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)?
Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.
And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.
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.
It would be interesting to see how many times this same project has been done because I feel like I was seeing it at least once a month for years.
The book recommendation aggregation website is so common because it’s one of the few variations of this theme that can be monetized through affiliate links.
None of them last long because the traffic falls to zero basically as soon as it falls off the front page.
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?
Describing things by reference to other, similar things is sort of how language works. Humans aren't quite Tamarians, but denotative meanings do often derive from connotations that originally attach via metaphor, analogy, or other forms of comparison.
Like how people talk about “Uber for x”? There’s probably a whole bunch of benefits - a vague sense of already being familiar, a quick understanding of the underlying similarity if you’ve done it well, a halo effect, etc.
I’m not sure where you get your evidence for “never get more popular than the original”. I’m sure you just haven’t heard of the originals that faded away.
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!
To be fair, recommending it doesn't mean endorsing it, just how people read autobiographies of someone they don't like to understand them better. There's probably a bunch of good lessons to take from reading Mein Kampf, it's just that none of them are "this guy was onto something"
If you’re using claude to build the whole thing and gather and parse the data, how on earth are you unable to get it to filter out the noise and show recommendations?
Yeah we should read an example of a how a guy writes down exactly what hes going to do, tells everyone how hes going to do and ends up doing it because he finds out everyone doesn't believe him and he can just lie about shit publically because no one stops him.
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:
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.
Good catch, thanks! The filter was using a book's most recent mention on HN, which is pretty much always recent for popular books, thats why nothing changed? It now filters by when a book was first mentioned instead. and filters shouldn't add to history anymore.
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.
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.
# 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)
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.
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...
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.
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
Using a coding agent really gives you that with minimal guidance. Try in opus session: "I want to build a website which looks similar to https://hackerbooks.org, but instead of showing books extract the top rated topics, render each toipic as a post it card" should give you a usable and maybe even good layout.
honestly claude did the frontend, my instruction was "make it feel like hackertube, but for books". radiospiel's advice is right, just try it. only needed nudges for performance, but otherwise its claude magic :)
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
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?
Depends on what catalog system your local library is using. Many use the open source Evergreen ILS. It has a very robust API that I've used quite a bit for discovery.
There are some others, just one example.
Point being though is that every library system is different.
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?
It's the same harness but in Claude Desktop (which now integrates Chat/Work/Code), you can easily install some plugins for web design, etc. Not that you can't in the TUI but in the GUI it's a few clicks away.
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.
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?
Are you referring to the "Top all-time" list? That list seems to be mostly filled with popular books that do not go into too much detail, which is required for a decent treatment of probability and statistics.
There is a separate topic "Data & Statistics" that has quite some relevant titles.
Also, I think the interest in probability theory has only recently grown with the advent of generative AI. I'm expecting more interest in the future.
Edit: also, the site seems to miss some nice gems, most likely because they are not traditionally published books:
"Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is freely available on Arxiv, and was discussed on Hacker News in March 2025 [1].
I am in that minority I guess that obsesses over P&S. If you want a recommendation right now, two most influential books I read are, in order:
* Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists, that showed me how to calculate various percentages and p values and what does statistical testing really means
* How to Lie with Statistics, that showed me how easily you can manipulate the numbers to get what you want out of them
Another neat one, albeit niche, is Directional Statistics. Turns out, doing stats on angles and directions is less trivial than it sounds!
The "Other" category has a whole load of random stuff in it, including TV series like Breaking Bad, and music like Thriller or Master of Puppets. There's also some wonky attribution in places, like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams"
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.
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 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
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
It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)
> 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.
I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
We've banned this account for repeatedly (exclusively?) posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Haha yeah. Looks like 226 different people brought it up, so it's in the top ~100. That's the "counts mentions" issue I guess. Also, the homepage shows random books (shuffled daily)
You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to suppose it to be a work not worth reading. It is not the best piece of writing, not even of Marx's, but its influence on humanity is enormous; that should suffice for the value in reading it.
Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.
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)
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)?
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.
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.
talk about speed! I have never seen anything with useful content load that fast. Very curious on what went into making it.
Local search index is the key to responsiveness.
Where does hacker books and hackertube get the data from? Is there a regular dump somewhere? Scraped, api?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563
I believe there’s a hackernews dump on google big query public datasets.
Also Hacker news does have a public API. It's ugly and awkward and they're never going to improve it but it's also free and not rate limited.
Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.
And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.
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.
Pleading guilty
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390
I planned to revive it later, but life got in the way
HackerTube is 404 and 503ing, so it might not last a day.
It would be interesting to see how many times this same project has been done because I feel like I was seeing it at least once a month for years.
The book recommendation aggregation website is so common because it’s one of the few variations of this theme that can be monetized through affiliate links.
