[HN Gopher] Extracting Hacker News book recommendations with the...
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Extracting Hacker News book recommendations with the ChatGPT API
Author : kristianp
Score : 369 points
Date : 2023-10-04 05:48 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.reyem.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.reyem.dev)
| usgroup wrote:
| The "Meditations" referred to in the list seems to be the work by
| Marcus Aurelius in the raw data (available at the bottom of the
| page): not Descartes -- presumably -- "Meditations on First
| Philosophy".
|
| It was just a spot check -- not exhaustive. Also many who refer
| to Descartes in the raw data, do so regarding other works.
|
| I think this is an interesting mistake.
| a_c wrote:
| Tangentially related, I always want a service to show all books
| mentioned in a book, like a web of html, but made out of books. I
| often find my next book that way. I wonder if there is such
| service out there? Would love to see the network and the
| visualisation of connected books
| theusus wrote:
| Why do you need ChatGPT some Algolia and Data analysis would
| suffice. What novel and hard work have you done for this?
| netsharc wrote:
| it'd be incredible if they analyzed what sorts of users (based
| on their comments) recommend each book, I guess with
| percentages (e.g. "80% who recommend Ayn Rand are right-
| leaning")
| lysecret wrote:
| This is a super cool idea.
| Havoc wrote:
| Suspect that would require a hell of a lot of queries
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Seems pretty lousy to take other people's recommendations and
| slap your referral link on them. This is honestly bordering on
| spam content.
| creativenolo wrote:
| If I knew it was an Amazon link before clicking it, I would be
| 100% ok with it.
|
| But as it is, I agree.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Funny, my first thought was: wow, what an easy way to make
| money -- I wish I'd done this.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| How much money do 50 odd affiliate links to sub 5 dollar
| books even make? I doubt OP is making some enviable amount of
| money.
| Kiro wrote:
| Out of all things you can "steal" I can't think of anything
| with less intrinsic value than the mentioning of a book title.
| Pretty sure no-one who posts a recommendation on a public forum
| has any expectations of ownership or attribution, unless they
| are quoted word-by-word but this is just aggregating the
| titles.
| bwb wrote:
| The author did a lot of work and analysis to build this. This
| is not easy to do and I've found that people doing anything
| with books are doing it for passion, not money.
|
| Background: I run hackernewsbooks.com, and the only thing
| affiliate revenue covers is the hosting and mailing list costs
| (~$50 a month). It is a fun project I bought from the original
| owner to learn (and because I loved the idea). I want to add
| more visuals and unique navigation to it. I also run
| Shepherd.com, which is a much larger book website and we are
| not covering our costs yet, it is a struggle.
|
| There is a tendency on H.N. to think everything is a scam; I'd
| love to see that moderated a bit so that people realize it's
| people like them building cool stuff that excites them.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's still sleazy hijacking other people's recommendations to
| monetize them.
| sockaddr wrote:
| From my perspective he's putting in the work to collect all
| of these into one spot that is easy and fun for me to
| peruse (also without banner ads and other garbage on the
| site).
|
| That seems sufficiently transformative to make his referral
| links okay.
| ryanklee wrote:
| I find the idea that everyone gets to hoard and constrain
| the value of their own output sleazy.
| 55555 wrote:
| Your comments here and elsewhere are indirectly being
| monetized too.
|
| I think most people who recommend a book do it to help the
| world and spread knowledge and would be glad to have their
| recommendation reshared.
| bwb wrote:
| And to add, it also is a HUGE help to authors. There is a
| huge problem in the book industry with"winner takes all"
| within Amazon and other big book websites. It means we as
| readers are getting less and less exposed to books that
| we would like but fail to get noticed. The more
| recommendations and distribution of unique
| recommendations the better.
| bwb wrote:
| I find it hilarious that you would say this when you used
| to work for Google :)
|
| All Google does is hijack other people's hard-written
| content and slap ads around it.
|
| I am half-kidding, as I love Google, but I think your
| comment lacks some self-awareness about the reality of
| curation and what it offers to people. And how the world is
| funded. I mean how much of your house is paid for from ad
| revenue while you worked at Google?
| distantsounds wrote:
| the "author" fed a bunch of text into a prompt generator and
| spit out a list with referral links
|
| web 3.0 looking good
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps they are trying to offset the carbon emissions from
| their GPU use.
| chrischen wrote:
| If you don't want to support them then don't click on the link
| or extract the raw link from the source? The person who made
| this is under no obligation to make it easy for you to use his
| thing for free.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| But I'm also supporting them by participating on Hacker News.
| tibanne wrote:
| Meditations isn't by Descartes is it?
| febeling wrote:
| There is one by Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy),
| but the link goes to the Marc Aurel book, so it's a mess either
| way.
| geonic wrote:
| The authors for Dune (Frank Herbert) and Meditations (Marcus
| Aurelius) are not correct
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Some HN cliches there! Are we this predictable?
| criddell wrote:
| LLM's depend on it!
