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The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025

692 points by mtlynch 9mo ago

RadiozRadioz 9mo ago
Without looking I knew who was #1. Another thing worth mentioning is that these folks are also prolific commenters on this site. It's not infrequent that I'm browsing around and see a thoughtful comment from Simon, Jeff, etc. It's part of what makes this feel like a nice close community. They're not just mythical blogging entities, they're people like us.
- refibrillator 9mo ago
  Sometimes I wonder if anyone else feels there is a halo effect around certain personalities on this site. When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project, it gives me bad vibes, as if they have ulterior motives. Especially if a majority of their blog posts are content lifted from elsewhere with minimal additions. Perhaps this is just hustle culture, and YC alum status confers immunity from these types of criticisms. Perhaps my only wish is that other voices would bubble to the top in some of these threads. In any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.
  - llmslave2 9mo ago
    With some of these commentators, every single comment contains a link or two to their blog.
    - _zagj 9mo ago
      The appetite HN has for this kind of naked self-promotion is really something. Get posted (even if by someone else) a few too many times to /g/ and you'll be regularly rebuked with "buy an ad" from then on, but HN just looks the other way, and the "haters" calling it out get flagged, at least until the pattern becomes conspicuous and obnoxious enough that even the more gullible lot of HNers start to notice.
      - satvikpendem 9mo ago
        Well, it does stem from a VC firm, business first. That it has tech people is only incidental.
    - adityaathalye 9mo ago
      Well, I link to my blog post(s) and/or github source(s) quite often. "Why does he do that?" has a fairly charitable interpretation, if you choose to answer it that way. In fact, here you go, I wrote about it and will quote myself... From my "about" page https://www.evalapply.org/about.html https://www.evalapply.org/about.html > Learn generously directs what I teach, speak, organise, code. and the first blog post I published: In the beginning, was the domain name https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main --- May I suggest the mantra "Take what is useful, discard the rest."?
      - llmslave2 9mo ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but to me the idea of self promotion like this is fascinating because it's not something I personally feel comfortable doing. Even if I know I'm only sharing a link because I genuinely think it would be useful, I would worry that in doing so there is an underlying self-serving reason. Idk. I'm horrible at sales, selling myself, etc. Even if I believe that a product is genuinely useful, the act of selling feels like it undermines everything else. Do not be like me if you want to make money lol
        adityaathalye 9mo ago
        I was there too, I get you. In the aughts, I had a blog, which I hated re-reading. With the benefit of time and experience (growing up, they call it), I understood that cringe to be the consequence of trying to look smart and/or play to a gallery. Your instinct is probably right, if you feel some comment of yours is "sleazy" or "obnoxiously self-serving". The jedi mind trick is to not stop there, but to use that cringe moment as a signal for some introspection. Think about what sort of a share would make you happy to share? What would you like to see more of in the world? Try to be that person. Do you need to share it publicly right away? Or just bang something out in a markdown file and rant to a pal or two? Only by doing it, did I properly grasp the fact that I just want to share stuff. And now, I tend to like what past-me shared. Even if he was dead wrong. Besides, I've caught myself re-reading a post from some years ago, because of course, I forgot what I was thinking back then. Or needed a reference from one of the copious footnotes / endnotes I habitually slap in there. Appropriate framing---combined with action (speech, sharing, conversation) that flows from said framing---makes all the difference. For me, that framing is "learn generously": https://www.recurse.com/self-directives#learn-generously https://www.recurse.com/self-directives#learn-generously Publishing one's mind can be a pretty vulnerable act. It often feels like a confession of ignorance. Often it is a confession of ignorance. However, now I don't really care if I look stupid or am wrong on the Internet. Because being wrong, and then making it right is part of the deal! Thus it is, that my website's entire purpose is to help me live that value. To be available to anybody who might find use for it; including the source code. In practice that materialises as this: - Paradox! Above all, be entirely self-serving from an "audience" perspective... The posts are mainly long-form explanations written by me for me, while I tried to figure something out that was not obvious to me. No gallery involved. No analytics, in fact. I have no idea which pages are being read (or not). - Not infrequently, it applies to so many other people facing the same questions / obstacles I grappled with. And here's the plot twist... Now when I see someone struggle, it behooves me to share my PoV. Not sharing is the "bad" act! - Technologically, I try to remove all friction from the reader. The site is served as plain HTML and CSS, with excellent lighthouse scores, pleasant reading experience, anonymous RSS feed. Content is CC-licensed, site builder is MIT-licensed. (Screen reader accessibility can definitely use work, but the markup is definitely not a "soup of divs" abomination). - Certainly not "make money", whatever that means. According to Cloudflare, my site consistently gets ~20K monthly unique visitors (supposedly human / non-bot). I don't even know what that means. It's just "internet number go up". My real joy is getting the occasional email from some kindred spirit. Once a month someone lights up my life with a delightful conversation. Why? Because I openly welcome it! You can write me too :) https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation (See, yet another self-share... which I feel fine about, even in a somewhat contentious sub-thread, because I really want to have a proper letter exchange, should you feel up for it!) (edit: typos, clarification, formatting)
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ludicrousdispla 9mo ago
    yeah, it feels like tireless self-promotion and their comments have very low utility for me
    - rednafi 9mo ago
      Tireless promo works. 3 of the top 5 authors on this list tirelessly promotes themselves everywhere - not just in HN.
    - underdeserver 9mo ago
      It's a way to discover their content - content you might miss if you only go on HN once or twice a day. HN is great for diversity of topics, tech news, random discussions with tech-celebs etc., but e.g. Simon's blog is the best content there is on what the latest LLM gizmo is and how well it works.
  - bakugo 9mo ago
    > When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project There is a rule specifically forbidding this, but it's been made quite clear that certain users are above this rule, to the point that the moderators themselves will show up to tell people off if they bring it up.
sxg 9mo ago
Interesting how Stratechery (Ben Thompson) is #15 in the last 5 years but not even top 100 in 2025. Similar with Julia Evans: #5 in the last 5 years but not in the 2025 top 100.
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  With Julia Evans, it's mainly due to her blogging less. She only published six blog posts in 2025, but five of them reached the front page.[0] By comparison, in 2020, when she was #11th most popular, she had 17 new blog posts on the front page plus 5 old ones.[1] Her site makes it kind of hard to count her total posts in 2020 by eyeballing it, but it looks like she published about 50+ new posts that year. [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d=jvns.ca&start=2025-01-01&end=2025-12-31 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d... [1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d=jvns.ca&start=2020-01-01&end=2020-12-31 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
