Papers
+452%
9,163 new paper objects in 2012–16, 50,572 in 2022–26 — the steepest climb of any large category.
What Hacker News actually recommended.
Two decades of submissions and 43 million comments, reduced to the objects people keep coming back to. Ranked by story points, discussion volume and the number of different humans who linked them.
25,610
ranked picks
1,116,238
objects found
49.3M
items mined
2020
peak discovery year
Twenty years, month by month
objects discovered per month · 2007–2026Month by month, from 2007 to today: each column is what HN discovered in that month, the bars on the right are running totals. It starts by itself when it scrolls into view. Watch the composition change: blogs and Wikipedia fill the 2010s, papers and videos take over the 2020s.
Feb 2007
12 new objects
'08
'11
'14
'17
'20
'23
'26
235 months
Feb 2007: Wiki 6 · Videos 4 · Books 1
Total by Feb 2007
12 objectsWiki
6
Videos
4
Books
1
Other
1
What changed
How the mix of new objects shifted between 2012–16 and 2022–26, in percentage points. Reading on HN moved away from essays, Wikipedia and repositories toward papers, videos and datasets.
Papers
+9.1 pp
Repos
+2.5 pp
Videos
+1.4 pp
Datasets
+0.4 pp
Podcasts
+0.2 pp
Courses
−0.6 pp
Books
−1.3 pp
Essays
−2.2 pp
Wiki
−9.4 pp
2012–162022–26
Δ shareBooks
−26%
6,180 → 4,597 objects. Only 35% of book picks ever had a submission of their own.
Datasets
×14.8
116 → 1,720 objects since 2012–16. The AI boom put datasets on the reading list.
Concentration
29%
github.com, youtube.com, en.wikipedia.org alone account for 29% of every ranked pick (books are 2,130 picks for scale).
Startup stories
postmortems · revenue reports · build-in-publicThe threads where people show the numbers: what failed, what made money, and what it cost. Ranked the same way as everything else — nothing here is an endorsement, these are the stories HN argued about most.
- 1I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors1,762 pts
- 2JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised1,168 pts
- 3My startup failed, and this is what it feels like1,084 pts
- 4Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month1,071 pts
- 5Indie Hackers: Learn how developers are making money971 pts
- 6A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month952 pts
Browse by category
sorted by pointsRepos
2,462 picksGitHub repositories HN keeps coming back to
- 1github/dmca9,722
- 2gorhill/uBlock7,427
- 3golang/go6,899
- 4nodejs/node4,694
Wiki
2,456 picksWikipedia articles used as evidence in arguments
- 1Lynn Conway1,670
- 2John McCarthy (computer scientist)1,621
- 3Timeline of the far future1,302
- 4Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed1,059
Videos
2,543 picksTalks, lectures and YouTube videos worth the watch
- 1Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole2,196
- 2Pockit: A tiny, powerful, modular computer1,939
- 3Facebook Fraud1,713
- 4Perseverance Rover lands on Mars1,674
Essays
2,631 picksBlog posts and Substacks that got recommended
- 1No Thank You, Mr. Pecker2,451
- 2I am an Uber survivor2,194
- 3Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company2,101
- 4Vulnerability in the Mac Zoom client allows malicious websites to enable camera1,937
Startup
520 picksPostmortems, revenue reports and build-in-public notes from founders
- 1I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors1,762
- 2JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised1,168
- 3My startup failed, and this is what it feels like1,084
- 4Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month1,071
Careers
306 picksQuitting, getting fired, managing, hiring — first-person career notes
- 1Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself2,348
- 2I resigned from Twitter1,822
- 3I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time1,644
- 4Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922)1,568
Build logs
1,629 picksI built / I shipped posts: side projects, tools and prototypes
- 1I made a robot to cut my hair with scissors4,573
- 2I made an open-source laptop from scratch3,237
- 3I may have created a new type of puzzle2,103
- 4I wrote a children's book / illustrated guide to Apache Kafka1,797
Incidents
115 picksOutage and data-loss postmortems written by the people involved
- 1This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem981
- 2Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem862
- 3Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on April 11799
- 4Roblox October Outage Postmortem687
Papers
2,662 picksarXiv and journal papers that survived the comments
- 1Fraud, so much fraud1,528
- 2The Chaostron: An Important Advance in Learning Machines (1961)1,487
- 3CRISPR eliminates HIV-1 infection in live animals1,455
- 4DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL1,351
Books
2,130 picksBooks people actually put links to
- 1Surviving in-flight breakup of an SR-71 Blackbird at Mach 3.182,493
- 2Edward Snowden: Permanent Record774
- 3The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan416
- 4The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius289
Courses
1,991 picksCourses, syllabi and lecture series
- 1A 2020 Vision of Linear Algebra835
- 2Google's Free Deep Learning Course645
- 3Algorithms627
- 4Mathematics for Computer Science: Readings555
Specs
1,824 picksRFCs, specs and standards cited in threads
- 1ECMAScript 2017 Language Specification1,068
- 2Cool URIs don't change (1998)814
- 3Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)741
- 4WASM 2.0634
Datasets
946 picksDatasets and benchmarks people share
- 1LLM Embeddings Explained: A Visual and Intuitive Guide456
- 2Try Stable Diffusion's Img2Img Mode415
- 3Browse State-of-the-Art Machine Learning Papers with Code415
- 4Jane Street Market Prediction ($100k Kaggle competition)360
Music
1,204 picksAlbums, tracks and playlists
- 1Artist releases album called “Ok Google Play Music” on Spotify586
- 2Students Question the NSA at Recruiting Session241
- 3Patch's new owner lays off staff in 1:39 conference call183
- 4How the McLaren F1 Got Its Sound183
Films
919 picksMovies and documentaries
- 1I think most readers of Hacker News would enjoy District 9 (I did: 9.5/10)48
- 2Atlas Shrugged film to be released in 201145
- 3Betas (TV Series 2013– )42
- 4The "other" side of file sharing39
Patents
520 picksPatents that came up in discussion
- 1Facebook has been granted patent on shadow banning2,112
- 2Google's PageRank patent has expired749
- 3“Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”360
- 4The patent on SIFT expired yesterday212
Podcasts
752 picksPodcast episodes people link to
- 1Vijayanagara – The Last Emperors of South India321
- 2Episode · anchor.fm237
- 3Chamath Palihapitiya on Wallstreetbets182
- 4Hacker And The Fed107
How ranking works
Points sums the score of every submission whose URL is the object. Comments sums those threads. Recommenders counts distinct commenters who posted a link to the object — the closest thing to “how many people independently vouched for this”.