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Moving away on the method, and sticking to the list (however
| imperfectly drafted).
|
| Would it be better to read in the order #50 --#> 1 or #1 --> #50?
| samirillian wrote:
| Fun fact, the guy the FBI claims was behind the Anthrax attacks
| was apparently a fan of Hofstadter:
|
| > A week later, just after 1:00 a.m. on the morning of November
| 8, the FBI stated that Ivins was observed throwing away "a copy
| of a book entitled Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,
| published by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979" and "a 1992 issue of
| American Scientist Journal which contained an article entitled
| 'The Linguistics of DNA,' and discussed, among other things,
| codons and hidden messages".
| ramshorst wrote:
| Would be interesting if ChatGPT could get ePubs for these ;)
| bwb wrote:
| So you can illegally steal from authors? What is wrong with
| you?
| ninepoints wrote:
| Atlas Shrugged at #8? Give me a break
| davidjfelix wrote:
| I thought this was pretty odd too but it does tend to find its
| way onto aggregated HN book lists (linked throughout the
| comments) a lot. My theory is that the short name combined with
| it's rather divisive content leads to people arguing about it
| by name which boosts these "per mention" metrics.
|
| For example: take a look at some of the comments here
| https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...
| while there are _some_ recommendations (I expect this) there
| are also quite a lot of people using the book as a way to
| deride purveyors of its ideology.
|
| I think what we're both experiencing here is an expectation
| that this list will be GOOD recommendations, but the
| methodology is popular mentions, which happen to contain some
| people's (subjective) GOOD recommendations but also peoples
| (subjective) BAD popular mentions.
| kristianp wrote:
| > while there are some recommendations (I expect this) there
| are also quite a lot of people using the book as a way to
| deride purveyors of its ideology.
|
| That's a good idea. It wouldn't be too hard to get chatgpt to
| also return the sentiment of the book mentions. Negative
| sentiment comments could be ignored for the purposes of a top
| 50 list.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I have not had good experiences or high expectations for HN
| book recommendations at all. For nonfiction there are about 20
| that come up reliably and a lot of them are quite great but
| it's still very r/books-ish and predictable. For fiction you
| are getting recommended dune and brandon sanderson, east of
| eden, maybe some philip k dick and that is that.
| zvmaz wrote:
| When I saw Ayn Rand in the list, it immediately lowered its
| credibility for me.
| negus wrote:
| Why so? Can you provide a more detailed description on why do
| you think her novels are unworthy?
| antupis wrote:
| As old joke goes "There are two novels that can change a
| bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and
| Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often
| engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable
| heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially
| crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The
| other, of course, involves orcs." but generally you should
| read it, at least then you know what those libertarian
| types are thinking.
| negus wrote:
| Do you really think this kind of jokes is a good
| explanation? One can easily replace "Atlas Shrugged" with
| almost any book in it.
|
| Your reply states that for you even the word
| "libertarian" is offensive.
| zvmaz wrote:
| If you have a penchant for Ayn Rand and her general
| outlook, I do not think your stance on her can change
| through rational discussion. There are "primal world
| beliefs" [1] that are irremediably incompatible.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_world_beliefs
| nickpp wrote:
| As someone who lived the horrors of communism through my
| teen years and thus read Ayn Rand in my middle age, I
| find her books logical, rational and real-world
| validated. Attributes utterly lacking from her
| detractors, strangely enough.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I'm not a libertarian, but hold a lot of libertarian
| values, "Atlas Shrugged" is a joke. I was expecting to
| read meaningful libertarian story, but got edgy dream of
| someone without any power in real life. Sort of
| "literally me" meme, but in a book format.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, first off, they're not very good. But also, in a way,
| that's not the point; no-one is reading them because
| they're good. They're the Objectivist equivalent of things
| like Battlefield Earth, overwhelmingly read because they
| were written by a cult founder rather than for the usual
| reasons one might read a novel.
| zvmaz wrote:
| I have not read her novels, but I stumbled upon her
| writings many times before. You'll perhaps find Massimo
| Pigliucci's critique [1] of her whole philosophy worth your
| time.
|
| [1] http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/10/about-
| objecti...
| lizardking wrote:
| It's an assigned opinion most of the time in my experience.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| See this recent Ask Reddit "What book is an immediate red
| flag for you when someone says it's their favorite?" and
| look at the replies around Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, The
| Fountainhead, e.g. this sub-tree:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/16yaui6/what_bo
| o...
| tangue wrote:
| I'm surprised that Knuth's book isn't in the top 5 and I'm very
| surprised to see Descarte's meditation as even in France no one
| longer reads this ( must be related to the various posts about
| meditation on HN imho ) and Franck ( not Brian ) Herbert wrote
| Dune. I don't trust this post and indeed I don't trust anything
| published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.
| [deleted]
| NhanH wrote:
| The author name is wrong for Meditations (though it links to
| the correct book)
|
| It's Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius).
| kristianp wrote:
| Author here. There are at least 2 books referred to as
| Meditations, so probably that item on the list should be
| split into Decartes [1] and Aurelius.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philos
| oph...
| prepend wrote:
| I think the accreditation to Descartes may be incorrect. The
| link goes to Marcus Aurelius.
| mberning wrote:
| Descartes wrote a book with a similar title, but I agree with
| you, I think Marcus is way more talked about on HN.
| xhevahir wrote:
| What? Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the
| most important books in the history of Western thought. Saying
| that "even in France no one longer reads this" is like saying
| that The Origin of Species is irrelevant because one never sees
| passengers reading it on the London Tube.
| chadash wrote:
| No one reads Origin of Species either. I'll bet that there's
| a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin's book
| versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important
| (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and
| Newton's Principia are a few more that come to mind.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Darwin is far more readable than any of the others you
| mention.
|
| Possibly Mein Kampf could compete in short passages by a
| "reading difficulty" score, but it's really tedious and
| much longer (by a factor of 5!). Darwin could actually
| write. _Origin of Species_ was intended for the educated
| public as well as for scientists.
| spicymapotofu wrote:
| People who want a deeper understanding of the related
| fields do read these. Furthermore, to reiterate the GP's
| reaction to GGP's sentiment about few reading them, their
| readership or lack thereof is not a variable in the
| question of their value. We can speak to many technical
| guides that would increase people's productivity if they
| only read them.
