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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
56 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadIn any case I’m truly grateful for this site as a whole, the good and the bad.
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.
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.
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...
It includes the 92 of those blogs that have RSS/Atom feeds.
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.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/en-us/three-chapters-at-cloudfla...
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...
(edit: fix missing column header)
Here's what my data looks like:
Not bad for an occasional blogger.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
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...
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.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/methodolo...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=miloslavhomer.cz
"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)
what made you migrate from Drupal?
from past videos i could recall your vast experience with running websites using it, even using drupal deployment for some sysadmin tutorials.
much appreciate the insider baseball about your work!
EDIT: there is a post on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487498
Made it to #369 in 2025 with morling.dev; let's see what's in stock this year :)