- llm_nerd 9mo ago
  HN is very fickle with blog authors, adopting certain people basically as their own. If the authors participate here it leads to a protective instinct among many. And I get it. It is a sense of community, belonging, and so on. But at the same time it's groupism and means that often mediocre, lazy content[^1] has an easy path to the front page, and if you dare counter or question it, the crowd will defensively strike out. It's like sharing the karaoke of a family member and crowing about it. It's more kuro5hin than Hacker News, and honestly it's something I wish this community didn't do as it often makes the front page more noisy than signal. [^1]: In no way am I saying all content from those regulars fits that bill, but there are many cases where this stuff is #1 and if it was from any random other blogger it would have rolled off of new without a single upvote.
  - geerlingguy 9mo ago
    This is somewhat true; I know I'm trained at least a tiny bit to look over at the 'byline' on posts if the title attracts my attention... But it's also muted a bit by the fact there are no icons, no large flashy attention-grabbing bits, and everyone gets the same muted colors for domain and submitter username. I like that a lot, and contrast it often, in my mind, with Reddit, which now has user avatars, little flashy icons, an annoying habbit of pushing 'full' posts and ads everywhere...
ashtakeaway 9mo ago
While J.B. Crawford's computer.rip is a newsletter and not a blog, I'd say he's popular enough to be on the list.
- susam 9mo ago
  He is featured in the top 100 list. See here: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=2025-01-01&end=2025-12-31 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
redfloatplane 9mo ago
> Simon often finds ideas within walled-garden platforms (e.g., TikTok, Twitter) and simply brings them to the open web I find this is a surprisingly valuable thing. The AI space is moving fast, and a lot of the interesting, imaginative experimental stuff is happening on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms I really don't want to engage with - but I do want to keep roughly up-to-speed with what's happening there.
- simonw 9mo ago
  That's something I like about having a quote blog - it's a very quick way to post something interesting, but you still have to be selective about exactly which piece you quote. For TikTok I usually run them through yt-dlp to extract the audio and then use MacWhisper for an initial transcript which I can then hand-edit to get to the most interesting portion. https://simonwillison.net/tags/tiktok/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/tiktok/
  - redfloatplane 9mo ago
    Well, it’s very much appreciated. So much of the weird one-off experimentation seems to happen on sites like that, and otherwise I’d have to either lump it or eat the radioactivity. It’s an interesting thing that even though I do plenty of my own weird little experiments and similar tool-building escapades as you, but I rarely post about them on my own blog (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog https://redfloatplane.lol/blog) (and thus, nowhere). Perhaps it’s that posting them on my blog feels like taking more responsibility than just saying “tried this experiment lol” on twitter.
  - JustinXie 9mo ago
    This workflow (extracting -> transcribing -> curating) is increasingly vital. We are seeing a massive amount of domain knowledge being locked inside "un-indexable" video containers or walled gardens like Discord and TikTok. Ten years from now, a search query won't find that brilliant explanation on a niche topic unless someone like you pulled it out and put it on the open web. It's effectively acting as a bridge between the ephemeral algorithmic feed and the permanent archival web.
simonw 9mo ago
The data for this is available as CSV files served with open CORS headers, which means you can have all sorts of fun with them from JavaScript apps running on other domains. Here's a SQL query run against this data using Datasette Lite (SQLite and Python in WebAssembly via Pyodide): https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://hn-popularity.cdn.refactoringenglish.com/hn-data.csv#/data?sql=with+yearly_scores+as+%28%0A++select+%0A++++domain%2C%0A++++strftime%28%27%25Y%27%2C+date%29+as+year%2C%0A++++sum%28score%29+as+total_score%2C%0A++++count%28distinct+date%29+as+days_mentioned%0A++from+%22hn-data%22%0A++group+by+domain%2C+strftime%28%27%25Y%27%2C+date%29%0A%29%2C%0Aranked+as+%28%0A++select+%0A++++domain%2C%0A++++year%2C%0A++++total_score%2C%0A++++days_mentioned%2C%0A++++rank%28%29+over+%28partition+by+year+order+by+total_score+desc%29+as+rank%0A++from+yearly_scores%0A%29%0Aselect+%0A++r.year%2C%0A++r.total_score%2C%0A++r.rank%2C%0A++r.days_mentioned%0Afrom+ranked+r%0Awhere+r.domain+%3D+%3Adomain%0A++and+r.year+%3E%3D+%28%0A++++select+min%28strftime%28%27%25Y%27%2C+date%29%29+%0A++++from+%22hn-data%22%0A++++where+domain+%3D+%3Adomain%0A++%29%0Aorder+by+r.year+desc&domain=simonwillison.net https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://hn-popularity.cdn.ref...
- azhenley 9mo ago
  Wow, my blog was #20 in 2021! Downhill since :)
- thundergolfer 9mo ago
  Is there a way to make data cleaning contributions?
emschwartz 9mo ago
Here's that list as an OPML file (for importing into a feed reader): https://gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d2bf860ccc367fe37ff953ba6de66b https://gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d2bf860ccc367fe37ff953b... It includes the 92 of those blogs that have RSS/Atom feeds.
- karpathy 9mo ago
  came here to look exactly for this thank you!
  - emschwartz 9mo ago
    You’re welcome! I wanted it to add to Scour (https://scour.ing https://scour.ing) but glad it was helpful for someone else too!
lapcat 9mo ago
My blog fell from #37 in 2024 to #357 in 2025. Dang, what happened???
- rvz 9mo ago
  Were you posting about AI and LLMs or was it just Apple?
  - lapcat 9mo ago
    Good point. I'm so out of the loop that I failed to guess the obvious.
- Retr0id 9mo ago
  I fell from 63 all the way to 3047 but it's mostly because I didn't do any substantive blogging this year :(
- tolerance 9mo ago
  Not enough introspective philosophical screeds to subsidize your rank in between the your tech-related breakthroughs and exposés.
- adityaathalye 9mo ago
  not the real dang
jeffbee 9mo ago
Dan Luu went from omnipresence to absence via Patreon.
eterm 9mo ago
I didn't even make the top 5,000. I really ought to write more blog posts. Actually I wonder if the dreaded profanity filter has caught me out again. I've had a couple of posts do well, and it's a .github.io subdomain, so it should have showed up.
- edent 9mo ago
  HN is very American in its puritanical approach to swearing. One of my posts had its title Bowdlerised to remove the word "disckhead"!
johnsillings 9mo ago
thanks for putting this together!
jgrahamc 9mo ago
Neat. Hey, OP, can you update my bio though? I used to be CTO of Cloudflare but I retired last March[1] and the new CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). Now I'm just a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-programmer-to-cto-to-board-of-directors/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudfla...
- simonw 9mo ago
  You can submit a PR to update your bio 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... - there are 77 closed PRs for that repo already so it looks like it's a well managed path for updating that.
  - jgrahamc 9mo ago
    Thanks, but doesn't look like that'll update the box on the main page that reads: "Who counts as a blogger? I explain more in my methodology page, but it’s basically anyone who blogs as an individual rather than as part of a company or a team. As an example, John Graham-Cumming is the CTO of Cloudflare, so I count his personal blog but not his posts to the Cloudflare company blog."
    - simonw 9mo ago
      Oh I see what you mean, yeah that needs fixing.
- rcarmo 9mo ago
  That quote, together with the rest of our timeline, made me realize that we might just be getting to the point where the dolphins finally up and leave :)
