The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News

sharjeelsayed | 486 points

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.

otras | a month ago

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

mtlynch | a month ago

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...

omoikane | a month ago

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.

bobbiechen | a month ago

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 !

jstanley | 25 days ago

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

surprisetalk | a month ago

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

Swizec | a month ago

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.

throwawayk7h | a month ago

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.

account-5 | a month ago

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.

AndrewStephens | a month ago

Top 75 :O

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

marginalia_nu | a month ago

Woo-hoo, # 265 :) FortressOfDoors.com

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

Happy to be included!

larsiusprime | a month ago

The most popular blog is the owner's blog? What is this, X...? :D

pprunty | a month ago

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.

OgsyedIE | a month ago

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.

lapcat | a month ago

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a planet like rss feed from these?

tathagatadg | a month ago

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?

Mistletoe | a month ago

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.

azhenley | a month ago

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.

Retr0id | a month ago

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

davidwu | 19 days ago

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

marc_abonce | a month ago
TheWoodsy | a month ago

Huh... I thought that Gwern would be further up, like top 10. Top 3 even. Weird.

axegon_ | 25 days ago

Number 18, Jeff Atwood codinghorror.com is a dead link. The actual link is https://blog.codinghorror.com/

shooshx | 25 days 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%.

hyruo | a month ago

Whoa, I made the list, but just barely, #4752.

HN has been a fantastic community for me.

codazoda | a month ago

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.

MartijnBraam | a month ago

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?

rahimnathwani | a month ago

TIL Krebs is a personal blog! I had assumed it is a team

Havoc | a month ago

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.

goostavos | a month ago

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

softwaredoug | a month ago

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

digdugdirk | a month ago

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.

serviceberry | a month ago

https://sive.rs/ at #20. That's awesome!

mrbluecoat | a month ago

Woo hoo. Made it to the top 200 (188), and somehow beat the ESR! What an honour.

dmitrygr | 25 days ago

Sad to see my site Joelx.com is not anywhere to be found.

silexia | 22 days 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.

ProAm | a month ago

Great list.

Also curious, what blogging platforms do they use?

meekaaku | 25 days ago

Happy to be included at #4429. thank you!

jppope | a month ago

I'm top 2049 with cryptologie.net !

baby | a month ago

Here's a Bluesky starter pack:

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

surprisetalk | a month ago

How was that list compiled?

gcj | 23 days ago

Top 1600. Yay!

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

gavinhoward | a month ago

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.

larsiusprime | a month ago

This cries out for a histogram.

timdellinger | 25 days ago

I should write more :(

stavros | 25 days ago

hmmm, prog21.dadgum.com is James Hague, not John Carmack.

interesting site.

avg_dev | a month ago

I am #3133! Fun.

rietta | a month ago

Amazing

tekichan | 22 days ago

there are too many blogs missing from it

newusertoday | a month ago

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.)

t0astbread | a month ago

jwz makes the list -- against his will.

cowmix | 25 days ago

Now someone needs to build semantic search over this to find hidden gem authors on any topic.

serjester | a month ago

[dead]

Hildajose18 | 20 days ago

[dead]

Davidgomiez | 23 days ago

[dead]

Silvana291 | 17 days ago

[dead]

Patrickhill300 | 19 days ago

[dead]

curtisszmania | a month ago

[dead]

TacticalCoder | a month ago