|
| Popularity is more a question of marketability, especially
| in the dire non-fiction category. Reading is a secondary
| use for most of these books, and it makes it even harder to
| discern which lifestyle books are resume-padding filler or
| truly generalizable advice.
| chx wrote:
| The ratio is much, much larger. Darwin's book is not an
| easy read but luckily you don't need to read Darwin's book,
| Almost like a Whale by Steve Jones is an excellent rewrite
| of it. Chapter by chapter, the same arguments are presented
| but where Darwin could only guess, Jones could rely on
| genetics and other advances in sciences.
|
| Newton's Principia is totally and absolutely impossible to
| understand to the average curious person raised on Cauchy
| and Weierstrass. There was a course at university aimed at
| people with advanced math knowledge to prepare you to read
| it.
| kortilla wrote:
| Important != popular nor currently relevant.
| guilbep wrote:
| Btw, it's wrong, it's a link to Marcus Aurelius
| "Meditations". not Descartes methaphysical ones.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Marcus Aurelius "Meditations" is a very popular
| recommendation these days, I keep seeing it around
| Scarblac wrote:
| It's extremely fragmented and repetitive, something we
| can't blame the author for as he never intended it as a
| book to be published.
|
| It could do with being recommended less, imo. There are
| probably good summaries of it around.
| mrkstu wrote:
| It's repetitive, but also not particularly long. Also
| easier to skim those parts. It is more of an issue when
| you're trying to consume the audio version...
| paperwasp42 wrote:
| For me, the repetition is a feature, not a bug. It's
| similar to Buddhist meditation practices, which also
| involve a lot of repetition. It really helps my brain to
| fully absorb the message and walk away feeling more calm
| and in control. But as with any philosophical text, your
| mileage may vary.
| [deleted]
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Knuth's work is the computer science version of "industry-
| specific canon that few people have actually read", much like
| The Powerbroker in urban planning.
|
| I own several of his books (admittedly they were gifts), and
| have never read them. So them not showing up in the top five
| doesn't surprise me much.
| [deleted]
| hcks wrote:
| It's massively overrated too. It's a detailed handbook on the
| engineering problems of it's time (sorting, parsing, ...)
| which have all been 'solved' since.
| laurent_du wrote:
| I don't think Knuth's work is canon in our specific industry,
| be it web dev, system dev, or whatever it is people around
| here are doing. Knuth belongs to Academia, not industry.
| smithza wrote:
| I am sorry that you feel this way. Software Engineering and
| Computer Science are thoroughly academic topics that every
| practicing IC and manager can greatly benefit from reading
| and digesting. Bill Gates put as an endorsement of TAOCP
| that he would hire (in industry) anyone who mastered the
| topics therein. Did you not go to university? Even if you
| didn't, where was the source of your education? Knuth wrote
| books that could belong to undergraduate level programming
| courses.
| hcks wrote:
| I mean Microsoft hires any college grad that can solve
| medium leetcodes, its not like it's a huge endorsement.
| aragonite wrote:
| For many people it's more of a reference book, not to be read
| cover to cover. Reminds me of this bit from a corecurisve
| interview with Richard Hipp:
|
| https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
|
| Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these
| things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They'd come
| to us and say, "Hey, why aren't you doing this optimization,"
| and I said "Never occurred to me." "Well, can you do it?"
| "Let's see what we can do," and then it would go in, so,
| yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to
| invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B
| tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree,
| on the bookshelf behind me, I've got Don Knuth's The Art of
| Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped
| to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he
| described the algorithm. That's what I did.
|
| Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for
| searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does
| not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That's
| an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my
| own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks,
| Don. I really appreciate it.
|
| Adam: That's awesome. Did you pull anything else from that
| book?
|
| Richard: Well, it's an amazing volume. I can't give you a
| specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read
| or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art
| of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are
| there, maybe not Don's exact implementation. I mean, I never
| took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language,
| but it's useful to flip through and look at all the
| algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two
| ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was,
| "Let's see what Don recommends." You pull it off. You see
| what he does.
| inductive_magic wrote:
| > I don't trust this post
|
| The post appended the raw data provided by GPT, allowing you to
| verify the integrity of the data. This makes the post
| trustworthy from a methodological pov.
|
| > I don't trust anything published on the Internet after Llms
| went mainstream.
|
| You _always_ had to verify the integrity of the data and
| methods used in _any_ publication, regardless of the medium.
| The responsibility of both authors and readers hasn 't changed.
| If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have,
| and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you
| should.
| otteromkram wrote:
| I don't trust this comment.
| kortilla wrote:
| > This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.
|
| A post is not trustworthy if it's reposting trash, even if it
| shows the source.
|
| > you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't
| have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs,
| you should.
|
| The nature of how LLMs hallucinate is different from how
| garbage used to appear on the internet. Before LLMs there was
| a relatively good inverse correlation between quality and
| blatant bullshit. Not enough to pass the verification rigor
| required for an academic publication by any means, but enough
| that you didn't have to second guess every single statement
| on every web page listing something as simple as book
| authors.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > The nature of how LLMs hallucinate
|
| oh here we go. You're one of those people conveniently
| restricting this accusation to a machine that scores a 130
| IQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11t5bhh/i
| _just...), instead of also including humans, who notably
| will send someone to prison 1000% sure that they witnessed
| _that person_ doing the thing, when in fact, later DNA
| evidence exonerates them (https://innocenceproject.org/dna-
| exonerations-in-the-united-...). Fucking LOL. Get out of
| here, doomer, the rest of us have AI-enhanced work to do.