None of them last long because the traffic falls to zero basically as soon as it falls off the front page.
Try web.archive.org
Feature suggestion: once copyright is up, link to a free online version (e.g. on archive.org, or similar online collections)
I think they’re talking about the index going away, not the books themselves.
They're all just vibecoded, so whenever you need one just spend an hour doing it yourself I guess
This is why way. I vibe coded my own for personal use when the one I used went down.
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?
Describing things by reference to other, similar things is sort of how language works. Humans aren't quite Tamarians, but denotative meanings do often derive from connotations that originally attach via metaphor, analogy, or other forms of comparison.
If you are referring to the "Hacker" part, I guess it makes sense since this is a list of books referred in "HackerNews".
If you were referring to why Karpathy's name was invoked in the post, piggyback effect I guess?
Like how people talk about “Uber for x”? There’s probably a whole bunch of benefits - a vague sense of already being familiar, a quick understanding of the underlying similarity if you’ve done it well, a halo effect, etc.
I’m not sure where you get your evidence for “never get more popular than the original”. I’m sure you just haven’t heard of the originals that faded away.
Obviously _some_ users are better than _no_ users on your app.
Some reference to something known is better than no reference.
This was done already, back in 2021!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
Funny, I bookmark interesting things all the time on here. I had this bookmarked. I've never revisited it.
Now we need HackerBookmarks - HackerBook, but for bookmarks.
Perhaps even `HackerHackerGlob`, a system for spinning out LLM generated curations of any aspect of HN.
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!
You all are tip toeing around HackerMedia.
To become HackerAI, applying for YC.
My favourite part of Startup School is when people ask you what you're working on, and then their profile and application can change.
I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
There have been a few. Here's one I found right away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
Seeing a book or two I recommended more than 10 years ago is pretty cool.
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!
To be fair, recommending it doesn't mean endorsing it, just how people read autobiographies of someone they don't like to understand them better. There's probably a bunch of good lessons to take from reading Mein Kampf, it's just that none of them are "this guy was onto something"
Noted, pushing a fix for the wording for now. Will also look into improving the recommendations.
Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"
If you’re using claude to build the whole thing and gather and parse the data, how on earth are you unable to get it to filter out the noise and show recommendations?
Sure can, coming right along
Maybe his Claude tokens ran out, and Cursor switched him over to Grok, which highly recommended Mein Kampf.
We will know in a couple days if it is Unser Kampf.
It should have been recommended by 1939 HNers.
Hey, maybe the aspiring entrepreneurs just want to emulate the most successful tech bro’s ? ;)
It was infamously on the president's bedside reading list.
If so, I'd bet it's a damn short list.
[dead]
Yeah we should read an example of a how a guy writes down exactly what hes going to do, tells everyone how hes going to do and ends up doing it because he finds out everyone doesn't believe him and he can just lie about shit publically because no one stops him.
Why would we want to forget such an example?
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...
Step 6 is "URLs" and then we're just back to regular hackernews
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.
If this is the bug-reporting subthread: "Show more comments" stops working after clicking it once.
It only keeps 30 comments per book so the second click was the last one :) pushed a minor fix, will look into adding all comments later
Good catch, thanks! The filter was using a book's most recent mention on HN, which is pretty much always recent for popular books, thats why nothing changed? It now filters by when a book was first mentioned instead. and filters shouldn't add to history anymore.
Much better now, thank you!
Why not open source the repo ? People find something interesting and will built on top of it.
This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
I'm beginning to like this new internet…
Content curation will be overhauled for a world with WAY more content of lower average quality.
Heavily curated like this is one direction. Micro consumables (ala tiktok) supporting more impressions is another.
Also: no ads, banners…
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.
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.
More filter options please?
Just to name some off the top of my mind.Not enough time to read these!
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.
I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
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...
That would be actual value worth investing in!
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.
Build it!
Claude can turn something like this around in less than a day.
That would be cool
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
Opus 5.5 is an order of magnitude better at design and design nuances than GPT 6.1 Sol, surprisingly.
If there is a design that LLMs do that you don't like, tell it that. You're allowed to be picky.
Using a coding agent really gives you that with minimal guidance. Try in opus session: "I want to build a website which looks similar to https://hackerbooks.org, but instead of showing books extract the top rated topics, render each toipic as a post it card" should give you a usable and maybe even good layout.
This is the stock claude UI
honestly claude did the frontend, my instruction was "make it feel like hackertube, but for books". radiospiel's advice is right, just try it. only needed nudges for performance, but otherwise its claude magic :)
Claude is epic
Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.
https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/
"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...
I've mentioned it a couple times.
Great idea and nice implementation, please keep it going! I'm waiting for HackerMusic and HackerNet now :)
What I'm getting from all this is that YC is dropping the ball in not investing in their own recommendation engine.
