The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025

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)

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.

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...

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...

> 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.

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 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.

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:

  | 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 |

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very neat that a bunch of people mentioned in the list are actively participating on this very thread!

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!

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.

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!

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

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!

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.

    9 idiallo.com 5,539 17 326 Ibrahim Diallo Software developer and blogger

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.

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 |

(edit: fix missing column header)

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

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.

Interesting to see John Gruber complaining about HN. He thinks DF is blacklisted. I wasn’t aware of this beef.

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?

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)

Pretty cool to have made the top 100! brb pouring a dram to celebrate.

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

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.

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.

brooker.co.za author's name is Marc not Chris. :)

scattered-thoughts.net author is Jamie Brandon. :)

Why the article doesn't have direct links to said blogs as they are mentioned?

Thank you for the mention! Didn't expect to see myself here haha - Byran

Network effect gaming or true interest? Which blogs have been overshadowed by the lucky few?

I ought to complain about YouTube more often, #47 with an average of 1200 points per post

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???

thanks for putting this together!

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TY