[HN Gopher] Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
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Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
Author : seinvak
Score : 283 points
Date : 2025-12-21 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app)
| codingdave wrote:
| Affiliate marketing is such a mixed bag. I absolutely love it
| when people can monetize their writing by adding some affiliate
| links that are relevant to the audience - win/win for all sides.
| Yet it is as slimy as anything else when the sole purpose of
| creating content is to publish affiliate links.
| seinvak wrote:
| My bad -- probably should've added a disclaimer :) For what
| it's worth, I only added sponsored links to the top ~50 books
| out of ~10k total. Mostly just trying to cover the cost of a
| decent domain so I can keep the site running.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| > "probably should've added a disclaimer"
|
| It's a violation of the Amazon Associates program to not have
| one.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| Eh, I've shared your views before. But Amazon affiliate link
| payouts are trash. The OP made it to the front page of HN, but
| I'd be surprised if he makes more than $100. It's possible, but
| probably highly unlikely. Let him them make some money, it's a
| cool project.
|
| But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a
| privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting
| emails).
| odie5533 wrote:
| Great books listed here! Added some to my TBR list. Thanks! I'm a
| little surprised the numbers aren't higher across the board.
| Insanity wrote:
| The fact that Mein Kampf was mentioned so often in 2025 is saying
| something about the political climate lol..
|
| Nice website though, I like it.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned
| books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements,
| so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
| Insanity wrote:
| Good catch, I didn't read through the comments where it's
| mentioned.
| mohamez wrote:
| I'm really trying so hard to understand how did you come up
| with this correlation.
| dozerly wrote:
| The US has shifted to becoming an authoritarian fascist
| state. It's not surprising that people reference another
| prominent authoritarian fascist manifesto.
| an0malous wrote:
| I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just
| mentioned in the context of banned book threads
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times
|
| Honestly given that the thing gets brought up about five
| times per day by absolutely anyone for any conceivable reason
| I think it's the opposite. The real dystopian picture of the
| future is getting hit on the head with a copy of 1984,
| forever.
| echelon wrote:
| The surveillance and censorship system being built around
| us is alarming.
|
| It only takes one leadership failure to turn it into
| shackles.
| silexia wrote:
| There are no banned books in America. Not spending taxpayer
| money forcibly taken from citizens on books they disagree
| with for public school libraries is far from banning books.
|
| If you are okay with a book indoctrinating kids with far left
| ideology, why not put in copies of far right books to balance
| it out?
|
| No one wants kids indoctrinated in culture war garbage.
|
| If you want to own a book, go buy it yourself.
| echelon wrote:
| I was apparently 6% of the 1984 mentions.
|
| Doing my part.
| tonymet wrote:
| This comment is a helpful way to understand Mein Kampf and
| whether it means its readers are Nazis.
| graemep on 4/15/2025 Mein Kampf IS a rant.
| I recommend people read it so you can understand how people
| like that think.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Maybe there's a german-language subset of comment threads where
| they discuss their struggles against the C++ standard.
| babblingfish wrote:
| Neat. I'm seeing a lot of overlap with books mentioned on
| r/reddit. I didn't realize, until know, how demographically
| similar hacker news and reddit are.
| tonymet wrote:
| do you not read the comments?
| silexia wrote:
| HN used to be a site for entrepreneurs to share ideas and work
| on things. Now the far left Reddit crowd has crashed it and
| anyone who has a successful business is just "lucky" and anyone
| who has earned wealth should have it stolen at gunpoint by the
| government to redistribute to those who don't produce anything.
| joshdavham wrote:
| The top 3 programming books mentioned this year were
|
| 1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs 2. Clean
| Code 3. Crafting Interpreters
|
| Also, it's quite fascinating how often fiction books were
| recommended! I wouldn't've expected that on HN.
| mirashii wrote:
| I'd be curious about sentiment analysis applied to these. I
| expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and
| one generally negative in 2025.
| seinvak wrote:
| > I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment,
| and one generally negative in 2025.
|
| You are quite correct! Crafting Interpreters actually has the
| highest average sentiment score across all books with more
| than 10 comments. This is the average sentiment score of all
| three( range being -10 to 10) :
|
| Crafting Interpreters(7.8) > SICP(4.3) > Clean Code(-3.2)
| WillAdams wrote:
| The world would be a better place if _Philosophy of Software
| Design_ would replace all mentions of the second book.
|
| https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| I haven't even read your recommendation and know you are
| right.
| endlessvoid94 wrote:
| Have you seen https://hackernewsbooks.com ?