| holden_nelson wrote:
| I miss when this forum wasn't so vitriolic.
|
| Of course humans also hallucinate, but we didn't have to
| take that into account every single time we read a piece
| of information on the internet. Humans have well-
| documented cognitive biases. Also, usually, a human's
| attempt to deceive has some motivation. With LLMs, the
| most basic of information they provide could be totally
| false.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I don't dispute this. What I chafe at is the _default-
| dismissive_ attitude about _any_ utility of these. "It
| emits inaccuracies, therefore useless" would invalidate
| literally every human.
|
| That said, overall utility of anything plummets
| drastically as reliability goes below 100%. If a
| particular texting app or service only successfully sent
| 90% of your messages, or a person you depended on only
| answered 90% of your calls, you'd probably stop relying
| on those things.
|
| (I wish I could edit out my vitriol.)
| BlackCherry wrote:
| You can have a high IQ while having wrong axioms or bad
| facts.
|
| Those humans who recalled incorrectly could have a 130
| IQ, proving my point above and making your ad hominem
| reddit speak luddite insult fall flat.
| pmarreck wrote:
| My argument was that this criticism was only being
| applied to LLM's and not to other humans.
|
| It is invalid if you take what an LLM says as simply what
| another human (who happens to have a broad knowledge
| reach) would say.
| [deleted]
| criley2 wrote:
| Here's my radical take: humans hallucinate as much or more
| than the top LLMs. Heck, depending on the human, nearly
| everything they think and say is functionally a
| hallucination according to the metrics in use here.
|
| When it comes to what LLM's write, I find that LLM
| hallucinations are like self-driving car crashes. We are
| hyper-aware of the machine doing something that we
| ourselves do every single day and consider a normal defect
| of biological conscious.
| Scarblac wrote:
| > Here's my radical take: humans hallucinate as much or
| more than the top LLMs.
|
| I can't believe that. LLMs _always_ talk in the same
| confident tone, entirely regardless of what they 're
| saying is true or not. What is true in the real world
| literally doesn't come into the equation.
|
| Whereas at least some of the time, humans will say that
| they're not sure and might be wrong, or otherwise sound
| less confident. And that's related to how true the thing
| they're saying is.
| Kerb_ wrote:
| You sound pretty damn confident for being so wrong. Are
| you a language model or human? And how sure are you of
| your answer? ;)
| pmarreck wrote:
| > humans will say that they're not sure and might be
| wrong
|
| Is that so? https://innocenceproject.org/dna-
| exonerations-in-the-united-... These people were
| convicted by people who were 100% convinced their memory
| was correct. The DNA evidence, which is "harder"
| evidence, said otherwise, and in these cases, was
| exonerating. (There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of
| other cases like this by the way, where the imprisoned
| innocent is NOT yet exonerated, all based on
| overconfident eyewitness testimony that yet managed to
| convince a judge/jury.)
|
| There is also the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, the
| cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge
| or expertise in a particular area tend to overestimate
| their competence and confidently assert their opinions.
| We've literally seen this countless times just since the
| 2016 US election, just watch literally any Jordan Klepper
| interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoZ2Lt_aCo8
| (honestly, this is a little too political for me to use
| as an example, but I ran out of time seeking out unbiased
| examples... Mandela Effect? Misplaced keys being common?)
|
| I'm afraid you're a little off, here, on your faith in
| humans not hallucinating memories and knowledge.
| firewolf34 wrote:
| Ironically, if you agree with pmarreck above, scarblac's
| comment can be seen as an example of a human
| hallucinating with confidence, precisely what they were
| arguing is less likely to occur in the organic side of
| the internet.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Yeah I was defin... perhaps guilty of sounding ver..
| somewhat confident myself.
|
| Luckily I only said humans add some doubt to what they
| say _some_ of the time :-)
| pmarreck wrote:
| I think this is overall a good criticism of the current
| generation of LLM's- They can't seem to tell you how sure
| (or not) they are about something. A friend mentioned to
| me that when it gave ChatGPT a photo of a Lego set with
| an Indiana Jones theme earlier today and asked it to
| identify the movie reference, it meandered on for 2
| paragraphs arguing different possibilities when it could
| have just said "I'm not sure."
|
| I think this is a valid area of improvement, and I think
| we'll get there.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| That "if" is doing a good bit of lifting though. Nobody
| is talking about the hallucination _rate_.
|
| How many times have innocent people been wrongly
| convicted? The innocence project found 375 instances in a
| 31 year period.
|
| How often do LLMs give false info? Hope it never gets
| used to write software for avionics, criminology,
| agriculture, or any other setting that could impact huge
| amounts of people...
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| They never did human always do it, rather that they do
| "some of the time". Whereas I've yet to see an LLM do
| that.
|
| Also experts tend to be much more accurate at evaluating
| how knowledgable they are (this is also part of the D-K
| effect). So Id much prefer to have a 130 IQ expert answer
| my question than an LLM
| pmarreck wrote:
| Fair enough, but given that access to a 130IQ expert on
| the subject matter at hand may be either expensive or
| impossible to obtain in the moment, and ChatGPT is always
| available 24/7 at very nominal cost, what do you think is
| the better option overall?
| Hedepig wrote:
| > LLMs always talk in the same confident tone,...
|
| They do, but they are better at verifying what they've
| already said. So a simple prompt asking them to verify
| the facts they've presented often improves the accuracy.
| There are also other techniques like chain of thought and
| tree of thought that further improves accuracy.
