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)
This really highlights the misalignment between information density and monetization mechanisms.
Text is random-access, searchable, and respects the reader's time (I can skim a blog post in 2 minutes to find the one command I need). Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.
It is somewhat tragic that the format which is often technically superior for documentation and reference (text) relies on the format that is optimized for engagement/retention (video) to subsidize it. Kudos to you for maintaining the blog-first workflow despite the incentives pulling the other way.
> Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.
Because people like video. I'd rather watch a video where the narrator shows me exactly what's happening and where, over text that I have to read. Many on HN like the opposite but don't seem to have the charity to understand the point of view of people like me.
It’s because a video can be passively watched when doing chores while reading text is an active … activity. The former requires less energy and commitment than the latter.
It also means that if YouTube displays an ad while I’m washing the dishes, I’m not stopping to press the skip button (unless it’s one of those silly ads that last an hour) which probably inflates the stats quite a bit.
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.
I found Hugo to work well for the most part. Seemed everytime I went to publish id run into a new error if I wasn't consistent enough about posting. I moved over to Docusaurus for the new year and off of Hugo.
Thanks for the work you do, really inspirational honestly.
Can you suggest that over in the GitHub issues? I will do it if it's simple to do in Hugo. A long time ago I set the summary as default in Drupal, and since there's no ads on the site or anything like that, the main reason to not do it is bandwidth, maybe, depending on how much traffic that URL gets (I was seeing like 5-10 requests per second for that URL earlier today, much more than I'd expect!).
I don't doubt that writing the blog first forces you to create the framework from which to create the video. You dot the "i's" and there too you remember the thing you almost forgot.
Oh hey, I think I first started running into you via our chef-drupal cookbooks ;) that community treated me so so well, but it's certainly better to move past it these days
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.
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.
> 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.
Thanks for this context! I've re-worded that sentence to remove the assumption that the Mac Mini post was adapted from the video.
>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.
Wow, I'm surprised it's that little. I assumed all the popular homelab creators were making much more from affiliate links because I'd assume it's $500-5k in referred purchases per day ($12.5-125/day @ 2.5% commission), so I'd expect $10-20k/yr.
If it's an insignificant amount of your income, why bother? Affiliate links create a bias that goes against the interests of readers.[0] I get it when it's the only way to be sustainable, but if it's a pretty small percentage of annual earnings, it seems not worthwhile.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I've updated the blog post and the dataset.[0] The blog updates instantly, but the dataset needs a few minutes for my pipeline to re-run and push to the CDN.
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 :)
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."
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.
> 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.
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/
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.
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) (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.
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.
> (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.
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. :)
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.
I was looking for @marklit (Mark Litwintschik / 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.
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.
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.
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.
From the other side, I’ve fairly often written blog posts that I don’t put much effort into and have no intention of reaching the front page of HN, only to see 12 hours later that somebody submitted it and it’s on the front page.
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.
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...
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.
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.
Looks like my site (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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
The minimum threshold for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all posts that reached the front page.[0] It looks like your domain currently has 176 total upvotes, so it misses the threshold.[1]
I have the minimum because I precompute all the data so that I can serve it on a static site, but it means everyone downloads the full dataset when they visit the site. I make the threshold 500 upvotes so the CSV doesn't grow too large.
Thanks for the reply, you are right, I missed the threshold on my first read. While I am still sad I can see the reasons for it. Guess I have some posting to do.
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.
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)
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.
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 :-)
What strikes me about this list is how many of these blogs have been around for years - some over a decade. There's something to be said for just... showing up consistently.
I've been writing about building tools for bookkeepers (not exactly a glamorous niche) and the compound effect is real. Posts from 2 years ago still bring in readers who then find newer stuff. No algorithm decides to bury you if you take a month off.
The POSSE approach someone mentioned is interesting too. Own your content, syndicate to platforms. Too many people build their entire presence on rented land and then wonder why they're invisible when the algorithm changes.
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.
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.
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)
This really highlights the misalignment between information density and monetization mechanisms.
Text is random-access, searchable, and respects the reader's time (I can skim a blog post in 2 minutes to find the one command I need). Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.
