With 2025 wrapped up, I can finally answer a question I’m curious about every year: who were the most popular bloggers of Hacker News?
Info
Who counts as a blogger?
I explain more in my methodology page, but it’s basically anyone who blogs as an individual rather than as part of a company or a team. For example, John Graham-Cumming blogged while he was the CTO of Cloudflare, so I count his personal blog but not .
#1 Simon Willison
For the third straight year, Simon Willison was the most popular blogger on Hacker News.
At first, Simon’s position at #1 feels obvious: he wrote about AI in a year when everyone’s obsessed with AI. But there are tons of AI bloggers, and Simon is the only one who’s popular on HN, so what sets Simon apart?
First, Simon isn’t selling you anything. Simon writes about LLMs as a power user not as a sales pitch from some startup’s VP of product. He tries every AI tool he can get his hands on with no allegiance to any particular vendor. That allows him to write about how new AI tools fit into the ecosystem at large. It’s like getting restaurant recommendations from someone who eats out 20 times a week as opposed to someone who owns 20 restaurant chains.
Simon is also one of the most prolific bloggers on Hacker News. In 2025 alone, he wrote over 1,000 blog posts, though only 118 were full-length articles (“only”).
Simon often finds ideas within walled-garden platforms (e.g., TikTok, Twitter) and simply brings them to the open web, where it’s easier for HN to discuss. Some of his most popular posts were just short quotes or links with a bit of commentary. “I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel” is just a quote from a video he watched on TikTok. “A computer can never be held accountable” is Simon summarizing a few tweets.
Simon has said these types of posts are easy to write yet high in value.
Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.
—Simon Willison, “ My approach to running a link blog ”
#2 Jeff Geerling
This is Jeff’s most successful year on Hacker News, beating his #5 finish in 2023.
The #2 spot was an extremely tight race this year. Jeff’s posts totaled 10,813 upvotes, edging out the #3 blogger by just 9 points (a 0.08% difference). The #4 finisher was just 100 points behind that. Past stories can still accrue upvotes, so this could still flip, but these were the rankings as of midnight on Dec. 31st.
Jeff is a popular YouTube creator with over 1M subscribers. He covers some of HN’s favorite topics, like Raspberry Pi computers, self-hosted software, and computer hardware. YouTube videos rarely succeed on Hacker News, so when Jeff publishes a new video, he often publishes an accompanying blog post. Jeff isn’t the only YouTuber who does this, but he’s one of the few who does it well.
I’ve seen other YouTube creators try to repurpose their videos by auto-generating a transcript and calling that a blog post. Jeff approaches his blog more thoughtfully.
Jeff started out as a blogger, and he still treats his blog readers as first-class citizens. He structures his articles to fit the text medium rather than just lazily scraping dialog from his videos. If you read his post about upgrading storage on his Mac mini, it stands on its own and never feels like material he salvaged from a video.
#3 Sean Goedecke
Sean came out of nowhere as a blogging powerhouse this year. He’d been blogging sporadically since 2020, but he hit a turning point at the end of 2024 with “How I ship projects at big tech companies.” It was one of HN’s top 100 posts of the year and remains Sean’s most popular post on HN.
After his first success on HN, Sean went from publishing every few months to multiple times per week, becoming a regular fixture on the front page.
Sean is a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub and previously worked at Zendesk. Like Simon, Sean is extremely prolific. He wrote 140 posts this year. Of those, 47 reached the front page. I’ve had a few years where a lot of my posts reached the front page, but for me that was about 10 articles. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a new article on HN almost every week.
Sean explains his strategy in “Writing a tech blog people want to read”:
the recipe for a popular post is to have a clear opinion about working in tech that many people disagree with.
I think Sean’s insight is true, but he’s selling his own writing a bit short. To me, Sean’s greatest strength is his ability to explain big tech organizational politics to engineers.
Most junior to mid-level developers don’t care about company politics. They think of office politics as something that strong technical thinkers shouldn’t have to waste brain cells on. As a result, they can’t understand why they can’t get promoted or how their company’s codebase got so bad. Sean’s posts explain these phenomena in a way that’s clear and intelligible to engineers.
Sean’s posts are also a good example of how much luck comes into play on Hacker News, especially for less established authors. Sean’s top three posts of the year all flopped on their first submission and didn’t succeed until their second or third try, sometimes months later. Even then, only a third of his posts reached the front page at all.
#4 Brian Krebs
Brian Krebs is an independent investigative journalist who covers cybercrime. He’s one of HN’s most popular bloggers of all time, second only to Paul Graham, the creator of HN. For 11 of the last 12 years, Brian has been one of HN’s top 10 bloggers.
In 2025, Brian mostly stuck to his usual beat of deeply investigated cybersecurity stories, but his second most popular story of the year was a sobering post about the Trump administration’s steps to undermine free speech in the US. It immediately shot to the #1 slot and stayed there for several hours. Unfortunately, too many users flagged the post, and it was moderated off the front page, which is often the fate of political stories on HN.
#5 Neal Agarwal
Neal’s work isn’t what you might think of as blog posts; they’re more like interactive art. Some of his posts are games that parody the web, while others are straight-faced visual essays about topics he finds interesting.
This was Neal’s most successful year on HN. Everything he published reached the front page, with about half hitting #1, and the rest peaking at #2. Stimulation Clicker was the 4th most popular post of the entire year.
Other notes
- John Gruber finished the year in #6 despite wondering aloud back in March whether Hacker News had shadowbanned his blog. It was his best year on Hacker News since 2011 and his first appearance in the top 10 since 2020.
- Mahad Kalam finished at #21 for the year with a single blog post, which became the top post of the year. Byran Huang appeared right behind him, also with a single blog post, which became the #3 most upvoted post of the year.
