[HN Gopher] The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025
___________________________________________________________________
The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025
Author : mtlynch
Score : 339 points
Date : 2026-01-03 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (refactoringenglish.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (refactoringenglish.com)
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| 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.
| refibrillator wrote:
| 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.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| With some of these commentators, every single comment
| contains a link or two to their blog.
| anonnon wrote:
| The appetite HN has for this kind of naked self-promotion
| is really something. Get posted (even if by someone else) a
| few too many times to /g/ and you'll be regularly rebuked
| with "buy an ad" from then on, but HN just looks the other
| way, and the "haters" calling it out get flagged, at least
| until the pattern becomes conspicuous and obnoxious enough
| that even the more gullible lot of HNers start to notice.
| sxg wrote:
| 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.
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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...
| ashtakeaway wrote:
| 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.
| susam wrote:
| He is featured in the top 100 list. See here:
| https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
| hebejebelus wrote:
| > 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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/
| hebejebelus wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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...
| azhenley wrote:
| Wow, my blog was #20 in 2021! Downhill since :)
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Is there a way to make data cleaning contributions?
| emschwartz wrote:
| 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.
| karpathy wrote:
| came here to look exactly for this thank you!
| emschwartz wrote:
| You're welcome! I wanted it to add to Scour
| (https://scour.ing) but glad it was helpful for someone else
| too!
| lapcat wrote:
| My blog fell from #37 in 2024 to #357 in 2025. Dang, what
| happened???
| rvz wrote:
| Were you posting about AI and LLMs or was it just Apple?
| lapcat wrote:
| Good point. I'm so out of the loop that I failed to guess the
| obvious.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I fell from 63 all the way to 3047 but it's mostly because I
| didn't do any substantive blogging this year :(
| tolerance wrote:
| Not enough introspective philosophical screeds to subsidize
| your rank in between the your tech-related breakthroughs and
| exposes.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| not the real dang
| jeffbee wrote:
| Dan Luu went from omnipresence to absence via Patreon.
| eterm wrote:
| 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.
| edent wrote:
| HN is _very_ American in its puritanical approach to swearing.
| One of my posts had its title Bowdlerised to remove the word
| "disckhead"!
| johnsillings wrote:
| thanks for putting this together!
| jgrahamc wrote:
| 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...
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| 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."
| simonw wrote:
| Oh I see what you mean, yeah that needs fixing.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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 :)
| ctxc wrote:
| The towel section was my favorite part of the book growing up!
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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...
| jgrahamc wrote:
| 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!
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Huh... I went looking in the 2,000s, thinking "same as last year
| probably". | Year | Rank | Domain |
| Total Score | Stories | Avg. Score | |------+--------+-----
| ----------+-------------+---------+------------| | 2025 |
| 719 | evalapply.org | 661 | 5 | 132 |
| | 2024 | 2138 | evalapply.org | 154 | 1 |
| 154 | | 2023 | 1674 | evalapply.org | 296 |
| 2 | 148 | | 2022 | > 5000 | NPC |
| NPC | NPC | NPC |
|
| brb, eating a sweet to celebrate popularity
|
| (edit: fix missing column header)
| susam wrote:
| 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: | Year | Rank |
| Domain | Score | Stories | Avg. Score |
| |------+------+-----------+-------+---------+------------|
| | 2025 | 41 | susam.net | 2544 | 16 | 159 |
| | 2024 | 98 | susam.net | 1530 | 13 | 118 |
| | 2023 | 236 | susam.net | 1026 | 11 | 93 |
| | 2022 | 96 | susam.net | 1652 | 21 | 79 |
|
| Not bad for an occasional blogger.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Network effect gaming or true interest? Which blogs have been
| overshadowed by the lucky few?
| nospice wrote:
| 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.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| I ought to complain about YouTube more often, #47 with an average
| of 1200 points per post
| thundergolfer wrote:
| 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
| simonw wrote:
| 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...
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _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...
| ArcHound wrote:
| 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?
| simonw wrote:
| 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...
| ArcHound wrote:
| Thank you for the reply, I'll go and make a PR.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _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.
| simonw wrote:
| How do you filter out the non-blog content? I assume you
| had an allow-list of known personal blogs.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Everything is default included, and I have a long list of
| not-blog domains that are excluded.[0] Plus, I exclude
| the Alexa top 500.
|
| There are lots of not-blogs still in the dataset, but I
| just exclude them when I come across them in popular
| views. But I'm sure if you dig through positions 101-5000
| you'll find lots of domains that don't match my official
| criteria for a blog.
|
| https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-
| data/blob/m...
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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
| ArcHound wrote:
| 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.
| cainxinth wrote:
| These are all great. We have good taste.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 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)
| wcchandler wrote:
| 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.
| kev009 wrote:
| Respectable to see this candor on how it's done, wishing much
| success in 2026.
| lnenad wrote:
| 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.
| smcleod wrote:
| 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.
| jamesgill wrote:
| Jeff, your /books and /blog links appear to be broken here:
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/about/
| g947o wrote:
| 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
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| edent wrote:
| 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 :-)
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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)
| gunnarmorling wrote:
| 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 :) year total_score rank
| days_mentioned 2025 903 369 8 2024 604
| 581 2 2023 547 861 3 2022 450
| 1165 4 2021 188 2308 2
| kstrauser wrote:
| After decades of posting, I'm proud to have clawed my way up to
| the top 4,000. I am unstoppable.
| jackfranklyn wrote:
| 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.
| ushdbz wrote:
| TY
| Hello9999901 wrote:
| Thank you for the mention! Didn't expect to see myself here haha
| - Byran
| arajnoha wrote:
| Why the article doesn't have direct links to said blogs as they
| are mentioned?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| 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
| mtlynch wrote:
| 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.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| 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!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-03 23:00 UTC)