The Most Popular Blogs on Hacker News in 2025
Analysis
This article discusses the popularity of personal blogs on Hacker News, as tracked by Michael Lynch's "HN Popularity Contest." The author, Simon Willison, highlights his own blog's success, ranking first in 2023, 2024, and 2025, while acknowledging his all-time ranking behind Paul Graham and Brian Krebs. The article also mentions the open accessibility of the data via open CORS headers, allowing for exploration using tools like Datasette Lite. It concludes with a reference to a complex query generated by Claude Opus 4.5.
Key Takeaways
- •The article highlights the use of a hand-curated dataset for tracking blog popularity.
- •Open data accessibility allows for external analysis and exploration.
- •The article showcases the application of AI (Claude Opus 4.5) in generating complex queries.
Reference
“I came top of the rankings in 2023, 2024 and 2025 but I'm listed in third place for all time behind Paul Graham and Brian Krebs.”