Hacker News was created by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, as a place for tech-savvy individuals to share and discuss interesting content related to technology, startups, programming, and more.

Initially, it started as a simple link aggregator, where users could submit links to articles, blog posts, and projects they found intriguing.

Over time, it evolved into a thriving community with a strong emphasis on intellectual curiosity, thoughtful discussions, and quality content.

I'm an avid reader of Hacker News and often come across high-quality discussions from the community. I found that the courses and books people discuss on Hacker News are really good, so I conduct monthly analyses and aggregate the top courses/books found in comments and rank them.

Top Picks

• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

  Charles Petzold · 3 HN comments

• UNIX: A History and a Memoir

  Brian W Kernighan · 123 HN points · 15 HN comments

• Dr. Z's Beat the Racetrack

  William T. Ziemba, Donald B. Hausch · 4 HN comments

• A Life of One's Own

  Marion Milner, Rachel Bowby · 1 HN comments

• Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines (MIT Press)

  Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, Gordon V. Cormack · 1 HN comments

• Lucene in Action, Second Edition: Covers Apache Lucene 3.0

  Michael McCandless, Erik Hatcher, Otis Gospodnetic · 1 HN comments

• Industrial archaeology in Britain, (Pelican)

  R. A Buchanan · 1 HN comments

• Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move!

  Keith Peters · 1 HN comments

• Constructing Language Processors for Little Languages

  Randy M. Kaplan · 1 HN comments

• The Political Economy of Dictatorship

  Ronald Wintrobe · 2 HN comments

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

  William Zinsser · 28 HN comments

• It's Better to Be a Good Machine Than a Bad Person: Speech Recognition and Other Exotic User Interfaces at the Twilight of the Jetsonian Age

  Bruce Balentine, Leslie Degler · 1 HN comments

• Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (New Directions in Social Psychology)

  Richard E. Nisbett, Dov Cohen · 3 HN comments

• LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process: Based on the Groundbreaking Research of Oscar Janiger, M.D.

  Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Oscar Janiger, Rick Strassman · 4 HN comments

• The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

  Jonathan Rauch · 1 HN comments

• Altered Carbon

  Richard MORGAN · 1 HN comments

• The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

  Steven Kotler · 1 HN comments

• Supermoney

  Adam Smith · 1 HN comments

• Quick Start Training for IBM z/OS Application Developers, Volume 1

  Robert Wingate · 1 HN comments

• IBM COBOL A Complete Guide - 2020 Edition

  Gerardus Blokdyk · 1 HN comments

• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

  Anand Giridharadas · 2 HN comments

• Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

  Alfie Kohn · 8 HN comments

• The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

  W. Edwards Deming, Joyce Orsini, Diana Deming Cahill · 2 HN comments

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

  David Allen, James Fallows · 3 HN comments

• How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

  Sönke Ahrens · 1 HN comments

• Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth

  W. Godley, M. Lavoie · 1 HN comments

• Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System

  Chet Haase · 1 HN comments

• One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein

  Whitney Alyse Webb · 1 HN comments

• One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, VOL.1

  Whitney Webb · 1 HN comments

• Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

  Dr. Dan Ariely · 17 HN comments

Our methodology

We conducted this analysis by "ranking things based on social signals"

It's the result of mining the HN archives for references to books and then ranking them and displaying all references in one place.

Ranking currently takes into account HN stories (points) and comments (sentiment, karma, estimated points).

Who are we

Find accountability partners, and study online courses & books with other learners. Moocable helps you find your next course/book/problem set, and lets you find study partners.