Popularity Contest, the highest-ranking personal blogs of HN
Personal blogs are my favorite part of Hacker News, so I was curious to find out which ones are the most popular. There are tools for finding popular individual posts on HN, but I'd never found anything that aggregates scores across multiple submissions for the same domain, so I decided to build one. I also had a vain curiosity about how my own blog compared to other popular HN authors like Simon Willison and Dan Luu. I had fun making this, as it helped me discover a lot of high-quality personal blogs that weren't on my radar, especially from the earlier days of HN. Suggestions, questions,…
Popularity Contest, the highest-ranking personal blogs of HN launched on March 14, 2025 with 19 votes, #927 of 7,215 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Popularity Contest aggregates Hacker News submission scores by domain to identify the highest-ranking personal blogs on the platform. Rather than showing individual posts, it combines performance data across multiple submissions from the same blog, revealing which personal sites have resonated most with the HN community over time. The tool is designed for HN readers curious about discovering quality blogs and understanding which independent voices have gained the most traction on the site.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
In the maker’s words, at launch
Personal blogs are my favorite part of Hacker News, so I was curious to find out which ones are the most popular. There are tools for finding popular individual posts on HN, but I'd never found anything that aggregates scores across multiple submissions for the same domain, so I decided to build one. I also had a…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- HNHacker News user blogroll2023 · dm.hn · ▲937
I saw this [0] pretty cool thread by user revskill, and wanted a quicker way to search through it, but also to keep them all in one place so I can read them at my leisure whenever I get time. Right now is like 60 lines of Ruby using Nokogiri, but I will certainly look into it further down the line and improve the list. There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that. There are some really awesome blogs in there. I really recommend going through the list, it made my day. [0] "Could you share your personal blog…
My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
- ATAnalyzing top HN posts with language models2022 · ▲117
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
HomeBrew HN – Generate personal context for content ranking2025 · hackernews.coffee · ▲129TLDR: Build a quick HN profile to see how little context LLMs need to personalise your feed. Rate 30 posts once, get a permanent ranked homepage you can return to. Our goal was to build a tool that allowed us to test a range of "personal contexts" on a very focused everyday use case for us, reading HN! We are exploring use of personal context with LLMs, specifically what kind of data, how much, and with how much additional effort on the user’s part was needed to get decent results. The test tool was a bit of fun on its own so we re-skinned it and decided to post it here. First time posting…
- HNHacker News Outliers2024 · hn.moritz.pm · ▲147
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
- IMI made an HN job board2013 · hnjobs.org · ▲149
I noticed the who's hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user's profiles and more. Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.
More life & fun this month
the category →
A free city-building game in your browser. You are the mayor. You know what the city needs. Now get it past the zoning board, the neighbors, the appeals court and the next election.
Life & fun · 3d ago · permit.petercai.com
- IV
Life & fun · 15d ago · tanzaniaeducationproject.org
Turn a phone, tablet or TV into a sign. Type a message and it fills the screen: welcome signs, timers, Wi-Fi passwords and more. No app, no account, free.
Life & fun · 16d ago · bigwords.page
Play a free virtual guitar online with your keyboard or by touch. Slow songs down and see every chord, string and strum. Acoustic, classic, electric and bass.
Life & fun · 10d ago · guitoro.com
Carrier settings from iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy firmware, decoded and compared: APNs, VoLTE, 5G and Wi-Fi Calling per carrier, and what each build changed.
Life & fun · 14d ago · carrierexplode.com
Life & fun · 24d ago · space.bl2.net
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, March 2025
the whole month →
Mimic Human Research & Save Findings in AI Knowledge Base
AI · 2025 · sider.ai
