alt Hacker NewsShow HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Saw Karpathy's HackerTube and wanted the same thing for books. So I had Claude build one (Opus 5.5).
It's ~16.5k books that at least two different HN commenters brought up, from 2007 till now. Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it. Data is downloadable from the about page.
To be clear: Claude wrote almost all of it, including the data pipeline and the site. I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc.
It counts mentions, so it's not perfect (praising a book and trashing it both count). If your favourite book is missing or matched to the wrong thing, tell me.
Comments
A couple of missing ones (that I expected to have been mentioned, aren't there as far as I can tell, and I found them on here with a quick google):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779266 I'd have expected it to come up as one step removed from Borges, and it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_(poignant)_Guide_to_Ru... mentioned many times, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36632010 - a surprising omission, tho I guess it's not in print.
This is great! I love to see the aggregated comments of HN users next to each book.
Besides linking to bookshop and amazon (weird choices in my opinion), you could also link to bookfinder, anna's archive, libgen. That would be really useful.
Fun skimming through this. I wondered how it would deal with book nicknames and chuckled when I found this entry https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL15190817W
Hah, good job, mate. I love it. I've given one credit tp HackerBooks on VibeVoted https://vibevoted.com/hacker-books. It should get a review alongside 11 other projects within the next 24h. I've also added it to SaaSHub. If you give me an email - can add you as the person managing the listing.
I'm wondering - how are you monitoring HN for new books?
I have recently tried to check around goodreads alterantives and I came face to face with these ISBNs and ASINs and how these are a hot mess. There's really no truly open metadata source that is "enough". App developers often depend on proprietary sources and sadly those are the ones which are more complete and go their own way for every source. How did you deal with that?
I also finally tried "Thinking, fast and slow" recently and realised it was absolutely not for me. Even the audiobook version didn't cut it. I found it completely dry and trite. I am not trying to offend anymoe (esp. with "trite"), and I am aware how storied and awarded the author is – to me it just came across as "yet another self-help kind of book" sadly. But then a clear lack of fiction for a long time in "top all-times" puts into perspective why that book is up at the top. I think the general hn reading-taste is quite different from mine. Also, it's not about what was book about, because I never reached that, it was rather how it was written.
Any plans to add some sort of tag/genre to search feature?
So how big is the catalogue? And are you going to expand it regularly?
I see some books where the same person recommended it many times. I think you should account for that.
I remember there were multiple such websites before being shared in HN. I bookmarked them, and a couple years later when I finally wanted to find a book, the only thing I got is 404. I hope this one lives longer.
Impressive work! I wonder if there's any plan for refining the classification based on user feedback? I.e. Martin Klepman's the wild boar book is currently being shown in "Business & Management" category, and "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" is in "Psychology and Behavior". By the way, is there some book naming normalization based on learned context embeddings (i.e., will this mention of the wild boar book be counted)?
Inspired by your site, I built out https://wikihack.netlify.app/
Hackerbooks, but for wikipedia :)
I hope you enjoy it.
Same problem as last time somebody made one of these: what I want to see is not most recommended, but least recommended, like books mentioned exactly twice. But there's no button to sort that way. So I'm flailing around at the top of your infinite scroll trying hopelessly to reach the bottom.
The next stage is "HackerTime", a startup providing enough time to watch all the video and read all the books and play all the game and read all the news on "HackerZ for Z in tube, books, games, news".
With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...
This is absolutely fantastic and a much more worthwhile resource than hackertube, which feels more like a graveyard of bygone thinking.
I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
The site is really fast. I see HTTP/3, OpenGraph, and Cloudflare. Can you expand on the technologies used?
Also... "Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it."
> Please don't put generated text in HN posts.
Claude speak gives me a gag reflex these days.
I think the concept is amazing, so don't take the rest of my comment too seriously.
But why do we anchor naming to someone who made something popular? Why do we upvote similar names too? For example, openclaw became popular then there were similar projects with the "claw" naming.
It's just a very fascinating psychological thing to do, and I don't understand why. Because if you copy part of a name, generally you'll never get more popular than the original name. So why do this?
Great website. My favorite part is the book section, cause I am always finding the truly pragmatic book for engineer. These information are useful for society, especially young enterprenaur as me.
