Over 500 Top PDFs posted to Hacker News in 2018

Hacker News is a GREAT source of tech news but one of the things I really like about it is when insanely smart people post actual PDFs they've found.

In the past I've seen PDFs from text books, brilliant original research and even old trusted technical books from the 80s and 90s.

So I figured it would be interesting to compute the top PDFs from 2018.

At Datastreamer (my company when not working on Polar) we have nearly a petabyte of web data to play with. We provide data indexing services for companies serious indexing web data (think search engines).

Turns out we have 12 copies of Hacker News for every day of 2018.

How it's calculated

So I threw some code together to quickly parse out the top links. I actually thought they would be helpful for users of Polar so I decided to share with class.

This is computed by taking any link to a PDF file that was on the front page at least once in a 24 hour period.

The List!

Without further ado, here's the full list of the top PDFs from Hacker News in 2018.

Also, if you need a tool to manage your PDFs which supports annotation and highlighting you should really take a look at Polar. It's Open Source, cross platform, and designed for people passionate about reading, education, and research.

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