The best online courses, according to hackers
17 online courses were recommended on Hacker News between November 2025 and November 2026. We rank them by how many separate people recommend each one, and 6 earn the Hacker Approved badge.
Top picks
The three most recommended online courses with the badge. Each figure is 2 people. RecommendsCriticizes One comment
Structured skill tree with prerequisites
People recommend it for a structured, distraction-free path through math with diagnosed gaps and many practice problems. The most common caveat is that the explanations are often too thin.
Explains computers from logic gates up
People recommend it as a hands-on way to learn how computers work, from logic gates up to compilers. Critics note it skips microcode.
Neural Networks: Zero to Hero by Andrej Karpathy
29 recommend, 2 criticize, 94% approval
Ranked 3 of 17 by recommenders
Strong starting point for learners
Free video lecture series that builds neural networks from backpropagation up to a GPT-2 clone, praised for intuition. Caveat: some find it oversimplified.
All 17 online courses, ranked
Select a column heading to sort. Approval share is recommenders out of everyone who gave an opinion; the tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs. Months counts the months, out of 13, in which someone recommended it.
| Rank | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Math Academy | 35 | 1 | 97% | 12 | 9 mo6 owners | Approved |
| 2 | Nand2Tetris | 31 | 3 | 91% | 10 | — | Approved |
| 3 | Neural Networks: Zero to Hero by Andrej Karpathy | 29 | 2 | 94% | 9 | — | Approved |
| 4 | CS193p SwiftUI course by Paul Hegarty | 13 | 1 | 93% | 2 | 11.9 yrs5 owners | — |
| 5 | CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch | 12 | 1 | 92% | 5 | — | Approved |
| 6 | CS50 by Harvard | 11 | 0 | 100% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Tied 7 | Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course | 10 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | Approved |
| Tied 7 | MIT Missing Semester | 10 | 3 | 77% | 2 | — | — |
| Tied 7 | Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka | 10 | 2 | 83% | 1 | — | — |
| 10 | Machine Learning by Andrew Ng | 9 | 1 | 90% | 6 | — | — |
| 11 | Ziglings | 8 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| Tied 12 | MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems course | 7 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | — |
| Tied 12 | Whimsical Animations by Josh Comeau | 7 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
| 14 | Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski | 6 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
| Tied 15 | Seeing Theory | 5 | 1 | 83% | 3 | — | — |
| Tied 15 | CMU 15-445 Database Systems course | 5 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
| Tied 15 | Decomp Academy | 5 | 2 | 71% | 1 | — | — |
How we rank
Rank is the number of separate people who recommend a product in a Hacker News comment over the past year. Someone who praises the same online course in five threads counts once.
The badge goes to online courses that at least 10 people recommend, with recommenders outnumbering critics at least 2 to 1, recommended in at least 4 of the 13 months.
Rankings are never for sale. We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. It never changes the order.