On the subject of reading (since the 'decline' in literacy is being raised in this thread) -- especially if you haven't read in a while and are thinking about reading but are maybe struggling to because you feel like it's "been too long" or that you'll struggle to concentrate on a book...

Please give reading (especially fiction) another chance. I had a stretch of about a decade where I finished maybe two or three books total. Partly, I didn't think I "needed to read" because of how much time I spend reading HN and other non-fiction sources, especially on the internet: or that I was "too busy".

I was running my startup, and had a copy of Infinite Jest on my bedside table for nearly 2 years -- telling myself that I would finish it. It's an amazing book (the part I've read anyway), but it was such an intricate piece of work that I managed to convince myself I basically had reading-ADHD and there was no point in me trying to read other books.

Last year, I started reading (fiction!) books that were just interesting to me or that other people were talking about, instead of picking up "aspirational" fiction or non-fiction and reading the first chapter.

I've been getting through a book every month or two since and am absolutely loving it. I read a lot of fiction as a child and teenager and I'd forgotten just how visceral good fiction can be. Reading properly again also helped convince me to write stories, too.

If this sounds like you, I challenge you (with kindness) to pick up a piece of approachable fiction and see how much more you get out of it than you expected to!

I second this.

For quite a long period in my 20s I would buy very worthy intellectual non-fiction books (based on reviews or recommendations) and then struggle to make headway with them. In retrospect, I think I was just usually too tired from work and life to have the mental energy to focus.

I then read an article by (IIRC) Irvine Welsh, the nub of which was ‘just read something’ - and reading fiction rather than non-fiction, and even trashy fiction rather than worthy fiction, was immeasurably better than not reading at all.

It was like I was given permission to not have to try and be intellectual and serious: (or pretentious?) and I’ve never looked back. Amongst many others, and to my surprise, I found I enjoy (what one might call) mid-level science-fiction and have happily worked through quite a lot now.

I read SO much military sci-fi, and it’s the best. I can tear through a book in a day because it’s just fun.

Marko Kloos, Joel Shepherd, Glynn Stewart. All write good sci-fi with cool ideas.

I don't read nearly as much as I should but I do listen to a lot of audiobooks. My wife scoffs at my collection, a lot of spy or military thrillers like Mitch Rapp and Jack Ryan (The Company is one of my favorites) but also Bobiverse and Expanse are great. Meanwhile she buys lots of books but reads none of them. Audiobooks aren't a perfect substitute for reading but they do stop me from doomscrolling or listening to stupid podcasts.

As for podcasts, Hardcore History and Blowback are my favorites that aren't political junk. I know people have their opinions on pop history media but it's interesting content and entertaining.

Cautionary Tales might fit your interests on the podcast side: https://timharford.com/articles/cautionarytales/

Basically telling a story from history and explaining what went wrong and why. Some of the stories are dramatised with professional actors and sound effects.

Like this episode about the woman who was instrumental in the creation of Monopoly, startting Helena Bonham Carter: https://timharford.com/2021/05/cautionary-tales-do-not-pass-...

Why would reading trashy fiction be better than not reading? Being alone with your mind is a healthier option in my opinion.

A couple of reasons I can think of.

- Reading helps hone your ability to focus your attention on one thing for sustained periods.

- Getting back into the habit of reading by reading "trashy" or otherwise easy books can serve as a stepping stone to reading more difficult or rewarding books. This worked for me when I fell out of the reading habit for a while and was bouncing off books that I wanted to read that were less immediately engaging.

I would also say that while I agree that being alone with your mind is quite healthy and something we would all ideally make time for, I don't think that it's the alternative most people are opting for over reading.

I think it's better iff it's used as training for reading better books. Definitely not worth doing if you insist on only reading that forever, though.

Care to share something to good you've read recently?

Not OP and not "good" in the literary sense but I've enjoyed reading Warhammer books since about last year. They're brainless and depressing dystopian, possibly YA level novels but at least it's self-aware and leans into it.

Flesh, by David Szalay.

It won the Booker Prize last year.