- ctxc 9mo ago
  The towel section was my favorite part of the book growing up!
- 9mo ago
adityaathalye 9mo ago
Huh... I went looking in the 2,000s, thinking "same as last year probably". | Year | Rank | Domain | Total Score | Stories | Avg. Score | |------+--------+---------------+-------------+---------+------------| | 2025 | 719 | evalapply.org | 661 | 5 | 132 | | 2024 | 2138 | evalapply.org | 154 | 1 | 154 | | 2023 | 1674 | evalapply.org | 296 | 2 | 148 | | 2022 | > 5000 | NPC | NPC | NPC | NPC | brb, eating a sweet to celebrate popularity (edit: fix missing column header)
susam 9mo ago
My blog moved from #99 in 2024 to #41 in 2025. Although I have never had any intention of blogging consistently, it is nice to know that I had a good blogging year. :) Here's what my data looks like: | Year | Rank | Domain | Score | Stories | Avg. Score | |------+------+-----------+-------+---------+------------| | 2025 | 41 | susam.net | 2544 | 16 | 159 | | 2024 | 98 | susam.net | 1530 | 13 | 118 | | 2023 | 236 | susam.net | 1026 | 11 | 93 | | 2022 | 96 | susam.net | 1652 | 21 | 79 | Not bad for an occasional blogger.
dleeftink 9mo ago
Network effect gaming or true interest? Which blogs have been overshadowed by the lucky few?
- nospice 9mo ago
  The way HN works, you basically need a couple of habitual submitters to subscribe to your RSS feed. Blogs that have that appear here frequently, so there's definitely a positive feedback loop. I had a blog that used to fare well on HN and it was carried 100% by a single HN regular. When that person went on a hiatus, my stuff stopped appearing on the front page. That's really all it takes.
tasuki 9mo ago
Oh I completely missed "The Website That Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". I'm definitely not afraid to discuss John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball, I'm just not interested.
jaydenmilne 9mo ago
I ought to complain about YouTube more often, #47 with an average of 1200 points per post
thundergolfer 9mo ago
Cool dataset. I did the same thing a few days ago[1] but somehow had the top 3 getting ~1000 more points than this data. There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all. Also baseten.co is not a personal blog. 1. https://x.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/2005737476069933272?s=20 https://x.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/2005737476069933272?s=20
- simonw 9mo ago
  Maybe because of this? > I aggregate scores across all submissions that received a score of at least 20 and are not dead or deleted. https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  >There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all. Yeah, the minimum for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all front page stories.[0] >Also baseten.co is not a personal blog. Thanks, I've updated the dataset to exclude baseten.[1] It should disappear in the next hour or so. Which view did they appear in? I don't see them anywhere in the top 100. [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo... [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/85 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/8...
ArcHound 9mo ago
Honestly, it makes me a bit sad I am not anywhere on the list at all. Yes, I had only one front page mention ever, the rest of my entries are probably bad and useless, but still. I don't see how and why I wouldn't fall into the dataset, does anybody know please?
- simonw 9mo ago
  The methodology is explained here: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo... You won't show up unless your site is listed in this manually curated CSV file: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/master/data/domains-meta.csv https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
  - ArcHound 9mo ago
    Thank you for the reply, I'll go and make a PR.
  - mtlynch 9mo ago
    >You won't show up unless your site is listed in this manually curated CSV Correction: you'll show up even if you're not in the CSV. The CSV just populates metadata for your entry.
    - simonw 9mo ago
      How do you filter out the non-blog content? I assume you had an allow-list of known personal blogs.
      - mtlynch 9mo ago
        Everything is default included, and I have a long list of not-blog domains that are excluded.[0] Plus, I exclude the Alexa top 500. There are lots of not-blogs still in the dataset, but I just exclude them when I come across them in popular views. But I'm sure if you dig through positions 101-5000 you'll find lots of domains that don't match my official criteria for a blog. https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/master/data/excludes.txt https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
cainxinth 9mo ago
These are all great. We have good taste.
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geerlingguy 9mo ago
I've gotten a ton out of this community (much of the time research I've done in the past year stems from various comments and articles I found here), and regarding: "Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. You can read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini and not even realize it’s adapted from a video." For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form. But the videos earn an income (about 1/2 what I earned as a software dev, but it's sustainable and lets me do whatever projects I like), whereas the blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible. Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)
- wcchandler 9mo ago
  Thanks for sharing what platform you’re using to run your blog! Been meaning to message you about it and ask. I see this model being quite attainable as somebody looking to advance myself professionally, following a similar approach.
- kev009 9mo ago
  Respectable to see this candor on how it's done, wishing much success in 2026.
- lnenad 9mo ago
  It's always a pleasure watching your videos, even when I don't like the topic; you seem like a genuine person that enjoys tech. Thank you for the content.
- smcleod 9mo ago
  I always enjoy watching your videos Jeff, appreciate your honest, no-hype approach. As a bonus it's great to see you active here and on Reddit as well.
- jamesgill 9mo ago
g947o 9mo ago
Good stuff, but I cannot wrap my head around how they could write so much while still making a living aka doing things that actually pay them
- simonw 9mo ago
  I sold a startup a few years ago which gave me the financial runway to "work for myself" aka not make much money at all for a few years.
- edent 9mo ago
  Someone once asked me how I found the time to read so many books. I just prefer reading to most other activities. I'd rather have my nose in a book than [your favourite activity]. It is the same with blogging. I'd rather spend time writing than I would watching YouTube, mowing the lawn, or whatever. Although, since starting an adult gap year 12 months ago, I've actually been blogging less as I find more interesting things to do than work :-)
- stavros 9mo ago
  People ask me where I find the time to make so many things, and I like to say "we all have the same 24 hours in a day, I just like to spend many of them making things". I guess what they're really have in their mind when they ask is "where do you find the extra hours to go so far down my priority list", but what they don't realize is that my priority list is simply different.
rcarmo 9mo ago
Nice. Can’t find mine in the top 1000, but I can live with that. I _am_ fascinated at some in the 100-200 rankings, since they seem to have very few posts (and short at that, based on my random sampling)
gunnarmorling 9mo ago
Oh nice, thanks for providing that data! Made it to #369 in 2025 with morling.dev; let's see what's in stock this year :) year total_score rank days_mentioned 2025 903 369 8 2024 604 581 2 2023 547 861 3 2022 450 1165 4 2021 188 2308 2
kstrauser 9mo ago
After decades of posting, I’m proud to have clawed my way up to the top 4,000. I am unstoppable.
jackfranklyn 9mo ago
[flagged]
ushdbz 9mo ago
TY
byran 9mo ago
Thank you for the mention! Didn't expect to see myself here haha - Byran
arajnoha 9mo ago
Why the article doesn't have direct links to said blogs as they are mentioned?
- rpastuszak 9mo ago
