alt.hn

3/25/2025 at 6:48:57 PM

The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News

 https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/

by sharjeelsayed

3/26/2025 at 2:52:39 AM

For 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.

by otras

3/26/2025 at 2:07:52 PM

You're still my favorite of the three of you.

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 7:49:23 PM

And you're my favorite of the one of you.

by stavros

3/26/2025 at 5:28:48 AM

Heh. 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).

by jbhoot

3/27/2025 at 2:36:42 PM

Funnily enough, I have a very common name and take quite a bit of relief in knowing that were someone to even attempt to look me up, they would see a number of authors, artists, politicians, etc. long before anything of me ever appeared. I've gone searching once or twice out of curiosity, and didn't find anything relevant on at least the first two or three pages of Google, Bing, etc.

I suppose the difference is that when I make any sort of professional blog, etc. I do so under online handles in place of my legal name because I see the content as being the important bit, not the person it's coming from; the credibility flows from the information provided, not the name it's tied to.

...Well, provided it's not xXx_DongMaster6969_xXx or whatever. :)

by registeredcorn

3/26/2025 at 5:39:58 AM

That's why I changed my name to a ULID

by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF

3/26/2025 at 5:40:06 PM

In 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.

by AStonesThrow

3/27/2025 at 6:37:29 AM

Being twins’d be considered tax evasion. :P

by volemo

3/26/2025 at 7:35:49 PM

You misspelled Wingdings. A common typo. The keys are like right next to each other.

by ToDougie

3/26/2025 at 2:38:15 PM

Legally? :D

by ZeroTalent

3/26/2025 at 6:57:36 AM

:D

by cung

3/26/2025 at 1:15:16 AM

Author 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

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 11:14:48 AM

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/ regularly shows up, most recently:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43471177

Did that get filtered out become of the domain?

by throw0101c

3/26/2025 at 12:47:30 PM

Yeah, for blogs that don't have a unique domain, I have to fix them by hand. I've just fixed Chris Siebenmann's. Thanks!

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 8:10:09 PM

Is it worth treating anything with a ~ as a home folder and thus a unique blog?

by basch

3/26/2025 at 10:00:37 PM

That's a good idea. I've just implemented that.

It doesn't change much, but it means less special-casing for universities.

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 2:26:01 PM

Hahah 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

by ativzzz

3/26/2025 at 4:03:46 PM

How did you establish a score of 20 points as cut-off point? Did you try other values before?

by mischa_u

3/26/2025 at 4:30:31 PM

It's somewhat arbitrary, but the threshold where you're not allowed to resubmit a story on HN is if it reaches over 20 points. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but it was a few years ago when I asked why I couldn't resubmit.

Also, just from my subjective sense, it's a reasonable cutoff for when articles are officially on the front page for any meaningful amount of time rather than they briefly appear and then fall off.

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 4:29:43 AM

thank you! Pull request submitted :)

by jppope

3/25/2025 at 10:55:32 PM

I 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

[2] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/d...

by omoikane

3/25/2025 at 11:22:53 PM

That'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.

by kens

3/25/2025 at 11:37:00 PM

There 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/1142231895042721...

by raphlinus

3/26/2025 at 12:59:29 AM

>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/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.

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 3:26:01 PM

It would have been funnier if you had claimed to have excluded me because of some shadowy conspiracy, or because of the rumors that I am a cannibal.

But thanks for fixing.

by mjd

3/26/2025 at 3:24:24 PM

Thanks so much for this! I checked last night, was stunned that my blog wasn't there, and went to bed sad and puzzled.

This morning I am jolly and cheerful. Thanks again!

by mjd

3/26/2025 at 12:54:01 AM

3a. Twist - given what you analyze, this time it's a time traveller from the past that needs to stop you :)

by eichin

3/26/2025 at 8:35:32 AM

3b. it's SERN that has a beef with them.

by TeMPOraL

3/25/2025 at 11:32:43 PM

5. steganographic subliminal messaging :P

by winwang

3/26/2025 at 12:09:02 AM

Author here.

That was an error.

I think what happened was that I was going through the list of domains and assumed that "righto.com" would be too valuable a domain name for a personal blog and excluded it without checking. Sorry about that!

