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

• Functional Programming in Scala

  Coursera · École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne · 227 HN points · 29 HN comments

• coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2

  Coursera · Offered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem · 154 HN points · 10 HN comments

• Design of Computer Programs | Udacity Free Courses

  Udacity · 2 HN points · 24 HN comments

• Functional Programming in Haskell: Supercharge Your Coding

  FutureLearn · The University of Glasgow · 69 HN points · 2 HN comments

• How to Code: Simple Data

  edX · University of British Columbia · 6 HN points · 21 HN comments

• Paradigms of Computer Programming – Fundamentals

  edX · Université catholique de Louvain · 46 HN points · 9 HN comments

• How to Code: Complex Data

  edX · University of British Columbia · 13 HN comments

• C for Everyone: Fundamentals

  Coursera · University of California, Santa Cruz · 19 HN points

• R Programming

  Coursera · Johns Hopkins University · 5 HN comments

• How to Win Coding Competitions: Secrets of Champions

  edX · ITMO University · 6 HN points · 3 HN comments

• Compilers

  edX · Stanford University · 4 HN comments

• Nature, in Code: Biology in JavaScript

  edX · École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne · 3 HN comments

• Agile Development Using Ruby on Rails - The Basics

  edX · University of California, Berkeley · 3 HN comments

• Unix Tools: Data, Software and Production Engineering

  edX · Delft University of Technology · 3 HN comments

• Introduction to Serverless on Kubernetes

  edX · The Linux Foundation · 11 HN points

• JavaScript (JS) Algorithms and Data Structures Masterclass

  Udemy · 2 HN comments

• Flying Car and Autonomous Flight Engineer Nanodegree

  Udacity · 3 HN comments

• The Complete Elixir and Phoenix Bootcamp

  Udemy · Stephen Grider · 3 HN comments

• Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science (part 1)

  edX · Harvard University · 2 HN comments

• Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra

  Coursera · Imperial College London · 2 HN comments

• Balancing Refactoring and Delivery: Clean Coding Practices

  Udemy · Abhinav Manchanda · 9 HN points

• IBM COBOL Basics

  Coursera · IBM · 8 HN points

• Software as a Service

  edX · University of California, Berkeley · 1 HN points · 1 HN comments

• How to create a Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto address - Java

  Udemy · Tuna Tore | AWS Solutions Architect · 2 HN points · 1 HN comments

• Nature, in Code: Biology in JavaScript

  edX · École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne · 1 HN comments

• Learn to Program: Crafting Quality Code

  Coursera · University of Toronto · 1 HN comments

• Effective Programming in Scala

  Coursera · École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne · 1 HN comments

• Algorithms and Data Structures

  edX · Microsoft · 1 HN comments

• Discovering Godot: Make Video Games in Python-like GDScript

  Udemy · Ben Tristem · 1 HN comments

• Kotlin for Java Developers

  Coursera · JetBrains · 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.