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Mind Games at number 2? I got that book years ago and was so
| disappointed I still think about it sometimes.
| Rendello wrote:
| You just bumped it up by mentioning it ;)
| Cloudly wrote:
| The recent novel Abundance seems to be agressibley grouped with
| the John Green novel An Abundance of Katherines - which I think
| is a humorous retelling of 2025 but also maybe needs some
| matching work
| card_zero wrote:
| _An Abundance of Katherines_ has only been mentioned on HN
| three times, and none of those are listed among the 19 claimed
| mentions.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic
| level coincidence
| kaangiray26 wrote:
| the ultimate coincidence of life, the universe, and everything
| duckerduck wrote:
| Now its 43 :'(
| jama211 wrote:
| List was to a time point, and list says 42. All good! You
| could even say after waiting the right amount of time, 42 was
| the answer this computer program generated...
| georgefrowny wrote:
| The eternal fate of the Googlewhack.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Actually still 42. The guide to the "universe" is a different
| book.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| It has wrong author.
|
| The author and book cover it is showing is for a comic book
| adaptation by John Carnell.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41725880
|
| Instead of showing the author and book cover for the original
| text book by Douglas Adams.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guid...
| belter wrote:
| So does Project Hail Mary...I sense a Easter Egg by the
| Author...
| tonymet wrote:
| great project! how did you do tokenization and alignment of the
| titles to their ISBN / Amazon ID
| seinvak wrote:
| Thanks! I used OpenLibrary's API to get the book IDs, and then
| Gemini 3 to generate the Amazon links.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a
| similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT
| model for NER on HN comments.
|
| I assume this one uses a few-shot LLM approach instead, which is
| slower and more expensive at inference, but so much faster to
| build since there's no tedious labeling needed.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28596207
| seinvak wrote:
| > Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember
| a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT
| model for NER on HN comments
|
| Yes, I saw that project pretty impressive! Hand-labeling 4000
| books is definitely not an easy task, mad-respect to tracyhenry
| for the passion and hardwork that was required back then.
|
| For my project, I just used the Gemini 2.5 Flash API (since I
| had free credits) with the following prompt:
|
| """You are an expert literary assistant parsing Hacker News
| comments. Rules: 1. Only extract CLEARLY identifiable books. 2.
| Ignore generic mentions. 3. Return JSON ARRAY only. 4. If no
| books found, return []. 5. A score from -10 to 10 where 10 is
| highly recommended, -10 is very poorly recommended and 0 is
| neutral. 6. If the author's name is in the comment, include it;
| otherwise, omit the key. JSON format: [ {{ "title": "book
| title", "sentiment": "score", "author" : "Name of author if
| mentioned" }} ] Text: {text}"""
|
| It did the job quite well. It really shows how far AI has come
| in just 4 years.
| dgeiser13 wrote:
| The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit is listed instead of "the
| Dragon book"
| thcipriani wrote:
| Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An
| Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John
| Green--"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this
| year.
| giraffe333 wrote:
| I thought this was "the Dragon Book" Compilers: Principles,
| Techniques, and Tools
|
| by Aho, Lam, and Sethi
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools...
| begueradj wrote:
| The 6 first books reflect the quality comments I often see here
| on HN.
| barddoo wrote:
| The Holy Bible mentioned.
| kace91 wrote:
| No offense intended towards anyone, but it usually strikes me how
| basic/surface level literature references are here. For a crowd
| pretty much defined by intellectual curiosity, it's mostly
| highschool reads, _very_ mainstream scifi /fantasy and corporate
| self help.
|
| I wonder if it's an american thing, for engineers to be detached
| of liberal arts? The vibe tends to be quite different in local
| engineering groups.
| emodendroket wrote:
| There is some real stuff in there if you scroll through but I
| don't disagree with your point. But it is easier to
| perform/identify oneself with intellectual curiosity than to
| truly be intellectually curious.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| I think it's more about how using "most" as a measurement, no
| matter who the audience is that you pool from, is not a good
| way of producing a valuable list. In the end, having someone
| learned and well read produce a hand-written list with deeper
| cuts brings more value.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I think two factors are in play:
|
| The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you
| go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more
| sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read
| differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more
| popular (it _is_ , after all, a popularity list).
|
| Second is this:
|
| > for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?
|
| Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of
| books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that
| should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books
| to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a
| very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great
| commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary
| purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the
| underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct,
| nonfiction book will always do a better job.