Ken is #8 of all-time now.

by mtlynch

3/25/2025 at 8:49:00 PM

I 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.

by bobbiechen

3/26/2025 at 1:25:36 PM

Hi, 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 !

by jstanley

3/25/2025 at 10:48:49 PM

Wow 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

by Swizec

3/26/2025 at 12:37:52 AM

Slate 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.

by throwawayk7h

3/26/2025 at 12:50:23 AM

Yeah, 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/2...

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 4:57:18 AM

Interesting 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.

by account-5

3/26/2025 at 5:00:22 AM

It is easier to do a blameless incident response (or whatever you call it at your company) with the passive voice IMO.

by exac

3/25/2025 at 7:50:02 PM

I 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.

by AndrewStephens

3/25/2025 at 8:54:13 PM

It 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).

by jll29

3/26/2025 at 12:07:10 PM

+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.

by infecto

3/26/2025 at 1:51:50 AM

At the bottom of the screen you will find a pulldown that lets you show up to 5000 entries.

by lisper

3/26/2025 at 7:32:59 AM

FYI, 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>

by dredmorbius

3/25/2025 at 8:45:39 PM

Tap of the beer glass to my similarly low-ranking compatriots.

by kstrauser

3/25/2025 at 8:09:53 PM

Well I clicked through and bookmarked it :)

by soupfordummies

3/25/2025 at 10:07:51 PM

Top 75 :O

I've apparently put out some serious bangers to end up in such esteemed company.

by marginalia_nu

3/26/2025 at 8:18:17 AM

I just discovered your blog, love the format and content! Gotta have to try out that search engine too.

by rpigab

3/25/2025 at 11:42:18 PM

Woo-hoo, # 265 :) FortressOfDoors.com

But my name is Lars Doucet, not Keith Burgun (that's KeithBurgen.net)

Happy to be included!

by larsiusprime

3/25/2025 at 10:15:15 PM

The most popular blog is the owner's blog? What is this, X...? :D

by pprunty

4/1/2025 at 8:30:28 PM

It was interesting to compare my expectations of who would be high ranking on this list versus the actual rankings. Cool project!

by davidwu

3/25/2025 at 10:33:30 PM

I 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.

by OgsyedIE

3/25/2025 at 8:44:31 PM

My blog is 76 all time in the list, except... the author is wrong and the bio is half wrong.

21 the last 12 months.

by lapcat

3/26/2025 at 12:19:21 AM

Sorry about that. Fixed now!

https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/1...

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 1:35:35 AM

My name is correct now, but I'm not a security researcher. ;-)

by lapcat

3/26/2025 at 2:13:19 PM

Don'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

[1] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/disclosure.html

[2] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/7/1.html

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 3:13:57 PM

I'm an Apple software developer. :-)

by lapcat

3/25/2025 at 11:03:22 PM

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a planet like rss feed from these?

by tathagatadg

3/25/2025 at 10:21:52 PM

I’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?

by Mistletoe

3/25/2025 at 11:19:37 PM

Bearblog has a lot of momentum and (anonymous) users, and a committed maintainer: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/

Ofc GitHub is will probably last longer, and so will running your own hosting/deployment

by wonger_

3/26/2025 at 12:43:36 AM

Just 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.

by jppope

3/25/2025 at 10:26:53 PM

github pages? you get a foobar.github.io domain for free with an option to link it to your own domain

by akomtu

3/25/2025 at 8:40:59 PM

My 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.

by azhenley

3/26/2025 at 12:56:07 PM

Ah, I didn't realize that your blog had moved. I've merged them, so now you're #74 of all time.

by mtlynch

3/25/2025 at 8:35:05 PM

Where 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.

by Retr0id

3/25/2025 at 9:56:04 PM

I'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.

by serviceberry

3/26/2025 at 9:22:20 AM

> Would be a lot of thankless work otherwise

So just don't include them, rather no info than completely incorrect LLM hallucinations

by KomoD

3/26/2025 at 1:16:36 PM

Author 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.

by mtlynch

3/27/2025 at 2:02:57 PM

Completely incorrect as in an entry being completely incorrect, not all the entries.

by KomoD

3/26/2025 at 12:24:52 AM

I 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/2...

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 4:38:12 AM

I 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

by marc_abonce

3/26/2025 at 6:12:03 AM

Baffled that https://lcamtuf.substack.com/ or https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ isn't in there.

by TheWoodsy

3/26/2025 at 7:24:01 AM

Based 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.

by dredmorbius

3/26/2025 at 11:10:21 AM

He 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.

