[HN Gopher] The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
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       The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
        
       Author : sharjeelsayed
       Score  : 88 points
       Date   : 2025-03-25 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (refactoringenglish.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (refactoringenglish.com)
        
       | AndrewStephens wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | soupfordummies wrote:
         | Well I clicked through and bookmarked it :)
        
         | kstrauser wrote:
         | Tap of the beer glass to my similarly low-ranking compatriots.
        
         | jll29 wrote:
         | 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 Sparck 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).
        
       | gavinhoward wrote:
       | Top 1600. Yay!
       | 
       | Edit: wait, that is actually how many points I got. Eh, I am
       | still on the list.
        
         | soupfordummies wrote:
         | LOL, enjoyed your most recent two posts. Too true buddy.
        
           | gavinhoward wrote:
           | I am glad I am not alone with AoC. :)
        
       | avg_dev wrote:
       | hmmm, prog21.dadgum.com is James Hague, not John Carmack.
       | 
       | interesting site.
        
       | Retr0id wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | serviceberry wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | azhenley wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | lapcat wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | bobbiechen wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | rahimnathwani wrote:
       | 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?
        
       | digdugdirk wrote:
       | Oooo... Can we get an average article ranking?
        
       | mrbluecoat wrote:
       | https://sive.rs/ at #20. That's awesome!
        
       | serviceberry wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | geerlingguy wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | marginalia_nu wrote:
       | Top 75 :O
       | 
       | I've apparently put out some serious bangers to end up in such
       | esteemed company.
        
       | serjester wrote:
       | Now someone needs to build semantic search over this to find
       | hidden gem authors on any topic.
        
       | pprunty wrote:
       | The most popular blog is the owner's blog? What is this, X...? :D
        
       | Mistletoe wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | akomtu wrote:
         | github pages? you get a foobar.github.io domain for free with
         | an option to link it to your own domain
        
       | OgsyedIE wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Swizec wrote:
       | 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
        
       | omoikane wrote:
       | 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...
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | TIL Krebs is a personal blog! I had assumed it is a team
        
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       (page generated 2025-03-25 23:00 UTC)