The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News

Self-searching and community reactions

• Many commenters immediately searched for their own blogs, often pleased or amused to find themselves anywhere on the list.
• Several describe HN as feeling both large and “cozy,” recognizing many domains and appreciating the community’s role in their careers or life trajectories.
• Some express motivation to write more after seeing their ranking.

Methodology, ranking, and biases

• Rankings are based on cumulative HN points for posts from each domain, with a cutoff of 20 points per story (roughly “front page long enough to matter”).
• Commenters note that this strongly favors long-lived or very prolific blogs; newer sites or infrequent posters are disadvantaged.
• Users explore time filters (e.g., last 12 months, custom periods) to see how rankings change; many high scorers drop in recent years.
• One suggestion: instead of average over all posts, compute average score over each author’s top N posts to avoid penalizing frequent publishers.

Metadata, bios, and LLM use

• Bios and topics are largely generated by an LLM, then spot-checked; the author claims ~95% accuracy.
• Some users object that any hallucinated entries should be omitted rather than shown incorrectly.
• Numerous corrections occur in the thread: wrong author names, mis-labeled professions or topics, dead links, and merged or split domains.
• There’s a request for a clear way (e.g., metadata file) to add or correct names and bios, which the author supports via a public repo.

Inclusions, exclusions, and edge cases

• Some prominent blogs were incorrectly excluded or mapped (e.g., shared domains, university ~user URLs, multi-author or moved blogs); these are gradually fixed.
• Debate appears over what counts as a “personal blog” and whether certain high-profile or quasi-corporate sites should be included.
• Combining multiple domains for the same writer is done only when clearly just a move, not when the author intentionally splits different projects.

Feature ideas and ancillary tools

• Requests include:
  • Semantic search over the dataset to surface “hidden gem” authors.
  • An RSS/planet-style feed aggregating these blogs.
  • Histograms and platform statistics; one commenter shares TLD distribution (.com, .org, .io, .net dominate).
  • Tools to analyze which blogs a user comments on most, or whose comments they reply to most.

Blogging and hosting advice

• For someone wanting a long-lived anonymous blog without running their own domain, suggestions include GitHub Pages, lightweight platforms like Bearblog, or static sites on cheap hosting.