Method / the counting rules

How we count

Every number on this site comes from the public Hacker News API and can be checked. Here is exactly how the courses and their receipts are built.

What a course is

A course is a path through sources, not a single article. It has 5 stages, numbered steps, and the HN threads that argue each source is worth your time.
A source can be a tutorial, a book, a series page, a repository or a video. A step can cite more than one source when they cover the same piece of the machine.
130 sources are cited today. The bars on a course card and course map show how each course's HN points are distributed across its steps.
The bar height uses a log scale, so a 6,000-point book does not flatten a 121-point tutorial. The Receipts page has every exact figure.

We pulled 4,140 HN stories above 100 points whose titles match tutorial phrasing ("build your own", "from scratch", "let's build", and others), then ran a topic search per course.
Sources were chosen by hand for followability and order. Points decide nothing about the order of steps; a course is ordered for learning.
Each course's own Method section lists what was left out and why.

Points are summed across every HN submission of the same source. A source is matched by URL substrings (its domain and path), searched through HN's Algolia API, with a title filter where a domain also hosts unrelated pages.
"Submitted N×" is the number of matching submissions: how many times HN rediscovered it.
For books and series on their own site, chapters submitted on their own count toward the book. YouTube videos are matched by video ID and GitHub repositories by path.
Courses are listed in suggested order, not by total points. Points are evidence, not the table of contents. Receipts ranks every source by its own total.

Quotes come from the top five top-level comments in the two best-scoring threads for each source, in HN's own ranking order.
Quotes are verbatim. We trim only with "…", keep the commenter's spelling and casing, and never join two paragraphs.
Criticism is quoted as readily as praise and is marked as HN's caveat.
Every quote and thread link is checked against the pulled data by a script before a course is published.

The order of steps, the advice, and every time estimate are editorial. Times assume evenings and weekends.
Costs were checked on each source's own site on the date shown on its course page.