|
| I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I
| know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read
| that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to
| the choir. What they are glorifying is how _well_ the story
| depicted an issue.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Behold a super-satured solution. A crystal touches it and
| where before was a liquid, now hard unyielding crystals
| spring forward, hard enough to scratch diamond. Some books
| are seed crystals, changing the shapeless into eternal forms.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Let me know when you find such a book ;-)
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| All books can be seed crystals, provided they find an
| appropriate super saturated solution in their readers
| (that was my point, actually, as a counter argument to
| OP's "preaching to the choir". Although the super
| saturated solution is already there, it needs to seed
| crystal to (physically) transform).
| kace91 wrote:
| >although a given novel may give great commentary about a
| social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is
| entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying
| social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book
| will always do a better job.
|
| I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding there, if you
| think all the potential value of a fiction book is some
| commentary padded by a story.
|
| Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction
| book never would. You experience life through someone else's
| eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions
| they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane
| what the author is trying to show, you see language being
| used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas,
| you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes...
| Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like
| saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a
| forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted
| output.
|
| There is also a fundamental difference between being told
| 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort
| to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a
| fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
|
| >It would help if you gave some examples of books that should
| be here.
|
| That's the thing, there is not specific book I could
| recommend that is most likely change your life for the
| better, for the same reason there is no single specific
| equation I can mention that will make someone good at math if
| they solve it. Some exercises are better, some are pointless,
| but it's the act of engaging that counts in the long term.
|
| My comment about this list had no implication that the books
| at the top of the list were less valuable than other hidden
| works; they're just a sign of a path not travelled quite far,
| if that makes sense.
|
| And leaving aside the usefulness of it all, pleasant
| experiences not all amount to entertaining. You'd probably
| agree that having sex with the love of your life and watching
| TV are not equivalent experiences, even if you come out of
| both with roughly the same level of self-improvement.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is
| some commentary padded by a story.
|
| Actually, I'm flipping the two: The potential value of a
| fiction book is a good story - social commentary is purely
| optional. Fiction that has commentary padded by a story are
| valued only by those who are sympathetic to the commentary.
| Whereas I can easily love a good story even if I disagree
| with the commentary.
|
| > Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-
| fiction book never would. You experience life through
| someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind
| by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder
| in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see
| language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions
| or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in
| someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point
| quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is
| done faster with a forklift, the process is the point
| rather than the extracted output.
|
| I don't think we're in disagreement. I'm merely saying that
| I've yet to see someone _changed_ by a fiction book. If
| there was change, it was always "change in the same
| direction" (e.g. "a renewed appreciation of X").
|
| I have seen plenty of folks changed by nonfiction, though.
|
| Incidentally, most/all of what you wrote above can be done
| as effectively with nonfiction. Books like _When Broken
| Glass Floats_ by Chanrithy Him are extremely powerful. As
| was _Killers of the Flower Moon_. I doubt any works of
| fiction dealing with the same topics would be more
| powerful. Both of these books could have been written (and
| read) as fiction, but knowing the events were true makes a
| huge difference in appreciation.
|
| > There is also a fundamental difference between being told
| 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take
| effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction
| gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the
| latter.
|
| This seems like a false dichotomy. You can have nonfiction
| do this very effectively without simply "telling" you.
| desmoulins wrote:
| The context of these book titles appearing in comments might
| skew the results. Ulysses is high up on the list, but the
| source comments have a lot of people using it as an example of
| a lengthy, difficult book.
|
| I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or
| example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't
| know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have
| heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class,
| instead of something more obscure.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Most people will barely read through a couple basics, so it can
| be a bit of a though sell to start recommending more niche
| stories. And part of the reason that some of these books are so
| successful is that they tend to have pretty widespread appeal,
| while more niche books will be more divisive and less likely to
| get recommended broadly.
|
| If you're so well-read why don't you grace us with some of your
| non-mainstream S-tier recommendations?
|
| From this list, one of the books that I recommend to everyone
| is Piranesi, which is fairly mainstream, and if they want to
| explore Russian magical realism then Vita Nostra. Unsong is
| another favorite. In general I love to explore magic systems
| that experiment with breaking a system, or stories that explore
| how different rules might interact within a system.
|
| I think people sometimes underestimate the value of lighter
| more fun reads, like cultivation stories. The best western
| adaptation of this style of novel is probably the Cradle
| series, by Will Wight. Even though the stories tend to be
| fairly light, they're quite enjoyable for exploring new modes
| of thinking. For example, we can analyze the interactions of
| energy as an abstract / symbolic form, and how it influences
| human behavior; which is an abstract / symbolic application of
| the cultivation lens over reality. To give an easier to
| understand example: Feng Shui isn't real but it's true, in the
| sense that the way in which we organize furniture within a
| space determines how people navigate it and how they interact.
