The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
93 comments
·March 25, 2025otras
jbhoot
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).
mtlynch
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
throw0101c
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?
jppope
thank you! Pull request submitted :)
omoikane
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...
mtlynch
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
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.
raphlinus
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...
mtlynch
>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.
eichin
3a. Twist - given what you analyze, this time it's a time traveller from the past that needs to stop you :)
TeMPOraL
3b. it's SERN that has a beef with them.
winwang
5. steganographic subliminal messaging :P
axegon_
Huh... I thought that Gwern would be further up, like top 10. Top 3 even. Weird.
tux3
It's total score, prolific writers rise
bobbiechen
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.
Swizec
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
mtlynch
Fixed now!
https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/2...
Sincerely, your biographer. : )
surprisetalk
I maintain a shuffled list of HN blogs here:
[1] https://blogs.hn
Please add your site or make corrections :)
account-5
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
It is easier to do a blameless incident response (or whatever you call it at your company) with the passive voice IMO.
throwawayk7h
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.
mtlynch
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...
AndrewStephens
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
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).
lisper
At the bottom of the screen you will find a pulldown that lets you show up to 5000 entries.
dredmorbius
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:
kstrauser
Tap of the beer glass to my similarly low-ranking compatriots.
soupfordummies
Well I clicked through and bookmarked it :)
marginalia_nu
Top 75 :O
I've apparently put out some serious bangers to end up in such esteemed company.
rpigab
I just discovered your blog, love the format and content! Gotta have to try out that search engine too.
mtlynch
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...
larsiusprime
Woo-hoo, # 265 :) FortressOfDoors.com
But my name is Lars Doucet, not Keith Burgun (that's KeithBurgen.net)
Happy to be included!
mtlynch
Sorry about that!
Fixed now: https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/1...
larsiusprime
no problem, thanks :)
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.