About

Hacker Blogs lists the personal blogs that Hacker News keeps linking to, ranked by how many different people linked them in stories and comments, so one enthusiastic fan can't move a blog up. Made by Julian Paul; corrections and missing blogs to @itsjulianpaul.

Work in progress

181,233 sites have been linked by at least 3 different people. 15,409 of them are checked so far, most-linked first, and each update adds more. A blog you expected may simply not be checked yet.

Following

Press Follow on the blogs you want, then Follow on any-feeds to read them in any-feeds, a feed reader, up to 10 at a time. Using another reader? Copy a blog's feed from its page, or “Download for another reader” to get your picks as an OPML file. Topic packs are on the feed packs page.

How it's built

1. Every story URL and every link in a comment across Hacker News history.
2. Every site linked by at least 3 different people, minus news sites, platforms, code hosts and docs.
3. Claude classifies each from its homepage and the HN titles that linked it; spam, parked and low-confidence sites are left out.
4. A crawler finds and checks each blog's feed. Blogs without one are listed as “no feed”.
5. Claude reads up to 40 HN comments per blog for the summary and the recommendation verdict.
6. If one of a blog's most frequent linkers has an HN profile that links to it, they're shown as its likely author.

The crawler

HackerBlogsBot fetches a listed site's homepage, favicon and feed when the directory is refreshed, to check the blog and its feed still work: at most two requests at a time per site, no JavaScript, nothing behind logins. To have your site left out, message @itsjulianpaul.

How “recommended” is judged

Claude marks each sampled comment as recommends (endorses the writing: a must-read, a favourite, the best explanation), critical (says the writing is wrong or poor) or neutral (cites it without judging). Citing a post approvingly is neutral; so are the author's own comments and criticism of the topic rather than the writing. At most three comments come from one thread.

Reasons (“Recommended for”, “Criticised for”) must cite the comments they come from. Verdicts are shown as bands (often, sometimes, rarely recommended) and only from 30 sampled comments, criticism only from three critical ones. The Most recommended list ranks by a 95% lower confidence bound. These rules came from a hand audit of 1,200 comments; judgements are still automatic and can be wrong.

Data

All numbers are computed from the listed data when the site is built. Data through 2026-11-02.

Data: open-index/hacker-news (ODC-BY) and the Hacker News API. Comment excerpts link back to Hacker News; favicons belong to their sites. Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.