It is somewhat tragic that the format which is often technically superior for documentation and reference (text) relies on the format that is optimized for engagement/retention (video) to subsidize it. Kudos to you for maintaining the blog-first workflow despite the incentives pulling the other way.
> Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment.
Because people like video. I'd rather watch a video where the narrator shows me exactly what's happening and where, over text that I have to read. Many on HN like the opposite but don't seem to have the charity to understand the point of view of people like me.
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It’s because a video can be passively watched when doing chores while reading text is an active … activity. The former requires less energy and commitment than the latter.
It also means that if YouTube displays an ad while I’m washing the dishes, I’m not stopping to press the skip button (unless it’s one of those silly ads that last an hour) which probably inflates the stats quite a bit.
It's nuanced but for me it boils down to: prefer videos for novel information/narrative, docs for something I know
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> Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment
I recently saw that YouTube allows you to “chat” with videos through AI and can surface random content from the middle of the video if you ask it to.
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You put into words what I often felt. I can’t CTRL+F a video per se. And a 30 minute video is too high a bar to learn it didn’t answer the question
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.
I found Hugo to work well for the most part. Seemed everytime I went to publish id run into a new error if I wasn't consistent enough about posting. I moved over to Docusaurus for the new year and off of Hugo.
Thanks for the work you do, really inspirational honestly.
Jeff, your /books and /blog links appear to be broken here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/about/
D'oh! Tracking some issues like this on https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/175 - thanks!
I know it is a choice but would you mind turning on full RSS with your blog.
Can you suggest that over in the GitHub issues? I will do it if it's simple to do in Hugo. A long time ago I set the summary as default in Drupal, and since there's no ads on the site or anything like that, the main reason to not do it is bandwidth, maybe, depending on how much traffic that URL gets (I was seeing like 5-10 requests per second for that URL earlier today, much more than I'd expect!).
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I don't doubt that writing the blog first forces you to create the framework from which to create the video. You dot the "i's" and there too you remember the thing you almost forgot.
The blog no doubt makes the videos better.
Ahh wondered why the RSS feed seemed to reset
Yeah; sorry about that! I tried to keep it close on the metadata so it wouldn't do that... but apparently that's not possible haha.
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Oh hey, I think I first started running into you via our chef-drupal cookbooks ;) that community treated me so so well, but it's certainly better to move past it these days
Respectable to see this candor on how it's done, wishing much success in 2026.
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.
> Just finished upgrading it to Hugo today! (After being on Drupal for 16 years)
I did this exact thing back in 2020 It was the smartest move I ever made.
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.
> 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.
Thanks for this context! I've re-worded that sentence to remove the assumption that the Mac Mini post was adapted from the video.
>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.
Wow, I'm surprised it's that little. I assumed all the popular homelab creators were making much more from affiliate links because I'd assume it's $500-5k in referred purchases per day ($12.5-125/day @ 2.5% commission), so I'd expect $10-20k/yr.
If it's an insignificant amount of your income, why bother? Affiliate links create a bias that goes against the interests of readers.[0] I get it when it's the only way to be sustainable, but if it's a pretty small percentage of annual earnings, it seems not worthwhile.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
I track separate for blog vs video description, and my other smaller but focused sites like the Pi PCIe database.
The blog is about 10% of total affiliate revenue. (Actually probably closer to 5-7%).
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.
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.
With some of these commentators, every single comment contains a link or two to their blog.
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> 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.
yeah, it feels like tireless self-promotion and their comments have very low utility for me
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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-cloudfla...
Sorry about that! Thanks for the correction.
I've updated the blog post and the dataset.[0] The blog updates instantly, but the dataset needs a few minutes for my pipeline to re-run and push to the CDN.
[0] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/8...
Nothing to apologize for; knowing I'd retired wasn't required reading to participate in HN :-)
But thanks for the correction, and even more thanks for choosing me as your example!
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 :)
You can submit a PR to update your bio here: 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.
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."
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The towel section was my favorite part of the book growing up!
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.ref...
Wow, my blog was #20 in 2021! Downhill since :)
Is there a way to make data cleaning contributions?