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 11:41:48 AM

Huh... I thought that Gwern would be further up, like top 10. Top 3 even. Weird.

by axegon_

3/26/2025 at 11:49:22 AM

It's total score, prolific writers rise

by tux3

3/26/2025 at 1:04:37 AM

A 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%.

by hyruo

3/25/2025 at 11:12:01 PM

Whoa, I made the list, but just barely, #4752.

HN has been a fantastic community for me.

by codazoda

3/26/2025 at 12:54:39 AM

Oh 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.

by MartijnBraam

3/25/2025 at 9:13:06 PM

Is 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?

by rahimnathwani

3/25/2025 at 10:58:15 PM

TIL Krebs is a personal blog! I had assumed it is a team

by Havoc

3/25/2025 at 11:29:06 PM

4443! 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.

by goostavos

3/29/2025 at 3:17:30 PM

Sad to see my site Joelx.com is not anywhere to be found.

by silexia

3/25/2025 at 9:24:31 PM

Oooo... Can we get an average article ranking?

by digdugdirk

3/26/2025 at 12:16:47 AM

Author 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.

by mtlynch

3/26/2025 at 3:49:55 PM

You could grab the top 10 posts by each author, and report the average score of those 10.

by timdellinger

3/25/2025 at 9:46:49 PM

Note 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.

by serviceberry

3/25/2025 at 10:14:54 PM

You 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.

by geerlingguy

3/25/2025 at 9:42:14 PM

https://sive.rs/ at #20. That's awesome!

by mrbluecoat

3/26/2025 at 3:49:31 AM

(p.s. that's not me, just someone I really admire)

by mrbluecoat

3/26/2025 at 5:52:35 PM

Woo hoo. Made it to the top 200 (188), and somehow beat the ESR! What an honour.

by dmitrygr

3/25/2025 at 11:09:48 PM

paulg'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.

by ProAm

3/26/2025 at 12:14:14 AM

I 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.

by jppope

3/26/2025 at 12:20:09 AM

oh it is most definitely a blog, by every possible definition of it

by bdangubic

3/26/2025 at 7:11:32 PM

Great list.

Also curious, what blogging platforms do they use?

by meekaaku

3/28/2025 at 1:10:16 PM

How was that list compiled?

by gcj

3/28/2025 at 1:10:33 PM

I understand how it was ranked, but how does one get into that CSV! :D

by gcj

3/26/2025 at 12:12:19 AM

Happy to be included at #4429. thank you!

by jppope

3/26/2025 at 1:12:54 AM

I'm top 2049 with cryptologie.net !

by baby

3/26/2025 at 3:53:19 PM

This cries out for a histogram.

by timdellinger

3/25/2025 at 11:48:27 PM

Interesting 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.

by larsiusprime

3/25/2025 at 8:03:59 PM

Top 1600. Yay!

Edit: wait, that is actually how many points I got. Eh, I am still on the list.

by gavinhoward

3/25/2025 at 8:11:53 PM

LOL, enjoyed your most recent two posts. Too true buddy.

by soupfordummies

3/25/2025 at 9:03:24 PM

I am glad I am not alone with AoC. :)

by gavinhoward

3/26/2025 at 3:49:33 PM

I should write more :(

by stavros

3/29/2025 at 7:02:39 PM

Amazing

by tekichan

3/26/2025 at 1:13:45 AM

I am #3133! Fun.

by rietta

3/26/2025 at 5:46:24 AM

there are too many blogs missing from it

by newusertoday

3/26/2025 at 12:53:24 AM

Now 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.)

by t0astbread

3/26/2025 at 3:15:08 PM

jwz makes the list -- against his will.

by cowmix

3/25/2025 at 10:08:40 PM

Now someone needs to build semantic search over this to find hidden gem authors on any topic.

by serjester

3/26/2025 at 12:40:28 AM

that sounds like a great idea actually

by jppope

3/31/2025 at 11:52:10 AM

[dead]

by Hildajose18

4/2/2025 at 8:57:17 AM

[dead]

by Patrickhill300

3/28/2025 at 11:21:51 AM

[dead]

by Davidgomiez

3/26/2025 at 4:07:02 AM

[dead]

by curtisszmania

3/26/2025 at 1:25:41 AM

[dead]

by TacticalCoder