|
| > at least some of the time
|
| YMMV
| danparsonson wrote:
| One could argue that whereas once it was necessary to verify
| the source, now it is necessary to verify not just the source
| but also the LLM derivation of it, (which may be subtly
| mangled) - and the source may no longer be readily apparent.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Or just disregard any machine-generated stuff entirely,
| though of course it may not always be labeled as such.
| xarope wrote:
| I think this is a good thing. In the past you would remind
| people, hey, after you find your wiki article, "please" go
| verify. But wiki was "good" enough most of the time, that
| people found verification to be often time redundant.
|
| But now with LLMs everywhere, people will realize it is
| necessary to verify.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Except that isn't what will happen and is part of the
| reason we tried to have majority trustworthy sources.
| phanimahesh wrote:
| I hope I can be this optimistic.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| You're optimistic!
| krapp wrote:
| How do you verify when every source you could possibly
| refer to has also been poisoned by AI?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't
| have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs,
| you should.
|
| Blaming LLMs for everything is becoming the preferred excuse
| for people who like to reject what they read and substitute
| their own beliefs instead.
|
| It's true that LLMs hallucinate and are definitely not
| correct all the time, but the way people are using that as an
| opening to reject everything on the internet and elevate
| their own prior beliefs to the top is strange.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Most people don't know humans hallucinate daily. Right now
| your brain is removing visual information by clipping out
| the image of your nose and replacing it with what the scene
| behind it theoretically looks like.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| IMO ChatGPT 5 will just think the answer to all problems
| is going to be "humans hallucinate too?!?!".
|
| Maybe it will be right, but the best part? We'll continue
| to be reminded of this fact.
|
| Thanks for reminding us all.
| westpfelia wrote:
| Honestly the fact that Ayn Rand is so high makes me question HN
| entirely.
| bwb wrote:
| I love Ayn Rand, but not for the weird cult thing it grew
| into.
|
| To me, it is the story of someone trying to create cool stuff
| and the world making that hard (felt like a celebration of
| human creativity). She is brutalistic in her messaging but it
| is an interesting story. I weirdly like her writing style,
| its like someone pounding a hammer against my skull. Haven't
| read her books in 10+ years but in my teens and twenties, I
| found them thought provoking and inspiring.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| Same, and I'm very progressive and completely disagree with
| her Objectivist philosophy, because she's obviously not a
| philosopher. She's a great writer though, her work can
| motivate people, and has for sometime made me reflect and
| move forward with my life.
|
| But I believe it might be toxic for the HN crew.
|
| Let's be frank, people don't read much on average, so they
| take whatever book or author you read as your own
| personality, when in reality people should read many books
| with different ideas, so you can form your own.
|
| One can learn a lot from reading from Friedman to Marx.
|
| This is why I also think that one should read all the
| classics instead of chasing book recommendations, any
| community you ask will give them recommendation for non-
| technical subjects that are from their own worldview, which
| in turn, will make you not smarter, but likely more stupid
| than you initially started before you've read those books.
| bwb wrote:
| Well said.
|
| She had a really unique view of the world, I appreciated
| it, and it definitely helped me develop my own view of
| the world. I am about to read the Upanishads along a
| similar line of thought.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think this is the first time I've heard anyone talk
| about Rand in a way that matches my own experience. Her
| writing definitely affected how I saw the world and I
| think that makes it good. But at the same time it's like
| nerd sniping for philosophy, I had such a visceral
| reaction to how well she presents an absolutely insane
| way of thinking that you can't just dismiss her out of
| hand. It forces you to genuinely learn to be able to
| command the vocabulary and ideas to really explain where
| the cracks are.
| __rito__ wrote:
| I think this [0] is a better, and more (statistically)
| representative list.
|
| [0]: https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news
| reducesuffering wrote:
| This list can't be more accurate with "Three Felonies A
| day" at #4, "Elements of Computing Systems" at #6, and
| "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" at #8. TFA list
| seems way more representative.
| __rito__ wrote:
| I didn't say perfect or accurate. I said "more
| statistically representative". As compared to the OP. And
| I stand by that.
| yawpitch wrote:
| If a list includes Ayn Rand and the title for the list
| doesn't start with "[N] Worst
| [Writers|Artists|Philsophers|Thinkers|Economists|Women] of"
| then it's a bad list.
| spicymapotofu wrote:
| This narrow perspective doesn't sit well with me. I read
| Shrugged while growing up poor, and I think a thoughtful
| take would be that she wrote, in her own way, something
| which could be in the running as the "Great American Novel"
| alongside Gatsby or Huckleberry Finn. It captures a
| zeitgeist, even if I don't personally want this world at
| large, and I think we lose an important part of literature
| discussions to allow a discourse as simple as "Rand bad".
| zvmaz wrote:
| > I think we lose an important part of literature
| discussions to allow a discourse as simple as "Rand bad".
|
| Sometimes, it _is_ that simple: "Rand bad".
| lizardking wrote:
| At some point a chunk of the Reddit hive mind detached
| and affixed itself to HN.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| I can assure you that Descartes Mediations is required reading
| for any philosophy student at some point, also in France.
| Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, is pretty
| much of no relevance if you study philosophy. It's very popular
| in the life style and esoterics section at book stores though.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Note: The author of Calculus is wrong in the table.
| thread_id wrote:
| Chat GPT missed a few (and probably more):
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=A+non-standard+book+list+for+softw...
| ... and more in the comments...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30651273
|
| The website looks like a clever way to generate a lot of clicks
| to Amazon using his affiliate link.