> 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.
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/
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.
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) (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.
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.
> (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.
After decades of posting, I’m proud to have clawed my way up to the top 4,000. I am unstoppable.
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:
Not bad for an occasional blogger.
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.
I was looking for @marklit (Mark Litwintschik / 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.
Here's that list as an OPML file (for importing into a feed reader): https://gist.github.com/emschwartz/e6d2bf860ccc367fe37ff953b...
It includes the 92 of those blogs that have RSS/Atom feeds.
came here to look exactly for this thank you!
You’re welcome! I wanted it to add to Scour (https://scour.ing) but glad it was helpful for someone else too!
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.
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...
[1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
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.
From the other side, I’ve fairly often written blog posts that I don’t put much effort into and have no intention of reaching the front page of HN, only to see 12 hours later that somebody submitted it and it’s on the front page.
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.
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...
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Very neat that a bunch of people mentioned in the list are actively participating on this very thread!
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.
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.
I told Safari to always open it in reader mode. That was the only way to use it on my phone.
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 :)
Looks like my site (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!
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.
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
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!
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!
Huh... I went looking in the 2,000s, thinking "same as last year probably".
brb, eating a sweet to celebrate popularity
(edit: fix missing column header)
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.
> 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
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!
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
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/methodolo...
>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/methodolo...
[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/8...
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.
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.
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.
These are all great. We have good taste.
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?
The methodology is explained here: 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/m...
>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.
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Thank you for the reply, I'll go and make a PR.
OP here. Sorry for the exclusion!
The minimum threshold for inclusion is 500 upvotes across all posts that reached the front page.[0] It looks like your domain currently has 176 total upvotes, so it misses the threshold.[1]
I have the minimum because I precompute all the data so that I can serve it on a static site, but it means everyone downloads the full dataset when they visit the site. I make the threshold 500 upvotes so the CSV doesn't grow too large.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=miloslavhomer.cz
Thanks for the reply, you are right, I missed the threshold on my first read. While I am still sad I can see the reasons for it. Guess I have some posting to do.
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.
HN is very American in its puritanical approach to swearing. One of my posts had its title Bowdlerised to remove the word "disckhead"!
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)
Interesting to see John Gruber complaining about HN. He thinks DF is blacklisted. I wasn’t aware of this beef.
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
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.
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.
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 :-)
Pretty cool to have made the top 100! brb pouring a dram to celebrate.
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.
He is featured in the top 100 list. See here: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
What strikes me about this list is how many of these blogs have been around for years - some over a decade. There's something to be said for just... showing up consistently.
I've been writing about building tools for bookkeepers (not exactly a glamorous niche) and the compound effect is real. Posts from 2 years ago still bring in readers who then find newer stuff. No algorithm decides to bury you if you take a month off.
The POSSE approach someone mentioned is interesting too. Own your content, syndicate to platforms. Too many people build their entire presence on rented land and then wonder why they're invisible when the algorithm changes.
brooker.co.za author's name is Marc not Chris. :)
scattered-thoughts.net author is Jamie Brandon. :)
Thanks, Phil! Updated!
https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/pull/9...
Why the article doesn't have direct links to said blogs as they are mentioned?
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
Links to: CSS, OPML (so you can import into your RSS reader in bulk), CSV, and JSON
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.
Network effect gaming or true interest? Which blogs have been overshadowed by the lucky few?
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.
I ought to complain about YouTube more often, #47 with an average of 1200 points per post
Thank you for the mention! Didn't expect to see myself here haha - Byran
It's weird to see Bill Gates' blog, way down at #84.
Times, they are a changin'...
Dan Luu went from omnipresence to absence via Patreon.
My blog fell from #37 in 2024 to #357 in 2025. Dang, what happened???
I fell from 63 all the way to 3047 but it's mostly because I didn't do any substantive blogging this year :(
Were you posting about AI and LLMs or was it just Apple?
Good point. I'm so out of the loop that I failed to guess the obvious.
Not enough introspective philosophical screeds to subsidize your rank in between the your tech-related breakthroughs and exposés.
not the real dang
thanks for putting this together!
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TY