The most popular blogs of Hacker News in 2025

2026-01-02 · Source: Simon Willison's Weblog · Field: Technology & Digital — Data Science & Analytics, Software Development & Engineering · Depth: Intermediate, quick

Summary

The "HN Popularity Contest" by Michael Lynch tracks and ranks personal blogs based on their performance on Hacker News, utilizing a hand-curated `domains-meta.csv` file to distinguish personal content. The author, Simon Willison, notes his blog, simonwillison.net, achieved top rankings in 2023, 2024, and 2025, placing third overall behind Paul Graham and Brian Krebs. The data powering the site is accessible via open CORS headers, allowing external exploration with tools like Datasette Lite. This enables users to query yearly domain rankings and access individual domain-specific CSV files detailing Hacker News submissions.

Key takeaway

For data analysts or developers interested in web data scraping and analysis, understanding how open CORS headers facilitate data access is crucial. You can leverage tools like Datasette Lite with publicly available CSVs to perform complex SQL queries, as demonstrated by the yearly ranking example. This approach simplifies data exploration and can inform content strategy by revealing performance trends.

Key insights

Open CORS headers on public datasets enable flexible external data exploration and analysis.

Principles

• Data accessibility enhances analytical utility.
• Curated metadata improves content classification.

Method

Utilize a hand-curated CSV of personal blogs to filter content, then aggregate Hacker News scores and rank domains annually using SQL window functions for yearly performance tracking.

In practice

• Explore `hn-data.csv` with Datasette Lite.
• Query yearly blog rankings using provided SQL.
• Access domain-specific CSVs for submission details.

Topics

• Hacker News Analytics
• Blog Popularity Tracking
• Data Accessibility
• SQL Window Functions
• Datasette Lite

Code references

• mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data

Best for: Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Analytics Engineer

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Simon Willison's Weblog.