Judofyr’s excellent collection of Hacker News threads with book recommendations made me want to see all of the best HN threads this year.

Thankfully, the HNSearch API makes this kind of data easy to get at so I hacked up a quick script to do just that.

While I was at it, I grabbed the top submissions as well!

Top Ten Submissions by Point Count

#10: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

submitted by smacktoward on Feburary 13th — 1,285 points (HN Thread)

#9: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

submitted by petercooper on July 30th — 1,309 points (HN Thread)

#8: “Lighten Up”

submitted by jnoller on March 21st — 1,332 points (HN Thread)

#7: Show HN: Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework

submitted by geoffschmidt on June 10th — 1,347 points (HN Thread)

#6: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

submitted by paulsilver on October 22nd — 1,424 points (HN Thread)

#5: Light Table - a new IDE concept

submitted by ibdknox on April 14th — 1,543 points (HN Thread)

#4: $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog

submitted by zotz on March 6th — 1,610 points (HN Thread)

#3: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

submitted by dzlobin on January 20th — 2,024 points (HN Thread)

#2: Poll: What’s your favortie programming langauge?

submitted by GreekOphion on March 23rd — 2,305 points

#1: Show HN: This up votes itself

submitted by olalonde on March 23rd — 3,357 points (HN Thread)

Top Ten Submissions by Comment Count

#10: Why I’m a Pirate

submitted by tbassetto on January 18th — 526 comments (HN Thread)

#9: Ecuador grants Julian Assange asylum

submitted by anons2011 on August 16th — 531 comments (HN Thread)

#8: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

submitted by sciurus on June 11th — 538 comments (HN Thread)

#7: 6.5 Million LinkedIn Password Hashes Leaked

submitted by ssclafani on June 6th — 545 comments (HN Thread)

#6: This is why I don’t give you a job

submitted by fourspace on January 7th — 549 comments (HN Thread)

#5: Poll: What’s Your Favorite Programming Language?

submitted by GreekOphion on March 23rd — 625 comments (HN Thread)

#4: Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

submitted by jipumarino on November 6th — 658 comments (HN Thread)

#3: Microsoft Introduces New “Surface” Tablet

submitted by yottabyte47 on June 18th — 693 comments (HN Thread)

#2: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

submitted by dzlobin on January 20th — 707 comments (HN Thread)

#1: “Lighten up”

submitted by jnoller on March 21st — 827 comments (HN Thread)

Top Ten Comments by Point Count

#10: patio11 on walking out of an interview (August 29th — 254 points)

#9: sriramk on Farewell Stack Exchange (February 6th — 255 points)

#8: pg on Viral Video About Body Scanners (March 8th — 257 points)

#7: tsaoutourpants on $1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog (March 7th — 257 points)

#6: tptacek on Matasano Security acquired for £8.4m ($13m) (August 2nd — 259 points)

#5: jkahn on Please don’t learn to code (May 15th — 260 points)

#4: api on Google Fiber Plans & Pricing (July 26th — 264 points)

#3: kirubakaran on Instagram is “worth” more than the New York Times (April 10th — 264 points)

#2: pg on Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News.. (August 17th — 271 points)

#1: mapgrep on The Best (November 7th — 397 points)

Some thoughts and stats

I thought it was interesting to see how different the top submissions lists were when sorted by points and comments. Only three submissions found their way on to both lists (Kill Hollywood, Lighten Up, and Favorite Programming Language).

It was also interesting to see by how large a margin mapgrep’s comment beat out the others. Over 100 votes!

Overall, there were 232,825 submissions to Hacker News in 2012 and 1,191,015 comments posted.

Busy year!