So - I find it difficult to read even fiction when things are stressful (which is perverse as I find it relaxing and refreshing). So, sometimes will go months without reading anything - then a spurt of 6-8 weeks and 30-40 books. Given the state of the world, the last couple of years have been rough. (And top that with a workload for the past year where there hasn't been a single month that I have worked less than 200-hrs (contract, so it ain't all that bad))

And it’s OK to read fun books, not everything has to be a classic or a guide to self improvement or some heavy tome dealing with deep issues.

I’ll add to this for cases where the problem is motivation for reading and spending time “non-productively.”

Many life and work problems have relevant fiction books that cover similar or loosely related situations. Reading these can create a perfect “mental sandbox” for problem solving, where your brain unconsciously plays around with a topic in a safe and fun way, all while you’re following a fictional narrative.

This is an alternative to more “rational” methods, like reading non-fiction, prompting an LLM for possible approaches, or problem-solving explicitly. Brains work in weird ways, and they often need lots of unstructured time, lateral thinking, and play. Reading fiction provides all three.

I can only second this message! I read a lot of non-fiction books when I was younger (during the whole improve-yourself trip of course) and most of them were so incredibly boring (always one concept explained with a 100 similar examples). Since then, I have started to read only fiction books and I learned more about society, relationships and life then with any non-fiction, while at the same time enjoying it more.

I’ll add: re-read books. When reading a book a second time (or third, or fourth) you’ll get new things out of it because you’ll spend less time and energy focused on the obvious things you’re already familiar with. And if it’s been some good number of years I think you’ll also find your memory of the book isn’t as good as you might have thought.

Whenever this topic comes up I always wonder if people mean reading as all long-form reading (including pop fiction) or if they mean “serious” reading. To me it’s actually quite strange but I feel like I have “lessened” as a reader over the past decades.

I used to be able to read some of the more classic novels a bit easier and now I just find them…a tad tedious? Is that the decline of reading that people are mentioning, or just… not reading at all?

I find it remarkably easy to read the popcorn fiction novels or anything very plot driven where characterization and world building is only in the service of the plot, but somehow this just feels like watching a movie but in book form. Is that also considered “reading”?

I wanted to get back into reading again and started just reading comics though it was through an app, it motivated me and after a while I started reading books instead both fiction and non-fiction.

As I age, reading has become a bit less enjoyable because I have to wear reading glasses (yes, I'm a baby). But I found that I really enjoy audio books- they give a different experience, it's very weird listening to books that I previously had read. One reason is that I read much faster than the audio book reading rate, and I find the slowness is a good thing- more time to experience and think I guess.

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.

On top of a fiction filter maybe you’d be willing to add DRM free ebook links (Project Gutenberg, Tor Books, Cory Doctorow, Ebooks.com has some) paid or unpaid, that would be really appreciated.

I would send you a tip for this. There are lots of them available so I think that coverage would be really helpful.

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.

Thanks! Why's (Poignant) Guide is in now: https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL22247013W (it wasn't in Open Library, so it needed a manual entry). The Invention of Morel: only ~3 people have mentioned it in all of HN, and yes, looks like we're missing some long-tail titles due to how the matcher works. Needs more thought to fix it while keeping the noise low.

I just read The Invention of Morel and can recommend it — unsettling, and smart. In general the approach of reading authors who were beloved by or respected by or inspirations for the authors we remember today (Borges in this instance) is quite fruitful.

We are talking less about books now. The number of book mentions in the site peaked in 2022 and has been decreasing steadily. Is this another effect of LLMs?

For all books, I summed their # of mentions across the years. The data show an increasing trend, peaking in 2022 and then decreasing since then:

2007: 1,062

2008: 3,248

2009: 5,206

2010: 8,942

2011: 8,330

2012: 8,200

2013: 9,808

2014: 10,436

2015: 12,618

2016: 14,173

2017: 15,231

2018: 18,001

2019: 17,928

2020: 19,613

2021: 19,996

2022: 22,797

2023: 20,178

2024: 16,103

2025: 13,738

2026*: 11,482

OK but what's the ratio of number of post to books mentioned?

Another theory is that around that time the people who value good writing got so annoyed at the AI spam that they left

The reading crisis is a global thing. It is likely linked more to the rise of social media than to the advent of the current AI era, and it doesn't look like it's changing anytime soon. We might be heading into an illiterate age.

The number of people who are reporting that they read every single day has only gone up in the past 30 year (~25% of people in Denmark read everyday).