I like the idea, but the wording might need to change as to how it counts a recommendation. As it stands Mein Kampf has been "recommended" by 651 HNers, a troubling statistic!
The “mentions since” picker appears to be broken, nothing in the list changes as far as I can see. Also I wish it wouldn’t add another page to my history.
This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
I want this but for podcasts. I pick a podcast I subscribe to say the Tim Ferris show and I see book mentions by episode/theme/tim/guest with links to favorite/library/amazon. Life's too fragile for me to make something public like that but it's fairly easy is'nt it. Every passing year I'm surprised it doesn't exist yet, especially nowadays given how easy it is to obtain transcripts.
Slightly different take - use the Claude / OpenAI / muse desktop navigation integration to actually go into your YouTube account and like all the videos and watch them for a bit to seed your algorithm.
May be we need single webapp that shows all intellectual artifacts shared in hackernews since its inception and updated hourly or daily and also make a social media app to for consumption:
1. youtube 2. books 3. podcasts 4. blogs 5. articles 6. etc...
I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
After clicking an entry, below, "What Hacker News says", we see comments with mentions and surrounding text. It's now squashed, maybe you can add a function to expand on click, to see the comment with newline separation if such exist. Cause very often these comments presents a list of their favorite book, and an explanation of why. When these are squashed, it's not clear which explanation is preceding or following the entry.
Also, clicking the link "On "...."" it doesn't bring to the exact comment, only that thread or topic, so you need to search for it. It could bring directly to that comment.
Wonderful. I love the little side bonus of stumbling across alternate versions of book covers I haven't seen before.
K someone make this into a spotify playlist please thx!
Love this! Pls add amazon.com links and a 2020s filter button. You could probably pull all the missing covers from Wikipedia. Would love to have this for TV/Movie/Podcast recommendations also.
Thx.
I need to understand how do you guys build such slick or decent UI for websites. I get the backend but the front end, I have yet to crack. I know there is impeccable repo but I'm unsure how to go from here
Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.
would be nice to select multiple radio buttons , as well as filter by nonfiction or fiction and genre
More filter options please?
# Author
# Date published (like enter a from-date and/or to-date)
# License
# Free download available y/n
# Sample chapter available
# Format: softcover / hardcover / ebook / audiobook etc
# No. of pages
# Language(s)
# Can you watch the movie? (if so: IMDB/Wiki link)
Great idea and nice implementation, please keep it going! I'm waiting for HackerMusic and HackerNet now :)
Love the site! It loads so fast that it actually survived the initial HN hug of death, which is already a miracle for any side project.
Not a fan of "For you" based on supposed similarities to what I've clicked before. Especially when e.g. "Scratch Programming Playground" has nothing to do with "Brave New World". I'd remove it but that's me.
Maybe language filters for non-English titles? Or if a book is in public domain already then links to the sources could be presented?
I bought and read Permutation City because it was mentioned here.
Add a way to suggest the correct author, sometimes just reading the first comment linked in the page has the right one, for example:
https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL999456W
> HIS DESIRE WAS FIERCER THAN A ROCKY MOUNTAIN STORM... HERS WAS RECKLESS AND DANGEROUSLY WILD
"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...
I've mentioned it a couple times.
Why not open source the repo ? People find something interesting and will built on top of it.
It would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)
Inspired by this, I made the same thing for dev tools, counting only comments that actually recommend the tool (not just mention it): https://shouvik12.github.io/hackertools
This is awesome.
Sometimes, I crave the directory like appearances of lycos/altavista/yahoo...
With finite reference points, directories work well. I would love to see this as a text version too.
I noticed almost all of the top recommended books are written by men. A quick skim of the first 100 books on the home page and I see ~4 by women. The Fiction category was largely the same. Nothing against these books, I have read many and enjoyed them, but that's a pretty crazy ratio.
I will add some personal recommendations to maybe get picked up by the algorithm:
Science fiction:
- Parable of the Sower and Kindred, both by Octavia Butler
- The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World Is Forest, both by Ursula K Le Guin (also The Left Hand of Darkness, which I did see on there)
Non-science fiction:
- Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (essays)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Thank you so much. It's incredibly useful for many people
Yes, could you please add a filter for fiction only? Since HN strongly leans towards nonfiction, the fiction ones are just interspersed, and I would like to see just them instead...
I think fiction books are more important and more "wholesome" than nonfiction ones.