R
Story
The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
  • otras
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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.

You're still my favorite of the three of you.
And you're my favorite of the one of you.
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).
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. :)

That's why I changed my name to a ULID
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.
Being twins’d be considered tax evasion. :P
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
You misspelled Wingdings. A common typo. The keys are like right next to each other.
Legally? :D
  • cung
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
:D
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

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?

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!
  • basch
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Is it worth treating anything with a ~ as a home folder and thus a unique blog?
That's a good idea. I've just implemented that.

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

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

I thought I'd have an easier time!

I had two posts[0, 1] I was super confident would be a match for HN and two others[2, 3] that I thought had a so-so chance. They've all flopped except I got lucky that someone else submitted this one after I gave up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43435961

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345866

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43301897

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43412220

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

thank you! Pull request submitted :)
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...

  • kens
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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.

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...

>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.

  • mjd
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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.

  • mjd
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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!

3a. Twist - given what you analyze, this time it's a time traveller from the past that needs to stop you :)
3b. it's SERN that has a beef with them.
5. steganographic subliminal messaging :P
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.

  • kens
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Thanks! Not to complain, but you spelled my name wrong :-)
D'oh! Fixed now.

https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2...

Sorry again!

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.

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 !

Author here. Thanks for letting me know. Fixed now: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/3...
I maintain a shuffled list of HN blogs here:

[1] https://blogs.hn

Please add your site or make corrections :)

[2] https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn

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

Fixed now!

https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2...

Sincerely, your biographer. : )

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.
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...

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.
  • exac
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
It is easier to do a blameless incident response (or whatever you call it at your company) with the passive voice IMO.
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.
  • jll29
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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).

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

Tap of the beer glass to my similarly low-ranking compatriots.
Well I clicked through and bookmarked it :)
Top 75 :O

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

If you limit it to July 2021 (when you started blogging) until the present, you're at #16:

https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?end=2025...

I just discovered your blog, love the format and content! Gotta have to try out that search engine too.
Woo-hoo, # 265 :) FortressOfDoors.com

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

Happy to be included!

Sorry about that!

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

no problem, thanks :)
The most popular blog is the owner's blog? What is this, X...? :D
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.

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.

Sorry about that. Fixed now!

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

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

I'm an Apple software developer. :-)
Okay, updated!

https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/4...

But privately, I think of you as a security researcher, and there's nothing you can do about it. : )

Thanks for your writing and your security findings!

  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a planet like rss feed from these?
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?
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

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

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

  • KomoD
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
> Would be a lot of thankless work otherwise

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

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.

  • KomoD
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
Completely incorrect as in an entry being completely incorrect, not all the entries.
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...

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

Snapshot for posterity: https://web.archive.org/web/20250326005255/https://refactori...
Baffled that https://lcamtuf.substack.com/ or https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ isn't in there.
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.

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.

Huh... I thought that Gwern would be further up, like top 10. Top 3 even. Weird.
  • tux3
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
It's total score, prolific writers rise
Number 18, Jeff Atwood codinghorror.com is a dead link. The actual link is https://blog.codinghorror.com/
Ah, you're right. Thanks! Fixed: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/3...
  • hyruo
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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%.
Whoa, I made the list, but just barely, #4752.

HN has been a fantastic community for me.

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.

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?

  • Havoc
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
TIL Krebs is a personal blog! I had assumed it is a team
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.

Is there a meta tag I’m missing on my blog to have my name be consumed into something like this? Curious how they get the names
Author here!

I explain the methodology here:

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

If you'd like to add your metadata, I'll happily accept a PR here:

https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...

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

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

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.

https://sive.rs/ at #20. That's awesome!
(p.s. that's not me, just someone I really admire)
Woo hoo. Made it to the top 200 (188), and somehow beat the ESR! What an honour.
Sad to see my site Joelx.com is not anywhere to be found.
  • ProAm
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
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.
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.
oh it is most definitely a blog, by every possible definition of it
Great list.

Also curious, what blogging platforms do they use?

Happy to be included at #4429. thank you!
  • baby
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I'm top 2049 with cryptologie.net !
Here's a Bluesky starter pack:

[1] https://go.bsky.app/HmV5x47

  • gcj
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
How was that list compiled?
  • gcj
  • ·
  • 3 weeks ago
  • ·
  • [ - ]
I understand how it was ranked, but how does one get into that CSV! :D
Top 1600. Yay!

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

LOL, enjoyed your most recent two posts. Too true buddy.
I am glad I am not alone with AoC. :)
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.
This cries out for a histogram.
I should write more :(
hmmm, prog21.dadgum.com is James Hague, not John Carmack.

interesting site.

Ah, fixed now. Thanks!

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

I am #3133! Fun.
Amazing
there are too many blogs missing from it
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.)

jwz makes the list -- against his will.
Now someone needs to build semantic search over this to find hidden gem authors on any topic.
that sounds like a great idea actually
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]