About

hnpodcasts finds podcast episodes recommended in Hacker News comments, resolves them to real shows, and lists only episodes a human has approved, grouped into topics.

Audio

hnpodcasts does not play audio. It is a directory: the RSS feeds and the links on each episode point at the publisher's original files, so you subscribe in your own podcast app and listen there, from the show directly. Audio is never rehosted.

Because the audio belongs to each show, hnpodcasts does not provide transcripts or captions for it. For a text version, follow the episode's show page to the publisher, whose site often carries show notes or a transcript, and read the linked Hacker News discussion.

Subscribe

There is one feed for every tracked episode across all podcasts, and each podcast has its own feed of just its tracked episodes (the "Tracked episodes (RSS)" link on any show page). Each item links back to the Hacker News thread that recommended it.

Topics

Podcasts are grouped by their genre as reported to Apple Podcasts, rolled up to a top-level genre (for example Documentary and Tech News become Society & Culture and Technology). Use the genre switcher at the top to browse one genre at a time.

How podcasts are ranked

Within a genre, and on the home page, podcasts are ordered by how often Hacker News recommended them: the number of distinct comments mentioning the show, shown as the "HN mentions" count on each tile. A show recommended in more comments ranks higher, regardless of how many of its episodes we track.

When two shows have the same number of mentions, the one with more tracked episodes comes first, and if they still tie, they are ordered alphabetically. Episode count is deliberately only a tie-breaker, so a show with one widely recommended episode is not buried beneath a show with many lightly mentioned ones.

Takedown policy

If you are a show owner and would like an episode removed from this directory, that request is honored. Removal takes it out of the site and the feed on the next build.