  If that helps I've just added a quick list of all feeds and sites mentioned in the dataset (I think): https://github.com/paprikka/heed https://github.com/paprikka/heed Links to: CSS, OPML (so you can import into your RSS reader in bulk), CSV, and JSON
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  If you click a domain, you'll see its details page, and there's a direct link at the top as well as direct links to all of the domain's front page stories.
rpastuszak 9mo ago
FWIW I've put together a quick(-ish ca 2k entries) list of RSS feeds by scraping the sites from the dataset: https://github.com/paprikka/heed https://github.com/paprikka/heed The repo contains links to: OPML (bulk import into RSS readers), Markdown (clickable links), and CSV/JSON It's not perfect, some feeds are not being captured, then some sites publish multiple feeds whereas I pull just one atm. I'll share a writeup once I clean it up a bit, but I hope it's useful / entertaining in the meantime. I keep a separate list of people I know, or met via HN in my RSS reader, so I'll needs to review/clean it up anyway. ok I'm late for a gig, bye!
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eatonphil 9mo ago
brooker.co.za author's name is Marc not Chris. :) scattered-thoughts.net author is Jamie Brandon. :)
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  Thanks, Phil! Updated! https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/95 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/9...
hnbear 9mo ago
I've long wondered how much HN karma I could farm by keeping track of the top-X HN blogs and auto-posting the links with a bot. There are also a number of other blogs I read that are semi-regularly on HN and aren't on the list that I expected to be. Maybe just didn't quite make the top 100, and I'm over-indexing on my personal preferences. eg. Matt Levine's Money Stuff crops up semi-often, and Bret Devereaux of ACOUP gets most of his posts on HN.
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  > I've long wondered how much HN karma I could farm by keeping track of the top-X HN blogs and auto-posting the links with a bot. A lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=todsacerdoti https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=todsacerdoti
  - cinntaile 9mo ago
    I think that account was compromised a while back, it looks fine now again. I don't get the point though, why even bother making a repost bot. It's not like they gain anything from it. Not that I have anything against the top bloggers, but I do hope the 2026 list will differ from the 2025 list. I'm here to read about varied tech content!
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
It's weird to see Bill Gates' blog, way down at #84. Times, they are a changin'...
JustinXie 9mo ago
A common thread among the top blogs listed here (Geerling, SimonW, rachelbythebay, etc.) is a distinct lack of "growth hacking" or AI-generated filler. In an era where search results are flooded with SEO-optimized slop, these blogs have become trusted nodes primarily because they verify their own reality. Whether it's Jeff physically plugging in a PCIe card or Rachel debugging a weird server issue, the value proposition is "I actually did this thing, and here is what happened." It seems the best SEO strategy for 2025 is simply proving you are a human doing actual work.
- catonmat 9mo ago
  The "verify their own reality" point resonates. I stumbled on a post recently where someone documented getting an OCR model from 90% to 98% accuracy - turns out most of the gain came from discovering their training labels were 27% wrong, not from model tweaks. The interesting bit was their finding that running AI verification in parallel resulted in 2% correction rate, but sequential processing caught 65%. That kind of hard-won, numbers-backed insight is what makes technical blogs worth reading vs the flood of tutorial content. https://devguide.dev/blog/teaching-ai-to-distrust-itself
ronbenton 9mo ago
Very neat that a bunch of people mentioned in the list are actively participating on this very thread!
OuterVale 9mo ago
Looks like my site (https://vale.rocks https://vale.rocks) ranked 440 by score, 128 by stories, and 135 by average score. Thanks for everyone here who checked out my writing last year!
ezekg 9mo ago
Pretty cool to have made the top 100! brb pouring a dram to celebrate.
arlattimore 9mo ago
On Daring Fireball, I find the site hard to use nowadays. It isn’t mobile friendly, and the white on grey, while cool, is a bit hard to read. I wonder if a fresh design might help out for improved engagement and thus shares/upvotes etc.
- trvz 9mo ago
  Making the site mobile friendly would take about five lines of HTML/CSS changes, but I recall him snubbing someone somewhere who asked for it. Whenever I listen to one of his podcasts, I notice audio quality being worse than appropriate for someone who has been making a chunk of their living from podcasts for years. I've found unsubscribing to be a remedy.
- kstrauser 9mo ago
  I told Safari to always open it in reader mode. That was the only way to use it on my phone.
baxtr 9mo ago
Interesting to see John Gruber complaining about HN. He thinks DF is blacklisted. I wasn’t aware of this beef.
bobse 9mo ago
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firefoxd 9mo ago
That's pretty cool. My blog is number 9. And I don't think I've been as prolific as those in the top 10. 9 idiallo.com 5,539 17 326 Ibrahim Diallo Software developer and blogger
dhx 9mo ago
I was looking for @marklit (Mark Litwintschik / https://tech.marksblogg.com https://tech.marksblogg.com) in the list as he's a geospatial-focussed blogger I've seen regularly on HN with interesting blog posts where he finds and presents open source datasets I'd never thought about, walks through some basic processing/querying steps, and provides some examples of what can be produced with the data. Many of the blog posts have left me thinking about possibilities to setup bots for uploading maps to Wikimedia Commons (for embedding within Wikipedias etc) based on these interesting datasets, or at least automating via scripts the development/upload of maps on a country-by-country basis (or other criteria) for static once-off datasets. Unfortunately he doesn't show in the top 100. Also unfortunately, there is no blogger described in the top 100 as having a geospatial interest/focus.
firexcy 9mo ago
Great project. It’s a surprise to learn that it’s possible to make it to #598 with three posts. (I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?) It was also during the past year that I came to realize how powerful and versatile Hugo is. I had used Hugo for many years, touching only the most basic feature set. Last year, I decided to be done with Twitter and Instagram and make my own timelines of text and photo posts with similar layouts. Initially, I thought it might require separate instances of GoToSocial and Pixelfed. It turned out that Hugo could do it all with a few tweaks, and now they are live at hsu.cy/notes and hsu.cy/gallery, respectively. I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to start their own blog.
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  > (I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?) It's a manual process, so I have to do it by hand when I notice a domain has moved. I've just added yours and kicked off a reprocessing job so that your old domain counts toward hsu.cy.
JustSkyfall 9mo ago
Reading the article and randomly stumbling across my name was certainly something to say the least.. here’s to hoping my next posts are written in better circumstances though!
alberto-m 9mo ago
I was extremely surprised not to see Bartosz Ciechanowski (ciechanow.ski) on the list, possibly the only author able to raise 1000+ upvotes on each and every of his posts. But, indeed, he has not published at all in 2025! Hope he comes back this year.
jp3217 9mo ago
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7777777phil 9mo ago
SELF PROMOTION I built an RSS aggregator based on this post and the 2025 HN Popularity Contest rankings. If there's interest in other slices (top 10, top 200, etc.), feel free to reach out, happy to add them. If you want to have a look at the feeds: https://rss-aggregator.philippd.workers.dev https://rss-aggregator.philippd.workers.dev

