Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN

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.

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.

So how big is the catalogue? And are you going to expand it regularly?

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

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?

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 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)?

Love it! :)

This was done already, back in 2021!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

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.

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 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?

You all are tip toeing around HackerMedia.

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.

I'm beginning to like this new internet…

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

would be nice to select multiple radio buttons , as well as filter by nonfiction or fiction and genre

Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.

https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

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)

Just to name some off the top of my mind.

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

I haven’t looked into the site code so don’t know if it’s some tracker or pure coincidence, but I own 15 of the first 20 books that showed up!

Some of the covers seem to be cropped? Also kinda astonished how bad a lot of cover designs are?

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on HackerHack, like HackerBooks and HackerBooks, but with comments and other posts and news and stuff. Some say it’s just HackerNews, but those are just Luddites who don’t get it.

It seems the published dates need tidied up. Brave new world is showing as published in the 2000s.

Very cool though and love seeing all of the covers in various forms of condition.

I like the responsiveness of the website.

But there's no way Vanity Fair by Thackeray so high on "top all-time" list. It turns out that a lot of comments are about Vanity Fair magazine.

Nice, I like it!

Feedback: I don’t understand how the rising category works. I looked up a couple of books and they seemed to have peaked a while ago.

I assume that like Karpathy you used Claude Code Desktop. The harness seems to be more capable than VS Code or terminal. Could you have done it with TUI alone?

This is the best HN day EVER since I stumbled on the site 10 years ago: first HackerTube and now this! Thank you SO much, both of you!

this has already existed for a long time, but I think it would be cool if it was really recommendations, instead of just mentions

This is really useful! Thanks for sharing!

The Science Fiction section is pretty much spot on, and in roughly the order I’d do it myself :)

Seeing a book or two I recommended more than 10 years ago is pretty cool.

HackerMovies someone with free tokens please

Was it pretty fun building with AI?

Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!

Are you tracking # of clicks you are getting?

Have AI create a clean room rewrite of each book, so we can read them on the site.

Do you guys really trust the taste of users on here? I don't

Awesome

I love this and feel it would be greatly enhanced with semantic search.

Gold gold . Thanks .now i need one for yt and one for only science papers

Compared to HackerTube, this is pure gold! Design books, it is!

I love seeing The Power Broker is in this list. His books is incredible. I wish more people would slog through it. I've personally bought it for at least 5 people and no one can seem to finish it.

The cover page for The Three Body Problem is from some other author than the one recommended.

Not enough time to read these!

Liked HackerBooks! My college algorithm professor always recommends the Concrete mathematics book.

I expected way more books for software engineering.

Made a version for Reddit:

https://www.trustmebro.reviews/c/books

There's been a few of these already, and it feels a bit off, I'd suggest you do one more prompt and weight by karma

apparently angry birds is a book? and it's more popular than the new testament in the "other" category.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on hacker hack

very nice!

edit: no love for the secret life of circuits under electronics, tho it is a fairly recent book

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720143

If I self promote my book, ENOF by Sol Yin, about a possible AI future in one comment and hope really hard that someone else legitimately says something about it by name in another comment, I'll make the list?

I used https://hackernewsbooks.com/ for years, it was fantastic for personal buys and gifts. But then it disappeared a few months a go.

Glad someone has created a new one.

Interesting discussion, thanks for posting.

Good for me. Thank you!!!

having 16.5k recommendations is the same as having 0 recommendations

Hi - I work at eBooks.com. If you'd like to register as an affiliate with us, send me a msg (email in profile). We have a good commission.

You know, one thing that I think is interesting in tech circles is how much interest we have in maths in general, except that there is almost nothing on the "top" list that I saw that was related to probability and statistics. It's like P&S, which is probably the most useful math for most people who need to make decisions in life, is just not that interesting to people with a technical bend.

I wonder if it is because simulation can often allow you to get around needing P&S techniques in general? Or maybe it is that (Neural Network) ML models allow you to often approximate the things you might do with P&S in terms of making decisions?

No real point, I just think it is interesting.

Next is HackerXXX

Hacker Music tomorrow?

Great site, thank you for sharing.

Now, all we need is diff-book-order(1), a command which takes as input your personal "library.bib" file and it orders all books mentioned on the parent's site that are not already part of the personal library.

I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood

Thank you!

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.

good move

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.

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?

Ayn Rand so high, though!

i like this idea

Everyone should read Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

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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.

"Top All Time" -> 3rd row -> "Mein Kampf"

Sweet.

Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.

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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.