The Top Hacker News Writers (2022)

Hacker News is a crowd-sourced aggregator of the top content on the web that “good hackers find interesting”. It’s easy enough to see who are the top curators on HN, but who are the writers that are most successful at getting to the front page of Hacker News?

We used Diffbot’s Article Extraction API to analyze the 10,950 stories that made it to the Hacker News frontpage in the last 12 months, extracting the author and topics of each article. Sorting by the most prolific individual authors, here are the Top 20 Authors of HN frontpage content in the last 12 months:

	Author	Frontpage Appearances (last 12mo)	Recent Frontpage Articles	Topics
	Brian Krebs	26	A Closer Look at the LAPSUS$ Data Extortion Group Scary Fraud Ensues When ID Theft & Usury Collide NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20 Million SIM Swap Theft	Microsoft, World Wide Web, computer security
	Jonathan Corbet	24	A way out for a.out Toward a better list iterator for the kernel Moving the kernel to modern C	LWN.net, kernel, Unix
	Ken Shirriff	23	Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part V: the output circuitry Inside the Apple-1’s unusual MOS clock driver chip	Yamaha DX7, read-only memory, engineering
	Julia Evans	17	Implementing a toy version of TLS 1.3 Celebrate tiny learning milestones Some tiny personal programs I’ve written	Domain Name System, debugging, Rust
	Dan Luu	17	Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? Cocktail party ideas The container throttling problem	Google, CPU, Steve Yegge
	Derek Lowe	14	Deliberately Optimizing for Harm These Are Real Compounds An ALS Protein, Revealed	Genentech, CRISPR, AlphaFold
	Jennifer Ouellette	13	An asteroid killed dinosaurs in spring—which might explain why mammals survived Study: 1960 ramjet design for interstellar travel—a sci-fi staple—is unfeasible Tiny tardigrades walk like insects 500,000 times their size	Italy, Luis, Walter Alvarez, Ig Nobel Prize
	Catalin Cimpanu	12	GitLab servers are being exploited in DDoS attacks in excess of 1 Tbps DDoS attacks hit multiple email providers Malware found preinstalled in classic push-button phones sold in Russia	Google, computer security, Android, Russia
	Jeff Geerling	11	Check your driver! Faster Linux 2.5G Networking with Realtek RTL8125B Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board SpaceX’s Starlink Review – Four months in	Raspberry Pi, Starlink, SpaceX
	Michal Necasek	11	Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified The Secret History of ATAPI Looking for High Sierra	Microsoft, IBM PC DOS, MS-DOS
	Paul Graham	10	Putting Ideas into Words Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? A Project of One’s Own	knowledge, PayPal, Michael Lind
	Simon Willison	10	How I build a feature git-history: a tool for analyzing scraped data collected using Git and SQLite Apply conversion functions to data in SQLite columns with the sqlite-utils CLI tool	SQLite, JSON, Python
	Ned Utzig	10	Holy Nonads! A Nine-Bit Computer! The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams A Talk With Computer Gaming Pioneer Walter Bright About Empire	IBM, Walter Bright, Sun Microsystems
	Davide Castelvecchi	9	Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star DeepMind’s AI helps untangle the mathematics of knots Astrophysicists unveil glut of gravitational-wave detections	mathematics, Roger Penrose, theoretical physics
	Dan Goodin	9	Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever iOS zero-day let SolarWinds hackers compromise fully updated iPhones This is not a drill: VMware vuln with 9.8 severity rating is under attack	Microsoft, iOS, graphics card
	Dr. Ian Cutress	9	From There to Here, and Beyond Did IBM Just Preview The Future of Caches? An AnandTech Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor	Intel, CPU cache, Ryzen, Advanced Micro Devices
	Jake Edge	9	Restricting SSH agent keys Moving Google toward the mainline Cooperative package management for Python	LWN.net, Python, Secure Shell
	Jean-Luc Aufranc	9	Android 13 virtualization lets Pixel 6 run Windows 11, Linux distributions Add 10GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module StarFive Dubhe 64-bit RISC-V core to be found in 12nm, 2 GHz processors	RISC-V, SiFive, ARM Cortex-A75
	Bret Devereaux	9	Collections: How the Weak Can Win – A Primer on Protracted War Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions Collections: Fortification, Part V: The Age of Industrial Firepower	Rome, Ancient Rome, Decline and Fall, War
	Howard Oakley	9	Explainer: Whatever happened to QuickTime? How good is Monterey’s Visual Look Up? How Secure Boot works on M1 series Macs	Apple Inc., macOS, M1

It’s good to see that after all these years, Hacker News has stayed true to the core hacker audience: operating systems, hardware, and security dominate the topics of the to writers.

You can find the full colab notebook for generating these results.