692 points by mtlynch 9mo ago

Without looking I knew who was #1. Another thing worth mentioning is that these folks are also prolific commenters on this site. It's not infrequent that I'm browsing around and see a thoughtful comment from Simon, Jeff, etc. It's part of what makes this feel like a nice close community. They're not just mythical blogging entities, they're people like us.

refibrillator 9mo ago
Sometimes I wonder if anyone else feels there is a halo effect around certain personalities on this site. When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project, it gives me bad vibes, as if they have ulterior motives. Especially if a majority of their blog posts are content lifted from elsewhere with minimal additions. Perhaps this is just hustle culture, and YC alum status confers immunity from these types of criticisms. Perhaps my only wish is that other voices would bubble to the top in some of these threads. In any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.
- llmslave2 9mo ago
  With some of these commentators, every single comment contains a link or two to their blog.
  - _zagj 9mo ago
    The appetite HN has for this kind of naked self-promotion is really something. Get posted (even if by someone else) a few too many times to /g/ and you'll be regularly rebuked with "buy an ad" from then on, but HN just looks the other way, and the "haters" calling it out get flagged, at least until the pattern becomes conspicuous and obnoxious enough that even the more gullible lot of HNers start to notice.
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Well, it does stem from a VC firm, business first. That it has tech people is only incidental.
  - adityaathalye 9mo ago
    Well, I link to my blog post(s) and/or github source(s) quite often. "Why does he do that?" has a fairly charitable interpretation, if you choose to answer it that way. In fact, here you go, I wrote about it and will quote myself... From my "about" page https://www.evalapply.org/about.html https://www.evalapply.org/about.html > Learn generously directs what I teach, speak, organise, code. and the first blog post I published: In the beginning, was the domain name https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main --- May I suggest the mantra "Take what is useful, discard the rest."?
    - llmslave2 9mo ago
      I don't necessarily disagree, but to me the idea of self promotion like this is fascinating because it's not something I personally feel comfortable doing. Even if I know I'm only sharing a link because I genuinely think it would be useful, I would worry that in doing so there is an underlying self-serving reason. Idk. I'm horrible at sales, selling myself, etc. Even if I believe that a product is genuinely useful, the act of selling feels like it undermines everything else. Do not be like me if you want to make money lol
      - adityaathalye 9mo ago
        I was there too, I get you. In the aughts, I had a blog, which I hated re-reading. With the benefit of time and experience (growing up, they call it), I understood that cringe to be the consequence of trying to look smart and/or play to a gallery. Your instinct is probably right, if you feel some comment of yours is "sleazy" or "obnoxiously self-serving". The jedi mind trick is to not stop there, but to use that cringe moment as a signal for some introspection. Think about what sort of a share would make you happy to share? What would you like to see more of in the world? Try to be that person. Do you need to share it publicly right away? Or just bang something out in a markdown file and rant to a pal or two? Only by doing it, did I properly grasp the fact that I just want to share stuff. And now, I tend to like what past-me shared. Even if he was dead wrong. Besides, I've caught myself re-reading a post from some years ago, because of course, I forgot what I was thinking back then. Or needed a reference from one of the copious footnotes / endnotes I habitually slap in there. Appropriate framing---combined with action (speech, sharing, conversation) that flows from said framing---makes all the difference. For me, that framing is "learn generously": https://www.recurse.com/self-directives#learn-generously https://www.recurse.com/self-directives#learn-generously Publishing one's mind can be a pretty vulnerable act. It often feels like a confession of ignorance. Often it is a confession of ignorance. However, now I don't really care if I look stupid or am wrong on the Internet. Because being wrong, and then making it right is part of the deal! Thus it is, that my website's entire purpose is to help me live that value. To be available to anybody who might find use for it; including the source code. In practice that materialises as this: - Paradox! Above all, be entirely self-serving from an "audience" perspective... The posts are mainly long-form explanations written by me for me, while I tried to figure something out that was not obvious to me. No gallery involved. No analytics, in fact. I have no idea which pages are being read (or not). - Not infrequently, it applies to so many other people facing the same questions / obstacles I grappled with. And here's the plot twist... Now when I see someone struggle, it behooves me to share my PoV. Not sharing is the "bad" act! - Technologically, I try to remove all friction from the reader. The site is served as plain HTML and CSS, with excellent lighthouse scores, pleasant reading experience, anonymous RSS feed. Content is CC-licensed, site builder is MIT-licensed. (Screen reader accessibility can definitely use work, but the markup is definitely not a "soup of divs" abomination). - Certainly not "make money", whatever that means. According to Cloudflare, my site consistently gets ~20K monthly unique visitors (supposedly human / non-bot). I don't even know what that means. It's just "internet number go up". My real joy is getting the occasional email from some kindred spirit. Once a month someone lights up my life with a delightful conversation. Why? Because I openly welcome it! You can write me too :) https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation (See, yet another self-share... which I feel fine about, even in a somewhat contentious sub-thread, because I really want to have a proper letter exchange, should you feel up for it!) (edit: typos, clarification, formatting)
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- ludicrousdispla 9mo ago
  yeah, it feels like tireless self-promotion and their comments have very low utility for me
  - rednafi 9mo ago
    Tireless promo works. 3 of the top 5 authors on this list tirelessly promotes themselves everywhere - not just in HN.
  - underdeserver 9mo ago
    It's a way to discover their content - content you might miss if you only go on HN once or twice a day. HN is great for diversity of topics, tech news, random discussions with tech-celebs etc., but e.g. Simon's blog is the best content there is on what the latest LLM gizmo is and how well it works.
- bakugo 9mo ago
  > When I see someone ending nearly every comment with a link to their blog or pet project There is a rule specifically forbidding this, but it's been made quite clear that certain users are above this rule, to the point that the moderators themselves will show up to tell people off if they bring it up.

sxg 9mo ago

Interesting how Stratechery (Ben Thompson) is #15 in the last 5 years but not even top 100 in 2025. Similar with Julia Evans: #5 in the last 5 years but not in the 2025 top 100.

mtlynch 9mo ago
With Julia Evans, it's mainly due to her blogging less. She only published six blog posts in 2025, but five of them reached the front page.[0] By comparison, in 2020, when she was #11th most popular, she had 17 new blog posts on the front page plus 5 old ones.[1] Her site makes it kind of hard to count her total posts in 2020 by eyeballing it, but it looks like she published about 50+ new posts that year. [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d=jvns.ca&start=2025-01-01&end=2025-12-31 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d... [1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d=jvns.ca&start=2020-01-01&end=2020-12-31 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
llm_nerd 9mo ago
HN is very fickle with blog authors, adopting certain people basically as their own. If the authors participate here it leads to a protective instinct among many. And I get it. It is a sense of community, belonging, and so on. But at the same time it's groupism and means that often mediocre, lazy content[^1] has an easy path to the front page, and if you dare counter or question it, the crowd will defensively strike out. It's like sharing the karaoke of a family member and crowing about it. It's more kuro5hin than Hacker News, and honestly it's something I wish this community didn't do as it often makes the front page more noisy than signal. [^1]: In no way am I saying all content from those regulars fits that bill, but there are many cases where this stuff is #1 and if it was from any random other blogger it would have rolled off of new without a single upvote.
- geerlingguy 9mo ago
  This is somewhat true; I know I'm trained at least a tiny bit to look over at the 'byline' on posts if the title attracts my attention... But it's also muted a bit by the fact there are no icons, no large flashy attention-grabbing bits, and everyone gets the same muted colors for domain and submitter username. I like that a lot, and contrast it often, in my mind, with Reddit, which now has user avatars, little flashy icons, an annoying habbit of pushing 'full' posts and ads everywhere...

