Simon Willison’s Weblog

The most popular blogs of Hacker News in 2025 (via) Michael Lynch maintains HN Popularity Contest, a site that tracks personal blogs on Hacker News and scores them based on how well they perform on that platform.

The engine behind the project is the domain-meta.csv CSV on GiHub, a hand-curated list of known personal blogs with author and bio and tag metadata, which Michael uses to separate out personal blog posts from other types of content.

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.

I dug around in the browser inspector and was delighted to find that the data powering the site is served with open CORS headers, which means you can easily explore it with external services like Datasette Lite.

Here's a convoluted window function query Claude Opus 4.5 wrote for me which, for a given domain, shows where that domain ranked for each year since it first appeared in the dataset:

with yearly_scores as (
  select 
    domain,
    strftime('%Y', date) as year,
    sum(score) as total_score,
    count(distinct date) as days_mentioned
  from "hn-data"
  group by domain, strftime('%Y', date)
),
ranked as (
  select 
    domain,
    year,
    total_score,
    days_mentioned,
    rank() over (partition by year order by total_score desc) as rank
  from yearly_scores
)
select 
  r.year,
  r.total_score,
  r.rank,
  r.days_mentioned
from ranked r
where r.domain = :domain
  and r.year >= (
    select min(strftime('%Y', date)) 
    from "hn-data"
    where domain = :domain
  )
order by r.year desc

(I just noticed that the last and r.year >= ( clause isn't actually needed here.)

My simonwillison.net results show me ranked 3rd in 2022, 30th in 2021 and 85th back in 2007 - though I expect there are many personal blogs from that year which haven't yet been manually added to Michael's list.

Also useful is that every domain gets its own CORS-enabled CSV file with details of the actual Hacker News submitted from that domain, e.g. https://hn-popularity.cdn.refactoringenglish.com/domains/simonwillison.net.csv. Here's that one in Datasette Lite.