| jassyr wrote:
| Are people still making money on Amazon affiliate programs? I
| thought that ship sailed like 10 years ago.
| klysm wrote:
| I wonder how this would compare to the results of just asking
| ChatGPT what books are frequently recommended on HN
| ultrasaurus wrote:
| Pretty good overlap: What are the ten most recommended books on
| Hacker News?
|
| 1. "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
| 2. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
| 3. "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by
| Robert C. Martin 4. "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald
| A. Norman 5. "How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale
| Carnegie 6. "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen
| 7. "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R.
| Hofstadter 8. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman 9.
| "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" by
| Cal Newport 10. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard
| P. Feynman
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I looked at _Godel Escher Bach_ and the 'first mention' link was
| to a comment seconding someone else's recommendation (albeit in
| what was likely the first HN thread to mention it), so I think
| the author's prompts need some refinement.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I knew _Never Split The Difference_ would show up. Do note that
| when it is mentioned at HN, you will likely also get some
| comments criticizing it.
| antman wrote:
| 7 Meditations, Descartes. That is a pretty good hallucination
| __rito__ wrote:
| I found Hacker Recommended Books [0a] on HN [0b], and began
| reading through the books on it, tried many books, read around 20
| of them. The experience has been great, and learned many new
| things. Some books have expanded my mind.
|
| If you are into books, I highly recommend searching HN with the
| simple keyword "books", and filter using "Ask HN" tags [1], or
| simply by "books". This is how I choose almost all of my English
| books now (I am trilingual and can read more languages)- even
| non-technical books. I have been doing this for more than two
| years, and I really like HN for books recommendations.
|
| Many years' worth of high quality reads can be found on HN
| threads related to books. They are goldmines.
|
| EDIT: There is also Hacker News Books [2]. Check out their Top
| Books of All Time section [3].
|
| [0a]: https://hacker-recommended-
| books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...
|
| [0b]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
|
| [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Ask+HN+books
|
| [2]:https://hackernewsbooks.com
|
| [3]: https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news
| [deleted]
| davely wrote:
| Thanks for these!
|
| I thought "Hacker Recommended Books" sounded immensely useful,
| so I decided to save the bookmark to my pinboard account.
|
| "Previously saved 2 years ago."
|
| Oops.
|
| (Not a critique of the site! More of myself and forgetting
| services like these exist despite my best intentions.)
| __rito__ wrote:
| Yeah, I too wish that the dev updated it once a year or once
| every six months.
| [deleted]
| FrankyHollywood wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967 ("Show HN: 40k HN
| comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning") is
| great, I still regularly use it!
| __rito__ wrote:
| I wish that model was updated in some time interval. It is
| frozen in time. :/
|
| I understand and know the pain of maintaining a fully online
| model, and that is asking too much from an individual. But,
| say, a manual update every six months or even a year would be
| okay.
| whycombagator wrote:
| I decided today I will start reading a book recommended by HN.
|
| So I went to your link at [0a], selected last 6 months. There
| are 58 pages of recommendations and 15 recommendations per
| page. So I rolled a 15 sided dice to choose the page. Then
| another roll to choose which book on that page.
|
| I will be reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar
| eks391 wrote:
| > I rolled a 15 sided dice
|
| 15 sided die? Why didn't you also roll a 58 sided die then?
|
| > I will be reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar
|
| Great luck! I loved that book as a child. It may have been
| what led me to HN...
| whycombagator wrote:
| Okay with the 58 sided dice I have added The Gruffalo to my
| reading list
| keiferski wrote:
| I actually find HN book recommendations useful for the opposite
| reason: the un-upvoted comments at the bottom that have book
| suggestions I've never heard of before. That is valuable, while
| this list of popular choices is mostly predictable.
|
| If you dig into any "recommend me books" post, you'll find some
| truly great recommendations near the bottom.
| jefc1111 wrote:
| Yep. Same for music. Go anywhere that people are talking about
| a band you like, then scroll down until you start to see things
| you've never heard of.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| As subjective as it may be I am pretty disappointed with the
| list. Here is my last 3 books. Also to disappoint. "The
| Passanger" McCarty, Cormac "Children of Time" Tchaikosvki, Adrian
| "Snowcrash" Stephenson, Neal "Antkind" Kaufman, Charlie
|
| I say four! four last books.
| goostavos wrote:
| What did you think of Antkind? That one has been on my list
| forever, but I've never gotten around to it. I expect it to be
| either pure genius, or... 500 pages of unending navel gazing.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| does anybody else consider "how to win friends and influence
| people" a red flag whenever somebody mentions it as one of their
| favorite or most impactful books?
| cloverich wrote:
| Its impactful for people with social anxiety, on the spectrum,
| a mix therein, etc. This book taught me how to talk to people,
| and steered me from a life of intense social anxiety and
| isolation towards being able to talk to and get to know other
| humans. The majority of people I know in life would not need
| this book, or probably find it a bit stupid even. But for me it
| was pivotal, and I bet many on HN had a similar experience.
| jborden13 wrote:
| No it's a solid read on human behavior
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't think so. I see this sentiment a lot from people who
| haven't actually read the book. People often think it's about
| being manipulative or something. It's really just a super basic
| guide on making and maintainibg friends.
|
| Like if you already have a group of friends and no worries
| about keeping that, you probably already know everything in the
| book. As someone who grew up as the perpetual outcast, the
| advice in that book was really useful for me. It was
| essentially cliff-notes for social skills I should have learned
| at the age of 10 but didn't.