Maybe that's their thoughtful decision and they just let people create whatever they want with HN data, which is good I guess
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
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.
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?
It would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)
Depends on what catalog system your local library is using. Many use the open source Evergreen ILS. It has a very robust API that I've used quite a bit for discovery.
There are some others, just one example.
Point being though is that every library system is different.
AI can help with that too! Have it pwn the library's public endpoints to get access to their catalog.
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
fixing it now. a "suggest a correction" button is a good idea too
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.
Next is HackerXXX
Thank you!
The Science Fiction section is pretty much spot on, and in roughly the order I’d do it myself :)
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?
It's the same harness but in Claude Desktop (which now integrates Chat/Work/Code), you can easily install some plugins for web design, etc. Not that you can't in the TUI but in the GUI it's a few clicks away.
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!
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.
Love it! :)
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.
yep, you're right, fixing it so it only counts comments that actually mention thackeray
this has already existed for a long time, but I think it would be cool if it was really recommendations, instead of just mentions
Yep, we can go back years to find sites like this. Here's one from 2021[1] and I swear I saw another site like this earlier this year.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
Do you guys really trust the taste of users on here? I don't
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
Liked HackerBooks! My college algorithm professor always recommends the Concrete mathematics book.
HackerMovies someone with free tokens please
Well that one is easy!
- The Matrix (1999) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Hackers (1995) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105435
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088247
- WarGames (1983) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
There you go, that’s the entire list :)
Don't forget the most prescient one!
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
"Never send a human to do a machine's job"
close enough to https://letterboxd.com/official/list/letterboxds-top-500-fil...
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.
Are you referring to the "Top all-time" list? That list seems to be mostly filled with popular books that do not go into too much detail, which is required for a decent treatment of probability and statistics.
There is a separate topic "Data & Statistics" that has quite some relevant titles.
Also, I think the interest in probability theory has only recently grown with the advent of generative AI. I'm expecting more interest in the future.
Edit: also, the site seems to miss some nice gems, most likely because they are not traditionally published books: "Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is freely available on Arxiv, and was discussed on Hacker News in March 2025 [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318624
I am in that minority I guess that obsesses over P&S. If you want a recommendation right now, two most influential books I read are, in order:
* Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists, that showed me how to calculate various percentages and p values and what does statistical testing really means * How to Lie with Statistics, that showed me how easily you can manipulate the numbers to get what you want out of them
Another neat one, albeit niche, is Directional Statistics. Turns out, doing stats on angles and directions is less trivial than it sounds!
Compared to HackerTube, this is pure gold! Design books, it is!
I love this and feel it would be greatly enhanced with semantic search.
Have AI create a clean room rewrite of each book, so we can read them on the site.
Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
Gold gold . Thanks .now i need one for yt and one for only science papers
Did you see this already? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510
Good for me. Thank you!!!
having 16.5k recommendations is the same as having 0 recommendations
apparently angry birds is a book? and it's more popular than the new testament in the "other" category.
The "Other" category has a whole load of random stuff in it, including TV series like Breaking Bad, and music like Thriller or Master of Puppets. There's also some wonky attribution in places, like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams"
User: Hey Chat, is Angry Birds more popular than the New Testament?
Assistant: Are you trying to get me shut down?
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.
I expected way more books for software engineering.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on hacker hack
Will that be a list of websites we should all hack?
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.
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.
Hacker Music tomorrow?
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.
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
Love this idea, building a trends page now.
Built it - https://hackerbooks.org/#/trends
I wonder if you've built it faster than I wrote that post.
Atlas Shrugged in the top of all time? So so.
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
> Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.
It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)
Everyone should read Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
i like this idea
Ayn Rand so high, though!
Let us hope it was mentions about how idiotic of a book it is...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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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.
It’s all good, just tell Anthropic that you’ve invested $6.3B in them, and in return, they get $6.3B of your product over the next 10 years.
It’s what all the other companies are doing!
If you owe the bank $10k, that's a you problem.
If you owe the bank $10Mil, that's the banks problem.
If you steal $10Bil from the bank, the government bails out the bank and now it's everyone's problem.
Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
Good idea. Maybe focus on posts that stay on the topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hcker.news - filters out by keywords, domains and users
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308787 - keeps the default look while just removing AI-related submissions
I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.
Or HackerNudes!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
NSFSIGGRAPH:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071#page=4
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We've banned this account for repeatedly (exclusively?) posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Haha yeah. Looks like 226 different people brought it up, so it's in the top ~100. That's the "counts mentions" issue I guess. Also, the homepage shows random books (shuffled daily)
You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to suppose it to be a work not worth reading. It is not the best piece of writing, not even of Marx's, but its influence on humanity is enormous; that should suffice for the value in reading it.
Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.
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Don't complain about downvotes because that just gets you downvoted even harder.
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