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/ regularly shows up, most recently: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43471177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43471177 Did that get filtered out become of the domain?
- mtlynch 2y agoYeah, for blogs that don't have a unique domain, I have to fix them by hand. I've just fixed Chris Siebenmann's. Thanks!
- ativzzz 2y agoHahah I was just reading your blog earlier this morning and saw > I can think of two remaining cards to play. > The first is to get on the front page of Hacker News. That’s usually difficult to do, but I’m supposed to be the expert. Well done
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[dead]
- surprisetalk 2y agoI maintain a shuffled list of HN blogs here: [1] https://blogs.hn https://blogs.hn Please add your site or make corrections :) [2] https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn
- otras 2y agoFor years, I've been good heartedly losing the blog SEO ranking fight to a great developer and writer who has the same name as me. A football player eclipses us both if you just google our shared name, but if you add any sort of "developer" or "programming", he's clearly got me beat for the top marks. It makes sense — he writes about tech much more consistently than I do, and his articles are likely much more helpful than my sporadic and eclectic posts. Naturally, being vain, when I saw this post, I immediately looked up my own blog and was chuffed to see it at #292. But, guess who I see just above at #289.
- jbhoot 2y agoHeh. For me, a British ambassador to Spain has all three of you beat (probably due to my frequent visits to gov.uk design system and nhs.uk).
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoThat's why I changed my name to a ULID
- cung 2y ago:D
- ZeroTalent 2y agoLegally? :D
- AStonesThrow 2y agoIn the future, our names will simply be a cryptographic hash of our genome and we’ll all enjoy unambiguous identity and individuality as we express ourselves solely with Unicode Emoji.
- ToDougie 2y agoYou misspelled Wingdings. A common typo. The keys are like right next to each other.
- 2y ago
- surprisetalk 2y agoHere's a Bluesky starter pack: [1] https://go.bsky.app/HmV5x47 https://go.bsky.app/HmV5x47
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- marc_abonce 2y agoI found it interesting to notice that a couple of politicians made it to the list, all 3 of them from Pirate parties it seems. But I think one of these entries needs to be updated, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Reda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Reda
- account-5 2y agoInteresting website. I was reading the free chapter about active and passive voice, something I've never really understood or paid much attention to. Excellent explanation that cleared things up. My manager uses active voice when they're taking credit for our work, and passive voice when they do things wrong. It's a neat trick.
- exac 2y agoIt is easier to do a blameless incident response (or whatever you call it at your company) with the passive voice IMO.
- newusertoday 2y agothere are too many blogs missing from it
- TheWoodsy 2y agoBaffled that https://lcamtuf.substack.com/ https://lcamtuf.substack.com/ or https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ isn't in there.
- dredmorbius 2y agoBased on my May 2023 survey of front-page results, those rank at 954 and 3,028 (of all sites) respectively: 954 18 63.008 lcamtuf.blogspot.com :::: blog 3028 6 77.327 lcamtuf.substack.com :::: blog Among blogs I'd identified (similar methodology though all but certainly different URL set from TFA), #295 and #521 of 5,506 blogs identified. My set includes 52,642 sites all told, with 16,185 classified as, e.g., "programming", "blog", "social media", "academic/science", "corporate comm.", "general news", "government", "software", "tech news", etc. I'd come up with 61 total classifications, covering all sites with at least 18 front-page appearances within the HN archive.
- mtlynch 2y agoHe is, but he's not in the top 100. He would be, but he splits his articles across different blogs. For authors that just change domains (e.g., christine.website and xeiaso.net), I combine scores, but if they maintain different writing under different domains, I treat the domains as separate. That said, I think Michał Zalewski is the author who most suffers due to this rule.
- axegon_ 2y agoHuh... I thought that Gwern would be further up, like top 10. Top 3 even. Weird.
- tux3 2y agoIt's total score, prolific writers rise
- jstanley 2y agoHi, my blog incoherency.co.uk appears at number 207 but it says the author is David Given. I'm not sure if the error is that you think my blog is written by David Given instead of James Stanley, or if you think David Given's blog is incoherency.co.uk instead of cowlark.com !
- mtlynch 2y agoAuthor here. Thanks for letting me know. Fixed now: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/37 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/3...
- shooshx 2y agoNumber 18, Jeff Atwood codinghorror.com is a dead link. The actual link is https://blog.codinghorror.com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/
- mtlynch 2y agoAh, you're right. Thanks! Fixed: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/38 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/3...
- cowmix 2y agojwz makes the list -- against his will.
- stavros 2y agoI should write more :(
- timdellinger 2y agoThis cries out for a histogram.
- dmitrygr 2y agoWoo hoo. Made it to the top 200 (188), and somehow beat the ESR! What an honour.
- meekaaku 2y agoGreat list. Also curious, what blogging platforms do they use?
- Davidgomiez 2y ago[dead]
- gcj 2y agoHow was that list compiled?
- gcj 2y agoI understand how it was ranked, but how does one get into that CSV! :D
- silexia 2y agoSad to see my site Joelx.com is not anywhere to be found.
- tekichan 2y agoAmazing
- Hildajose18 2y ago[dead]
- davidwu 2y agoIt was interesting to compare my expectations of who would be high ranking on this list versus the actual rankings. Cool project!
- Patrickhill300 2y ago[dead]
- Silvana291 2y ago[dead]