The hidden power of HackerNews search

July 29, 2018

Hacker News Search is my go-to search engine

Hacker News (HN) is fantastic for keeping up to date with the latest advancements in startup and tech; submitted, ranked and commented on by people all over the world. With search it becomes much more powerful.

Here’s what Hacker News Search it is great for:

  1. Finding the best resources for learning a new technology

As engineers, we need to rapidly learn new technologies, languages, and skills. However, finding the best resources to learn from is hard. HN Search solves this.

For example, if you are wanting to learn about Natural Language Processing, Data Science, or LSTMs just search for them to find the most relevant articles and useful tutorials.

Searching for LSTMsSearching for LSTMs

2. Finding the top recent articles for a topic/company

HN is great for the top articles in the last 24 hours. But sometimes you want to see the top articles for the last week, last month or last year. HN Search Solves this and lets you filter by topic too.

For example, search to determine the progress of Quantum Computers, what the latest moves are by Amazon, or the most important research on CRISPR.

3. Getting crowdsourced opinions

It’s often useful to get opinions from people of varying backgrounds and locations. The comments section of HN is a great place for this. All you have to do is find the relevant article. This is where HN Search steps in.

For example, if you are considering a Ph.D. and are wanting to hear the pros and cons or are thinking of learning machine learning with Fast.ai course and are wanting to hear from people who have completed it.