ashtakeaway 9mo ago

While J.B. Crawford's computer.rip is a newsletter and not a blog, I'd say he's popular enough to be on the list.

susam 9mo ago
He is featured in the top 100 list. See here: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=2025-01-01&end=2025-12-31 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...

redfloatplane 9mo ago

> Simon often finds ideas within walled-garden platforms (e.g., TikTok, Twitter) and simply brings them to the open web I find this is a surprisingly valuable thing. The AI space is moving fast, and a lot of the interesting, imaginative experimental stuff is happening on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms I really don't want to engage with - but I do want to keep roughly up-to-speed with what's happening there.

simonw 9mo ago
That's something I like about having a quote blog - it's a very quick way to post something interesting, but you still have to be selective about exactly which piece you quote. For TikTok I usually run them through yt-dlp to extract the audio and then use MacWhisper for an initial transcript which I can then hand-edit to get to the most interesting portion. https://simonwillison.net/tags/tiktok/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/tiktok/
- redfloatplane 9mo ago
  Well, it’s very much appreciated. So much of the weird one-off experimentation seems to happen on sites like that, and otherwise I’d have to either lump it or eat the radioactivity. It’s an interesting thing that even though I do plenty of my own weird little experiments and similar tool-building escapades as you, but I rarely post about them on my own blog (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog https://redfloatplane.lol/blog) (and thus, nowhere). Perhaps it’s that posting them on my blog feels like taking more responsibility than just saying “tried this experiment lol” on twitter.
- JustinXie 9mo ago
  This workflow (extracting -> transcribing -> curating) is increasingly vital. We are seeing a massive amount of domain knowledge being locked inside "un-indexable" video containers or walled gardens like Discord and TikTok. Ten years from now, a search query won't find that brilliant explanation on a niche topic unless someone like you pulled it out and put it on the open web. It's effectively acting as a bridge between the ephemeral algorithmic feed and the permanent archival web.

simonw 9mo ago

The data for this is available as CSV files served with open CORS headers, which means you can have all sorts of fun with them from JavaScript apps running on other domains. Here's a SQL query run against this data using Datasette Lite (SQLite and Python in WebAssembly via Pyodide): https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://hn-popularity.cdn.refactoringenglish.com/hn-data.csv#/data?sql=with+yearly_scores+as+%28%0A++select+%0A++++domain%2C%0A++++strftime%28%27%25Y%27%2C+date%29+as+year%2C%0A++++sum%28score%29+as+total_score%2C%0A++++count%28distinct+date%29+as+days_mentioned%0A++from+%22hn-data%22%0A++group+by+domain%2C+strftime%28%27%25Y%27%2C+date%29%0A%29%2C%0Aranked+as+%28%0A++select+%0A++++domain%2C%0A++++year%2C%0A++++total_score%2C%0A++++days_mentioned%2C%0A++++rank%28%29+over+%28partition+by+year+order+by+total_score+desc%29+as+rank%0A++from+yearly_scores%0A%29%0Aselect+%0A++r.year%2C%0A++r.total_score%2C%0A++r.rank%2C%0A++r.days_mentioned%0Afrom+ranked+r%0Awhere+r.domain+%3D+%3Adomain%0A++and+r.year+%3E%3D+%28%0A++++select+min%28strftime%28%27%25Y%27%2C+date%29%29+%0A++++from+%22hn-data%22%0A++++where+domain+%3D+%3Adomain%0A++%29%0Aorder+by+r.year+desc&domain=simonwillison.net https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https://hn-popularity.cdn.ref...

azhenley 9mo ago
Wow, my blog was #20 in 2021! Downhill since :)
thundergolfer 9mo ago
Is there a way to make data cleaning contributions?

emschwartz 9mo ago

Here's that list as an OPML file (for importing into a feed reader): https://gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d2bf860ccc367fe37ff953ba6de66b https://gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d2bf860ccc367fe37ff953b... It includes the 92 of those blogs that have RSS/Atom feeds.

karpathy 9mo ago
came here to look exactly for this thank you!
- emschwartz 9mo ago
  You’re welcome! I wanted it to add to Scour (https://scour.ing https://scour.ing) but glad it was helpful for someone else too!

lapcat 9mo ago

My blog fell from #37 in 2024 to #357 in 2025. Dang, what happened???

rvz 9mo ago
Were you posting about AI and LLMs or was it just Apple?
- lapcat 9mo ago
  Good point. I'm so out of the loop that I failed to guess the obvious.
Retr0id 9mo ago
I fell from 63 all the way to 3047 but it's mostly because I didn't do any substantive blogging this year :(
tolerance 9mo ago
Not enough introspective philosophical screeds to subsidize your rank in between the your tech-related breakthroughs and exposés.
adityaathalye 9mo ago
not the real dang

jeffbee 9mo ago

Dan Luu went from omnipresence to absence via Patreon.

eterm 9mo ago

I didn't even make the top 5,000. I really ought to write more blog posts. Actually I wonder if the dreaded profanity filter has caught me out again. I've had a couple of posts do well, and it's a .github.io subdomain, so it should have showed up.

edent 9mo ago
HN is very American in its puritanical approach to swearing. One of my posts had its title Bowdlerised to remove the word "disckhead"!

johnsillings 9mo ago

thanks for putting this together!

jgrahamc 9mo ago

Neat. Hey, OP, can you update my bio though? I used to be CTO of Cloudflare but I retired last March[1] and the new CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). Now I'm just a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-programmer-to-cto-to-board-of-directors/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudfla...

simonw 9mo ago
You can submit a PR to update your bio 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... - there are 77 closed PRs for that repo already so it looks like it's a well managed path for updating that.
- jgrahamc 9mo ago
  Thanks, but doesn't look like that'll update the box on the main page that reads: "Who counts as a blogger? I explain more in my methodology page, but it’s basically anyone who blogs as an individual rather than as part of a company or a team. As an example, John Graham-Cumming is the CTO of Cloudflare, so I count his personal blog but not his posts to the Cloudflare company blog."
  - simonw 9mo ago
    Oh I see what you mean, yeah that needs fixing.
rcarmo 9mo ago
That quote, together with the rest of our timeline, made me realize that we might just be getting to the point where the dolphins finally up and leave :)
ctxc 9mo ago
The towel section was my favorite part of the book growing up!
9mo ago

adityaathalye 9mo ago

Huh... I went looking in the 2,000s, thinking "same as last year probably". | Year | Rank | Domain | Total Score | Stories | Avg. Score | |------+--------+---------------+-------------+---------+------------| | 2025 | 719 | evalapply.org | 661 | 5 | 132 | | 2024 | 2138 | evalapply.org | 154 | 1 | 154 | | 2023 | 1674 | evalapply.org | 296 | 2 | 148 | | 2022 | > 5000 | NPC | NPC | NPC | NPC | brb, eating a sweet to celebrate popularity (edit: fix missing column header)

susam 9mo ago

My blog moved from #99 in 2024 to #41 in 2025. Although I have never had any intention of blogging consistently, it is nice to know that I had a good blogging year. :) Here's what my data looks like: | Year | Rank | Domain | Score | Stories | Avg. Score | |------+------+-----------+-------+---------+------------| | 2025 | 41 | susam.net | 2544 | 16 | 159 | | 2024 | 98 | susam.net | 1530 | 13 | 118 | | 2023 | 236 | susam.net | 1026 | 11 | 93 | | 2022 | 96 | susam.net | 1652 | 21 | 79 | Not bad for an occasional blogger.