It is a problem that 30% of those who do not read are reporting that it's because they can't focus on ready, but that number might have been the same through out the years.

"Illiterate is an adjective and noun that primarily describes a person who has little or no formal education and is unable to read or write." More like functionally illiterate - lack of critical thinking, common sense and factual knowledge, an inability to parse complex ideas, and poor writing skills.

It's getting pretty bad. I am at a point now where if I have to ask someone working in a store for help, I actively avoid anyone that looks to be under the age of 30. I can't take another Gen-Z stare.

why is it a crisis ? because "longer is better" ?

proverbs wouldn't have stood the test of time if they were books.

The functions of a proverb and a book are completely different, I have no idea what you're going for with that comparison.

How would they know?! They've never read a book!

I think the number per active yearly users would be even more interesting. Clearly there is a correlation with the traffic too. But I wouldn't be very surprised if the relative numbers were still in decline.

Nice catch! Is it possible that HN traffic is going down?

without normalizing for number of distinct HN users, as well as the possible incorporation of a new demographic to the site's readership that is less interested in books, but has always been present somewhere in the world, this trend doesn't actually say much. It says something about the website, news.ycombinator.com, but that isn't terribly relevant to anything.

The new demographic is probably vibe-coders, actually. These were people that were never much into reading. But because HN is generally AI adjacent, a person starting to vibe code or otherwise use AI tools will probably find HN in the sources and start using it because it shows up so frequently in forum listings.

So "WE" are probably still talking about books the same amount (pre LLMs-going-mainstream HN users), and the book trend is more of a latent eternal-September effect.

Once upon time, before this AI/LLM movement, there was a similar project made by hand using what was known back then as NLP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

I am afraid reading is fading out dramatically in recent years and I, myself, haven't read a book in more than a year now!

This wave might causes writers to stop writing altogether which would bring us to the chicken & egg dilemma.

Amazing work! I added one for repos on GitHub, gitlab etc mentioned on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50342272

This made me wonder what happened to hackernewsbooks.com? The last newsletter I got was "Hacker News Books – Week 28 Jul 05, 2026 – Jul 12, 2026".

I believe the original owner sold it and is working on https://bookdna.com/ now.

ya I sold it to a new guy to take over, as I am entirely focused on bookdna.com and launching our app here in about a month

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

Good catch :) link now redirects to the actual dragon book

Now I wanna know what the original link was?

It was this one https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dragon-book-magical-tales-f...

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

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.

HackerTube is 404 and 503ing, so it might not last a day.

HN hug of death at its best

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.

Unfortunately, copyright won’t be up for most of these books in our lifetimes.

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.

Spoke my mind

That's why to build things as a static site generator, and then the result of that effectively needs no further maintenance, and only costs whatever the domain costs.

Makes it much more viable to keep such experimental things online "forever".

Made games version of this, still more indexing to do.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50341635

Taking inspiration from this, created HackerProducts, products that are recommended by hackers here!

https://hackerproducts.pages.dev

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)?

Likewise, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is filed under Fiction.

Which is maybe accurate, but definitely not intended by the author.

I chuckled when on the front page, the first book is Das Kapital. And if you click on Biographies, lo and behold: Mein Kampf! (I half expected when clicking on Fiction to get the Bible >:) )

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!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50341635 we got HackerGames

Love it! :)

Thank you :) what are your fav books? curious to see if they're listed

I'm not sure if the 'recommended' - 'neutral' - 'critical' statistic is reliable here. Like if I told you that 68% of people are neutral about a book, does it mean it's good? Bad? Is it even worth reading?

It also doesn't seem to understand sarcasm

https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL1067314W

Sees this as recommendation (I think?) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917334

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?

I concur "Thinking, fast and slow" I tried to get through it multiple times and failed.

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

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.

If you click on a link or comment you can favorite it. They're public though, if that's a problem.

I tried to retrieve & process my favorites because I never actually do anything useful with them, and managed to get rate-limited. Someday I need to try again.

Funny to see "Clean Code" mentioned there, I feel like this is one of those that didn't age well now with code being mostly generated.

You could argue it is still relevant but I would say fuzz testing, formal proof systems, and compilers are going to be where stuff goes instead.

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?

Thanks, appreciate it! And thanks for the VibeVoted credit.