|
| The only "red flag" I see when someone mentions the book is
| that they were probably very socially inept at some point in
| the past like I was. They still might be, but they're working
| on it.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| that's interesting. i've never read the book, maybe i'll give
| it a try. only had an experience with a person who highly
| recommended it and they weren't very trustworthy.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The advice in it certainly can be used by untrustworthy
| people or in malicious ways but so can any other social
| advice really. I'm sure some people buy the book to only
| read the sections about asking people to do things for you
| or being a better salesman (Which doesn't have to literally
| be selling things. Maybe I'm trying to convince my friends
| to try some new board game at game night instead of the
| same 3 we always play). But even then you'd have to ignore
| most of those chapters' advice about putting the buyer's
| needs first.
|
| Ultimately the core of the book is "think about the other
| person and their perspective" and gives advice on how to
| apply that in cases of making friends, keeping friends and
| having good business relationships. Or to frame it a more
| selfish way, "the best way to get what you want from other
| people is to give them what they want first."
|
| Like I said, it's nothing groundbreaking, but the stories
| and examples were helpful to me when I was socially
| clueless. The average person might still find value in it
| because even though these things are easy to know, it takes
| conscious effort to apply. But I also think writing "Pause
| and think about the other person" on your hand with a
| marker will have exactly the same benefit unless you really
| need some of these things spelled out for you.
| willtemperley wrote:
| For any readers of "Thinking: Fast and Slow", this blog on
| replicability with a reply from the author Daniel Kahneman is
| fascinating:
|
| https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...
|
| Edit: here's the article with the comment from Kahneman:
|
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
| warrentr wrote:
| Where's the reply from Kahneman?
| willtemperley wrote:
| Edited ... sorry
| musha68k wrote:
| An increasingly good question to ask oneself these days: how
| could this be done without direct usage of LLMs / without ML
| even? Then as a second step ask yourself how potential
| _assistance_ from generative tools and perhaps ML could _improve_
| those solutions.
| chung8123 wrote:
| I think a lot of the basic tasks with LLMs can be done without
| ML but what I find interesting is learning how to use LLMs to
| do interesting things and the ceiling being a lot higher than
| with traditional methods.
|
| Learning how to use a new tool with older type of work can be
| useful and enlightening.
| botro wrote:
| I made a version of this using boring tech (Postgres, Django,
| Python) by just counting the number of times a book link (not
| just books, youtube videos, arxiv papers etc) is posted in
| Hacker News comments. I also did a bunch of calculations around
| the poster of the link and replies to the posted link. The
| reality is that boring tech does not get attention and
| engagement.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| Happy to hear (with Postgres or Python or Django) how you are
| going to filter out irrelevant comments, from comments
| mentioning books. And then how you're going to extract the
| book title and its author from a comment?
|
| That doesn't look trivial at all to me... but... if you did
| that, please share with us a Github repo.
| botro wrote:
| The site is http://hnlikes.com/ and on the About page I
| describe how it was done.
|
| Like I mentioned it only looks for books that are linked
| (or videos, arxiv papers, Wikipedia etc.). I then use the
| link to get information from the site itself.
|
| I calculate scores for the given link weighted by a number
| of metrics.
|
| I'm sorry if I gave the impression this was fancier than it
| actually is.
| blondie9x wrote:
| Why are there so many issues with the list? Descartes didn't
| write Meditations. Some links are dead or point to wrong item.
| q87b wrote:
| How to make cheap Amazon affiliate link spam even less about
| quality: Use "AI" to generate it.
| gooseus wrote:
| "Bible" should probably have been excluded. Besides the fact that
| I can't imagine this many people here actually recommending
| reading it (rather than it just being mentioned it in passing),
| it's multiple books written by multiple authors across multiple
| centuries. If people were actually recommending the Bible, they'd
| probably be recommending specific books like Job or Psalms or one
| of the Gospels.
|
| In a similar way Fooled By Randomness, The Black Swan, and
| Antifragile are all a part of the Incerto series and could have
| been condensed to one line item.
|
| In any case, great work! I'd like to see a post like this with
| the top 50-100 authors and the comments full of discussions about
| which of the books are the author's best / most accessible.
| tobbe2064 wrote:
| What a pretentious list
| boringg wrote:
| How about extracting podcasts and top blogs?
|
| Interested to see what that looks like. Also would be great to
| see if users were self promoting content...
| maroonblazer wrote:
| I'm an informavore, and even in my 50s, I realize there aren't
| enough years left to read all the non-fiction I want. For some
| books (non-fiction only), I want just a couple double-clicks into
| the main points, much like a grad student skimming numerous texts
| to extract key points for their thesis. ChatGPT has been
| invaluable for this.
|
| For instance, I began reading Susan Nieman's "Evil in Modern
| Thought" but found the writing style a bit tedious after just two
| chapters. I turned to ChatGPT for a chapter-by-chapter summary,
| which it provided brilliantly. I shared this with a friend who
| earned her PhD in the 2000s, and she was astounded. It's hard to
| overstate the time saved.
|
| [EDIT]: Here's the summary from ChatGPT:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/2f3d0aca-46d3-490b-8426-5e8813...
| eli wrote:
| You don't worry that it will include hallucinations? Seems like
| it would be hard to tell if it's summarizing a chapter or
| inventing a chapter based on its title and context.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I'm impressed the chapter by chapter worked. I tried something
| like that and had to use a RAG like approach where I provided
| the text with each question, and used Claude.
| column wrote:
| So.. what was the prompt? You talk about your results and they
| are valuable, but the prompt would be great
| kristianp wrote:
| Added, thanks for the suggestion. (I wanted to keep it high-
| level, some of this stuff is obvious to this crowd).