dleeftink 9mo ago

Network effect gaming or true interest? Which blogs have been overshadowed by the lucky few?

nospice 9mo ago
The way HN works, you basically need a couple of habitual submitters to subscribe to your RSS feed. Blogs that have that appear here frequently, so there's definitely a positive feedback loop. I had a blog that used to fare well on HN and it was carried 100% by a single HN regular. When that person went on a hiatus, my stuff stopped appearing on the front page. That's really all it takes.

tasuki 9mo ago

Oh I completely missed "The Website That Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". I'm definitely not afraid to discuss John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball, I'm just not interested.

jaydenmilne 9mo ago

I ought to complain about YouTube more often, #47 with an average of 1200 points per post

thundergolfer 9mo ago

Cool dataset. I did the same thing a few days ago[1] but somehow had the top 3 getting ~1000 more points than this data. There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all. Also baseten.co is not a personal blog. 1. https://x.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/2005737476069933272?s=20 https://x.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/2005737476069933272?s=20

simonw 9mo ago
Maybe because of this? > I aggregate scores across all submissions that received a score of at least 20 and are not dead or deleted. https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
mtlynch 9mo ago
>There's some data issues in the full dataset, expectedly. My blog got around 200 points this year, which should be enough to hit #2077, but the blog does not appear at all. Yeah, the minimum for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all front page stories.[0] >Also baseten.co is not a personal blog. Thanks, I've updated the dataset to exclude baseten.[1] It should disappear in the next hour or so. Which view did they appear in? I don't see them anywhere in the top 100. [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo... [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/85 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/8...

ArcHound 9mo ago

Honestly, it makes me a bit sad I am not anywhere on the list at all. Yes, I had only one front page mention ever, the rest of my entries are probably bad and useless, but still. I don't see how and why I wouldn't fall into the dataset, does anybody know please?

simonw 9mo ago
The methodology is explained here: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodology/ https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo... You won't show up unless your site is listed in this manually curated CSV file: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/master/data/domains-meta.csv https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
- ArcHound 9mo ago
  Thank you for the reply, I'll go and make a PR.
- mtlynch 9mo ago
  >You won't show up unless your site is listed in this manually curated CSV Correction: you'll show up even if you're not in the CSV. The CSV just populates metadata for your entry.
  - simonw 9mo ago
    How do you filter out the non-blog content? I assume you had an allow-list of known personal blogs.
    - mtlynch 9mo ago
      Everything is default included, and I have a long list of not-blog domains that are excluded.[0] Plus, I exclude the Alexa top 500. There are lots of not-blogs still in the dataset, but I just exclude them when I come across them in popular views. But I'm sure if you dig through positions 101-5000 you'll find lots of domains that don't match my official criteria for a blog. https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/master/data/excludes.txt https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...

cainxinth 9mo ago

These are all great. We have good taste.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

geerlingguy 9mo ago

I've gotten a ton out of this community (much of the time research I've done in the past year stems from various comments and articles I found here), and regarding: "Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. You can read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini and not even realize it’s adapted from a video." For most of my favorite projects, I write the blog post _first_, then adapt that to a YouTube script. I still consider the written word to be vastly superior to video form. But the videos earn an income (about 1/2 what I earned as a software dev, but it's sustainable and lets me do whatever projects I like), whereas the blog has earned maybe a few thousand dollars with Amazon Affiliate links each year (it covers the hosting, at least, and gives a little extra cash, but I try to keep the blog as "old school web" as possible. Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)

wcchandler 9mo ago
Thanks for sharing what platform you’re using to run your blog! Been meaning to message you about it and ask. I see this model being quite attainable as somebody looking to advance myself professionally, following a similar approach.
kev009 9mo ago
Respectable to see this candor on how it's done, wishing much success in 2026.
lnenad 9mo ago
It's always a pleasure watching your videos, even when I don't like the topic; you seem like a genuine person that enjoys tech. Thank you for the content.
smcleod 9mo ago
I always enjoy watching your videos Jeff, appreciate your honest, no-hype approach. As a bonus it's great to see you active here and on Reddit as well.
jamesgill 9mo ago

g947o 9mo ago

Good stuff, but I cannot wrap my head around how they could write so much while still making a living aka doing things that actually pay them

simonw 9mo ago
I sold a startup a few years ago which gave me the financial runway to "work for myself" aka not make much money at all for a few years.
edent 9mo ago
Someone once asked me how I found the time to read so many books. I just prefer reading to most other activities. I'd rather have my nose in a book than [your favourite activity]. It is the same with blogging. I'd rather spend time writing than I would watching YouTube, mowing the lawn, or whatever. Although, since starting an adult gap year 12 months ago, I've actually been blogging less as I find more interesting things to do than work :-)
stavros 9mo ago
People ask me where I find the time to make so many things, and I like to say "we all have the same 24 hours in a day, I just like to spend many of them making things". I guess what they're really have in their mind when they ask is "where do you find the extra hours to go so far down my priority list", but what they don't realize is that my priority list is simply different.

rcarmo 9mo ago

Nice. Can’t find mine in the top 1000, but I can live with that. I _am_ fascinated at some in the 100-200 rankings, since they seem to have very few posts (and short at that, based on my random sampling)

gunnarmorling 9mo ago

Oh nice, thanks for providing that data! Made it to #369 in 2025 with morling.dev; let's see what's in stock this year :) year total_score rank days_mentioned 2025 903 369 8 2024 604 581 2 2023 547 861 3 2022 450 1165 4 2021 188 2308 2

kstrauser 9mo ago

After decades of posting, I’m proud to have clawed my way up to the top 4,000. I am unstoppable.

jackfranklyn 9mo ago

[flagged]

ushdbz 9mo ago

byran 9mo ago

Thank you for the mention! Didn't expect to see myself here haha - Byran

arajnoha 9mo ago

Why the article doesn't have direct links to said blogs as they are mentioned?

rpastuszak 9mo ago
If that helps I've just added a quick list of all feeds and sites mentioned in the dataset (I think): https://github.com/paprikka/heed https://github.com/paprikka/heed Links to: CSS, OPML (so you can import into your RSS reader in bulk), CSV, and JSON
mtlynch 9mo ago
If you click a domain, you'll see its details page, and there's a direct link at the top as well as direct links to all of the domain's front page stories.

rpastuszak 9mo ago

FWIW I've put together a quick(-ish ca 2k entries) list of RSS feeds by scraping the sites from the dataset: https://github.com/paprikka/heed https://github.com/paprikka/heed The repo contains links to: OPML (bulk import into RSS readers), Markdown (clickable links), and CSV/JSON It's not perfect, some feeds are not being captured, then some sites publish multiple feeds whereas I pull just one atm. I'll share a writeup once I clean it up a bit, but I hope it's useful / entertaining in the meantime. I keep a separate list of people I know, or met via HN in my RSS reader, so I'll needs to review/clean it up anyway. ok I'm late for a gig, bye!