For the SaaSHub listing you can use [email protected].

Not doing any realtime or semi-realtime monitoring yet, the whole thing is compiled offline on my laptop. Might set up a periodic refresh if people find it useful -- but I suspect the listing will change as much. Maybe once a month is good enough.

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.

And https://standardebooks.org/

Here are some books that have helped me:

https://hypertexthero.com/books-for-thinking-and-learning/

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.

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?

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 wonder if plain JS will make a comeback with how good AIs are at writing code (at least for one off simple sites)

talk about speed! I have never seen anything with useful content load that fast. Very curious on what went into making it.

It does load faster than Hacker News itself here…

Ow it doesnt load anymore

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.

This is your sign to read some Carl Jung, it matches perfectly with what you are asking. I just checked and I'm like half the mentions of Aion. Just read until you get into the fish symbolism chapters.

You can download the .csv from the about page and filter / explore the data however you want using an agent or even just hand written Python.

This is actually BETTER than HackerTube, which doesn't expose something like this on the front-end AFAICT. Maybe the reason you didn't look for a .csv on HackerBooks is because you checked HackerTube first and developed a little bit of learned helplessness while I checked HackerBooks and its comments first before checking HackerTube

Oh, top tip. I didn't even try the about page.

To what end?

Mining.

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.

Pfft that is simply a special case of HackerRecommendationSiteGenerator.com

47,699 products, places and tools ranked from 13,576,547 opinions on Reddit and HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333280

I‘m waiting for HackerFlicks

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?

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.

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?

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.

It's a nice gesture I think. My question is why do we anchor naming to things we don't like: anti-capitalism, anti-ai, etc. That seems to inextricably link the new effort with the thing it was supposed to be an alternative to.

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!

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

"Top all-time" should be called "Most mentioned" and it should display the mentions stat followed by the recommends stat

"Most recommended" can stay as it is

and then a new "Top all-time" should be a weighted sum of recommendations plus mentions with recommendations getting a higher weight (obviously) … l33t c0d1ng sk1llz for deducting negative mentions (as in "awful book", "do not recommend" etc)!

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.

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.

It should have been recommended by 1939 HNers.

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?

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"

Tbh, I was expecting more from HN recommendations. Some are to be expected, like tech books that are kinda irrelevant in a post AI era.

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.

Much better now, thank you!

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

Inspired by your site, I built out https://wikihack.netlify.app/

Hackerbooks, but for wikipedia :)

I hope you enjoy it.

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.

Build it!

Claude can turn something like this around in less than a day.

Claude or not, building has never been a blocker for me tbh. Hosting on the other hand

That would be cool

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.

This is absolutely fantastic and a much more worthwhile resource than hackertube, which feels more like a graveyard of bygone thinking.

I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.

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

Well kinda this: https://www.trustmebro.reviews/r/hackernews

It seems like it didn't pick up media recommendations all that well, huh.

I would love deeper access to the data set. I've been on a quest to understand why Godel Escher Bach, a book that I think is great, is apparently bad and is something I'm supposed to grow out of as a teenager. But that opinion, when glimpsed, like bigfoot is gone before you are able to figure out what you're seeing. It says 8% negative. It shows top 30 comments which is nice but seems to only be a snapshot of the praise.

Who says you’re supposed to grow out of GEB? Also only teenagers are reading it?? Idk about that

Right! I personally think that characterization is crazy, but it's out there. This twitter thread started me down the rabbit hole, and, maddeningly, it's very coy and vague.

https://x.com/davidbessis/status/1993238641729036639

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'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…

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.

This is the stock claude UI

Claude is epic

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.

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

https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

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.

added, every book page now has bookshop.org and amazon links (affiliate, disclosed). bookshop supports indie stores if you have a preference. fixing bunch of issues, feature requests in parallel too. thanks!

Would you be interested in trying an Amazon link localizer[1]?

I built something[1] recently and would love to see hear your feedback.

Happy to give you some credits for free!

[1] https://slashlink.app

Permutation City, Greg Egan

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.

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.

  # order selected volumes
  # bulk order all books on this site

(you could use Amazon affiliate links to help finance the site.)

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?

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

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

I see some books where the same person recommended it many times. I think you should account for that.

"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...

I've mentioned it a couple times.

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.

