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
Your book cover images are trash and I don’t blame you. There isn’t a good compendium of high-quality cover images and metadata for books that you can use for commercial purposes. Google books is amazing but they won’t let you use it for commercial purposes so there is a huge hole in the market if someone is willing to solve it. Calibre does a pretty good job, but it has its own algorithm that is very convoluted and involves searching Google images and multiple other sources and compiling them.
good move
I'd love to see a books and youtube thing for metafilter too. It has a similarly good recommendation history for me.
I am really loving what people are building on similar ideas close to HackerTube and I am tinkering something of my own as well with these new ideas.
Awesome Idea and I would love to see what else community tinkers with things like these :-D
Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.
Edit: I will try to read thinking fast and slow because of HN recommendations. I have heard some good things about the book but I will try to read it in future given HN's immense recommendations, so your website has already had a negative net positive for me :-D
Atlas Shrugged in the top of all time? So so.
> that at least two different HN commenters brought up,
I don't agree with this since this only showcases popular books known to a certain age demographic and relatively recent times.
What i am really interested in are those unique books recommended by one person only! There are some real gems and classics out there which few people have heard of.
Perhaps this could be added?
i like this idea
Everyone should read Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Slop
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> I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc.
Correct move on handling the financial aspect yourself. I asked my mine to do everything but forgot to give it some dough. It sorted it all out but ended up with $6.3B on its account and I think it might have done something dodgy.
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Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
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It would be much more amazing if theres just a link to download all thees books as a ZIP file.
If some AI influencer could please do that and post a link here as a comment i'll give you some upvoates
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Interesting discussion, thanks for posting.
Thanks for developing this handy reference.
Just wondering why holy books like Bible and Bhagavad Gita are included but not Tanakh and Quran? Is there any selection bias in the algoritm since all the popular holy books for main world's religions are frequently mentioned and recommended in HN.
I think now we need 'HN-News - HackerBooks, but for news mentioned on HN'
SCNR
Even though I like HackerTube as well as HackerBooks. However, for HackerBooks, I am missing the summary of why people on HN recommend it.