About Hacker Courses
Hacker Courses collects the online courses programmers recommend to each other in public Hacker News comments, from 2006 to October 2026: 1,376 courses drawn from 3,371 comments.
How ranking works
Comment karma is not public, so each course is scored from who recommended it, how strongly, in how many separate discussions, and for how long.
- Stance. Every comment is labelled for the course it mentions: strongly recommends (1.0), recommends (0.7), mentions (0.25) or criticizes (0).
- One vote per person. Someone who recommends a course five times counts once, at their strongest stance.
- Pile-ons are damped. Within one thread, votes decay by half each (1, ½, ¼…). Ten replies in one thread are worth less than two independent threads; the same course surfacing in ten unrelated threads counts ten times.
- Staying power. Each extra calendar year in which people recommended it adds 8%.
Trending uses the same votes, halving their weight every two years back from the newest comment in the data.
Badges
- Classic
- Top-ranked and recommended across at least eight years.
- Evergreen
- Recommended in six or more different years.
- Rising
- Most of its support came in the last three years of data.
- Hidden gem
- Only two to four recommenders, but nearly all of them emphatic.
How the list was made
Comments were found with keyword rules and reviewed by AI models (Claude Haiku 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5), which also merged the many spellings of each course, labelled each comment's stance and wrote the summaries. Expect a few misses. Course images come from each course's own page; courses without one get an illustration for their topic. The full pipeline is open source.
License
The code and original artwork are MIT licensed. The course catalog, rankings and summaries this project generated are CC BY 4.0. Comments remain their authors' and course images their providers'; neither is licensed by this project. Details in DATA-LICENSE.md.
Privacy and removal
No accounts and no cookies. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which doesn't use cookies or fingerprinting and doesn't follow you to other sites. Saved courses and your theme are kept in your own browser. Each comment belongs to its author and links back to the original. To have a comment removed, open a removal request.