I have made extensive use of this while building my library book recommender doodad https://leafle.org

The LLMs are very good at reverse engineering undocumented apis!

Why not open source the repo ? People find something interesting and will built on top of it.

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

K someone make this into a spotify playlist please thx!

That's great, I just built one focused on mentions.

would it be possible to crosslink each book to its amazon reviews so that one can see how it was rated there? nice thing-- useful.

I bought and read Permutation City because it was mentioned here.

Wonderful. I love the little side bonus of stumbling across alternate versions of book covers I haven't seen before.

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

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.

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.

It's hosted on cloudflare. The CDN there can handle millions of hits per day without breaking a sweat.

Can you also put books on hardware, electronics, and consumer products (hardware) in the library too please?

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

I'll add my favorite. The Anvil of the World. rip Kage Baker.

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.

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!

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

Super useful. Thanks

Thank you so much. It's incredibly useful for many people

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 :)

"Never send a human to do a machine's job"

Don't forget the most prescient one!

- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

close enough to https://letterboxd.com/official/list/letterboxds-top-500-fil...

Here you go https://hackerfilms.pages.dev

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

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

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

Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!

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

This is a nice application. Thanks for sharing.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

Are you tracking # of clicks you are getting?

Excellent work!

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?

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 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 audio book version is a powerful sleep aid.

We are now at the point where a new SaaS can be conceived, implemented and launched on HN before the announcement of the SaaS that inspired it has left the front page. I can feel the acceleration squishing my face.

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

Not enough time to read these!

This is really useful! Thanks for sharing!

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.

Good for me. Thank you!!!

having 16.5k recommendations is the same as having 0 recommendations

Was it pretty fun building with AI?

Of course it was AI, everything now is built with AI, what is the point of this?

Awesome

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 heard that ENOF by Sol Yin is a good recommendation. Something about a possible AI future..

i hate ENOF by Sol Yin, it is a dystopian book about a possible AI future, anytime i hear people talk about ENOF by Sol Yin it is always in context of how ENOF by Sol Yin wants to end the world.

Hacker Music tomorrow?

Next is HackerXXX

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

Made a version for Reddit:

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

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.

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.

I wonder if you've built it faster than I wrote that post.

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.

Now there’s a lot of shit to ignore! Thanks for the filter! Building an inverse app now with Claude!

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.

Thank you!

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.

Interesting discussion, thanks for posting.

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. ;)

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

I'd love to see a books and youtube thing for metafilter too. It has a similarly good recommendation history for me.

Atlas Shrugged in the top of all time? So so.

good move

i like this idea

Ayn Rand so high, though!

Let us hope it was mentions about how idiotic of a book it is...

Shoreing up the meme that there is; "no such thing as bad publicity"

> 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?

+1. very important imo

Ah, a fellow "Bookliophile", i see ;-)

You might find some interesting books/papers if you search my comments, many of which i have not seen others mention.

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

Slop

Goddamn, what's your problem?

> 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 <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Dave Olson) writes:

|> In <[email protected]> [email protected] (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

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

Sweet.

Why data is not enough. That is a pretty good argument for HN-style moderation. Shadow banning rants would be nice.

My Strugle by Karl Ove Knausgård is called Min kamp in the original. It is perhaps not worth top 3 but is is good in its original language. Perhaps just replace it.. :-)

It’s commonly used as a counterargument when people argue for free speech.

[flagged]

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 [email protected] 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.

I did read it and it still stole my time (how apt). Just read wiki.

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.

You have a known pedophile ( hawking ) listed on your site.

Don't complain about downvotes because that just gets you downvoted even harder.

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.

Inspired by your virality, I built out https://shortstack.tools

Independent free directory for short form creators. apps and tools are hands on tested by me.

I hope you enjoy it.

I recommend Lovestar by Andri Magnason

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161381

But apparently I’m the only one, so it didn’t make it in.

But I still recommend it and think HN as an audience would find it more relevant than most people as a fictional near-future technology gone wrong story with ubiquitous advertising, remote work, rocketry, startup innovation, a revered CEO, a justification machine which may as well be an LLM nowadays.

Had a similar idea and built https://booksthathelped.com/ based on comments where someone says a book helped them (through burnout, a lost job, anxiety, or with sleep, creativity, writing etc.). Still work in progress