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 Courses

• Economics of Money and Banking

  Coursera · Columbia University · 6 HN points · 26 HN comments

• The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910

  Coursera · University of Virginia · 8 HN comments

• Science Matters: Let's Talk About COVID-19

  Coursera · Imperial College London, Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA) · 25 HN points · 1 HN comments

• Introduction to Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science

  Coursera · University of California San Diego, National Research University Higher School of Economics · 10 HN points · 3 HN comments

• Global Warming I: The Science and Modeling of Climate Change

  Coursera · The University of Chicago · 3 HN comments

• Principles of Economics with Calculus

  edX · Caltech · 1 HN comments

• Macroeconometric Forecasting

  edX · The International Monetary Fund · 1 HN comments

• Algorithmic Toolbox

  Coursera · University of California San Diego, National Research University Higher School of Economics · 1 HN comments

• Networks, Crowds and Markets

  edX · Cornell University · 2 HN points · 1 HN comments

• Fashion as Design

  Coursera · The Museum of Modern Art · 1 HN comments

• Age of Cathedrals

  Coursera · Yale University · 1 HN comments

• Microeconomics: The Power of Markets

  Coursera · University of Pennsylvania · 3 HN points

• Macroeconometric Forecasting

  edX · The International Monetary Fund · 1 HN comments

• Microeconomics Principles

  Coursera · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · 1 HN comments

• The Power of Macroeconomics: Economic Principles in the Real World

  Coursera · University of California, Irvine · 1 HN comments

• The Age of Sustainable Development

  Coursera · Columbia University · 1 HN points

• Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis

  Coursera · Stanford University · 1 HN points

• Cyber Security Economics

  edX · Delft University of Technology · 1 HN points · 1 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 online courses 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.