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eatonphil 9mo ago

brooker.co.za author's name is Marc not Chris. :) scattered-thoughts.net author is Jamie Brandon. :)

mtlynch 9mo ago
Thanks, Phil! Updated! https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/95 https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/9...

hnbear 9mo ago

I've long wondered how much HN karma I could farm by keeping track of the top-X HN blogs and auto-posting the links with a bot. There are also a number of other blogs I read that are semi-regularly on HN and aren't on the list that I expected to be. Maybe just didn't quite make the top 100, and I'm over-indexing on my personal preferences. eg. Matt Levine's Money Stuff crops up semi-often, and Bret Devereaux of ACOUP gets most of his posts on HN.

mtlynch 9mo ago
> I've long wondered how much HN karma I could farm by keeping track of the top-X HN blogs and auto-posting the links with a bot. A lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=todsacerdoti https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=todsacerdoti
- cinntaile 9mo ago
  I think that account was compromised a while back, it looks fine now again. I don't get the point though, why even bother making a repost bot. It's not like they gain anything from it. Not that I have anything against the top bloggers, but I do hope the 2026 list will differ from the 2025 list. I'm here to read about varied tech content!

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

It's weird to see Bill Gates' blog, way down at #84. Times, they are a changin'...

JustinXie 9mo ago

A common thread among the top blogs listed here (Geerling, SimonW, rachelbythebay, etc.) is a distinct lack of "growth hacking" or AI-generated filler. In an era where search results are flooded with SEO-optimized slop, these blogs have become trusted nodes primarily because they verify their own reality. Whether it's Jeff physically plugging in a PCIe card or Rachel debugging a weird server issue, the value proposition is "I actually did this thing, and here is what happened." It seems the best SEO strategy for 2025 is simply proving you are a human doing actual work.

catonmat 9mo ago
The "verify their own reality" point resonates. I stumbled on a post recently where someone documented getting an OCR model from 90% to 98% accuracy - turns out most of the gain came from discovering their training labels were 27% wrong, not from model tweaks. The interesting bit was their finding that running AI verification in parallel resulted in 2% correction rate, but sequential processing caught 65%. That kind of hard-won, numbers-backed insight is what makes technical blogs worth reading vs the flood of tutorial content. https://devguide.dev/blog/teaching-ai-to-distrust-itself

ronbenton 9mo ago

Very neat that a bunch of people mentioned in the list are actively participating on this very thread!

OuterVale 9mo ago

Looks like my site (https://vale.rocks https://vale.rocks) ranked 440 by score, 128 by stories, and 135 by average score. Thanks for everyone here who checked out my writing last year!

ezekg 9mo ago

Pretty cool to have made the top 100! brb pouring a dram to celebrate.

arlattimore 9mo ago

On Daring Fireball, I find the site hard to use nowadays. It isn’t mobile friendly, and the white on grey, while cool, is a bit hard to read. I wonder if a fresh design might help out for improved engagement and thus shares/upvotes etc.

trvz 9mo ago
Making the site mobile friendly would take about five lines of HTML/CSS changes, but I recall him snubbing someone somewhere who asked for it. Whenever I listen to one of his podcasts, I notice audio quality being worse than appropriate for someone who has been making a chunk of their living from podcasts for years. I've found unsubscribing to be a remedy.
kstrauser 9mo ago
I told Safari to always open it in reader mode. That was the only way to use it on my phone.

baxtr 9mo ago

Interesting to see John Gruber complaining about HN. He thinks DF is blacklisted. I wasn’t aware of this beef.

bobse 9mo ago

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firefoxd 9mo ago

That's pretty cool. My blog is number 9. And I don't think I've been as prolific as those in the top 10. 9 idiallo.com 5,539 17 326 Ibrahim Diallo Software developer and blogger

dhx 9mo ago

I was looking for @marklit (Mark Litwintschik / https://tech.marksblogg.com https://tech.marksblogg.com) in the list as he's a geospatial-focussed blogger I've seen regularly on HN with interesting blog posts where he finds and presents open source datasets I'd never thought about, walks through some basic processing/querying steps, and provides some examples of what can be produced with the data. Many of the blog posts have left me thinking about possibilities to setup bots for uploading maps to Wikimedia Commons (for embedding within Wikipedias etc) based on these interesting datasets, or at least automating via scripts the development/upload of maps on a country-by-country basis (or other criteria) for static once-off datasets. Unfortunately he doesn't show in the top 100. Also unfortunately, there is no blogger described in the top 100 as having a geospatial interest/focus.

firexcy 9mo ago

Great project. It’s a surprise to learn that it’s possible to make it to #598 with three posts. (I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?) It was also during the past year that I came to realize how powerful and versatile Hugo is. I had used Hugo for many years, touching only the most basic feature set. Last year, I decided to be done with Twitter and Instagram and make my own timelines of text and photo posts with similar layouts. Initially, I thought it might require separate instances of GoToSocial and Pixelfed. It turned out that Hugo could do it all with a few tweaks, and now they are live at hsu.cy/notes and hsu.cy/gallery, respectively. I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to start their own blog.

mtlynch 9mo ago
> (I’m not sure why the data from my old domain, cyhsu.xyz, hasn’t been aggregated to the new hsu.cy, despite the methodology page saying it should. Must I return the canonical header in addition to a 301 code?) It's a manual process, so I have to do it by hand when I notice a domain has moved. I've just added yours and kicked off a reprocessing job so that your old domain counts toward hsu.cy.

JustSkyfall 9mo ago

Reading the article and randomly stumbling across my name was certainly something to say the least.. here’s to hoping my next posts are written in better circumstances though!

alberto-m 9mo ago

I was extremely surprised not to see Bartosz Ciechanowski (ciechanow.ski) on the list, possibly the only author able to raise 1000+ upvotes on each and every of his posts. But, indeed, he has not published at all in 2025! Hope he comes back this year.

jp3217 9mo ago

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7777777phil 9mo ago

SELF PROMOTION I built an RSS aggregator based on this post and the 2025 HN Popularity Contest rankings. If there's interest in other slices (top 10, top 200, etc.), feel free to reach out, happy to add them. If you want to have a look at the feeds: https://rss-aggregator.philippd.workers.dev https://rss-aggregator.philippd.workers.dev