| column wrote:
| Thanks, it's actually quite instructive.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| To anyone considering reading Dawkins let me highly recommend The
| Ancestor's Tale over The Selfish Gene.
|
| It's easily not only the better work but Dawkin's best and one of
| the best books I've personally read.
|
| I always cringe when I see The Selfish Gene, The Blind
| Watchmaker, etc listed because you're not getting his absolute
| best stuff.
| pphysch wrote:
| This is a striking summary of HN's ideological leanings. Beyond
| the obvious programming/math classics, it's an exposition of the
| Californian Ideology [1].
|
| It would be nice if there was some further sentiment analysis.
|
| [1] (PDF) -
| https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...
| thiago_fm wrote:
| The "Meditations" book I believe is to be from Marcus Aurelius,
| not Descartes (which also has a book with a similar name)
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Agreed -- part of that stoicism trend.
| 0xEF wrote:
| What annoys you about it?
| lainga wrote:
| Oh, it's not the thing itself, it's just me...
| firtoz wrote:
| Hegel, is that you?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Sorry if the comment came across as curt, I'm not annoyed
| by it, though I am curious whether it's still ongoing since
| I haven't seen it as much lately.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Sad that none of Douglas Adams' books are listed.
| samokhvalov wrote:
| it's no 29
| rcarmo wrote:
| Oh. Must have scrolled past. Was expecting it to be much
| higher up.
| amelius wrote:
| A more general approach would be to train an LLM on all HN
| comments, then allow the user to ask this LLM questions, like:
| "Could you recommend me a few books on machine learning?"
| criddell wrote:
| I bet OpenAI used HN comments as a data source. You could
| probably ask ChatGPT for book recommendations of the type
| recommended on HN.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, we can verify this. Someone could ask for a top 10, and
| see if it matches.
| dwighttk wrote:
| "Even with a temperature of 0, GPT's results vary from call to
| call."
|
| So like the number of times a book is mentioned changes?
|
| Wouldn't you fail a cs student whose program did that?
| robinoh wrote:
| I keep being amazed how `Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions`
| gets so little love here.
| raybb wrote:
| Now time to use ChatGPT to turn it into a list on Open Library!
| yayitswei wrote:
| I believe you can use the function calling feature to force the
| output to be schema-conforming JSON.
| anthomtb wrote:
| It's surprising that Code, by Charles Petzold, didn't make the
| top 50. That's one of the most approachable books out there for
| learning how computers really work. I see a lot of mentions of
| Code on HN but maybe that is skewed by the links for which I read
| the comments.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| That book has parallels to "Draw the rest of the horse" - it's
| an awesome book, but the author definitely doesn't do a great
| job with the latter half, where he assumes that you not only
| understood the first part but also committed components to
| memory, so the rest of what he is saying can fit into your
| working memory and make sense.
|
| Have to admit I struggled with the latter half, mainly because
| I didn't quite memorize the first half even though "I get it".
|
| I do like the "teach it to me like I am 5" approach. People try
| to gloss over the basics nowadays like it's not complex enough
| intrinsically.
| nzgrover wrote:
| This is a fantastic book if you have difficulty sleeping! I had
| no idea such an interesting topic, the fundamentals of the
| operation of computers, could be rendered so lifeless and dull
| or that it would take so many words to do so. I'm reading
| through it now but it's taking an awful long time as I never
| get through more than 3 or 4 pages before it's lights out.
| __rito__ wrote:
| I read it full and didn't honestly understand the hype.
|
| It gives you the false sense of you getting the full picture.
| But not really.
|
| Among other HN darlings in books- The Little Schemer, SICP,
| The Black Swan were totally worth it.
| anthomtb wrote:
| Do you have a suggested alternative?
| __rito__ wrote:
| Please consider reading and working through nand2tetris.
|
| It's really great.
| __anon-2023__ wrote:
| By the way, number 48 on the list, The Elements of
| Computing Systems, is the book of nand2tetris.
| https://www.nand2tetris.org/book
| Mimmy wrote:
| i see it at #15
| anthomtb wrote:
| You are right. Its under the full title: "Code: The Hidden
| Language of Computer Hardware and Software".
| botro wrote:
| It's the #2 most frequently posted Amazon link in Hacker News
| comments according to my site (HNLikes.com).
| 3abiton wrote:
| Will be used for the next version
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I love that book. That's _the_ book I recommend to non-
| technical people who want to know about the theory of how it
| all works.
| [deleted]
| pvdoom wrote:
| Jesus Christ, are there some incredibly bad books at very high
| place - i.e. the How to wind friends, or the Atlas Shrugged
| drivel ...
| daft_pink wrote:
| Is there a link for those that just want the extraction results
| of your project?
|
| Would love to see aggregations of stuff like this from hacker
| news.
| jmacd wrote:
| HN has given me so many great book recommendations over the
| years. Things I truly would not have found myself. I really get
| excited when I see someone mention a book in a relevant topic
| thread.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lfmunoz4 wrote:
| I'm surprised how few books there actually are. Each time I see
| one of these lists I see the same books over and over again. In a
| single lifetime you can easily read all "good" books. Wonder what
| books are good but are hardly mentioned, probably none cause if
| they were good the would be mentioned. We have a tendency to
| think there is hidden knowledge but that is just not the case.
| These books are what there is kind depressing if you've read most
| of them.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| It's probably isn't that few books surpass a measure of quality
| but how a hit based business is rate limited by the bandwidth
| of word of mouth trendiness.
| sarasasa28 wrote:
| What about this but only for fiction?
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Amazon affiliates are getting smarter by the day.
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