| And why might this be useful? Well, sometimes we fail to see
| the full picture when using a single lens, and different lens
| might let us see things in a new light.
|
| I've read some terribly generic web novel slop and gotten
| fairly unique and interesting perspectives from them, but most
| people aren't good enough readers to enjoy bad books, so they
| can only read and enjoy good books.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Embarrassing to see 0 works by Max Stirner in this work. HN is
| truly spooked.
| omoikane wrote:
| I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33
| mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11
| mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian Chronicles"
| appears to be referencing "The Martian" instead.
|
| Also, "Godel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions)
| are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
| losvedir wrote:
| Similarly, "The Book of Dragons" I'm guessing might be the so
| called "dragon book" about compiler design.
| furyofantares wrote:
| You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the
| delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is
| largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.
|
| It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or
| fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
| wellpast wrote:
| Love this. Is there a scrape-able list of these?
| seinvak wrote:
| Thanks for the love.No need to scrape, just use this json
| containing all the data used in making the site :
|
| https://storage.googleapis.com/globalhnbucket/normalized_boo...
| emodendroket wrote:
| Harry Potter apparently either the best book to read or the one
| with the most for engineers to learn from, I have to conclude.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I think it has to do with the author generating controversy on
| this website for news discussion.
| samx18 wrote:
| Kind of surprising that HN still is quite limited to the US-West,
| expected a little more diversity with the readers and discussions
| out there
| xp84 wrote:
| It's mostly an English language site and there are a lot of
| English speakers in "the West" - I would expect that if there's
| a China equivalent there aren't that many Americans having
| discussions there.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| What are some books from other regions that you hope might get
| discussed here more?
| yoan9224 wrote:
| Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and
| Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN.
|
| Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN
| skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in
| the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading
| habits than stereotypes suggest.
|
| One bug: looks like "The Martian" by Andy Weir is getting grouped
| with "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. Might want to add
| some disambiguation logic for common title collisions.
|
| How are you doing the extraction? LLM-based NER or something more
| traditional like regex + entity matching?
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| I wouldn't think clean code is on-brand at all.
|
| Maybe mentioning it for what not to do?
|
| Just search it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clean+code
|
| All (justifiably) against clean code methodology.
| ruraljuror wrote:
| https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code is a
| great find from that list. Thanks!
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I was recently reading through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language
| of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, and she
| has so many great quotes that are directly relevant to this
| situation.
|
| Here's a shorter one:
|
| > "The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your
| understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own
| feelings, and your destiny."
|
| And a longer one:
|
| > "We read books to find out who we are. What other people,
| real or imaginary, do and think and feel - or have done and
| thought and felt; or might do and think and feel - is an
| essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are
| and may become... A person who had never listened to nor read a
| tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his
| own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know
| quite fully what it is to be human. For the story - from
| Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools
| invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining
| understanding. There have been great societies that did not use
| the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell
| stories."
|
| Engaging with fantasy and scifi helps us understand ourselves
| and the world around us. It helps find what truly moves and
| inspires us. It teaches us to dream of a different, better
| world.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| What is the cut off date?
|
| It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
| seinvak wrote:
| Just missed by a day I guess. Cutoff is 15th December.
| cwnyth wrote:
| There's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts
| Programming Rust as the same book.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Lovely site. Got curious about one of my own biases (that the
| perceived libertarian slant of HN would be similarly in favor of
| Ayn Rand), and clicked through the usual suspects to see the
| context they were discussed in.
|
| Pleasantly surprised to see much of the discourse was along the
| lines of, "Oh yeah, read her stuff, found it fascinating [in the
| same vein as a train wreck can be], recommended just to
| understand how those folks think." Not going to pick up her stuff
| any time soon, but I was happy to have a bias prove unfounded.
| bdunks wrote:
| It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
|
| I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation
| Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn't
| read it. I couldn't believe how well it held up 70+ years
| later(!!)
|
| I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it's
| appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it's
| probably the best -- but all three are great.
|
| I'm now ready Project Hail Mary. It's been a long time since I
| read the Martian,but Andy Weir's writing style is fast paced and
| practically a screenplay already. It's obvious from the first
| chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Andy Weir's writing style is fast paced and practically a
| screenplay already
|
| Oh thanks for the warning. I was avoiding him based on a hunch.
| Now I know I was right.
|
| If anyone else is weird like me and likes books to not read
| like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse.
| druskacik wrote:
| Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this
| and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some
| non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished
| Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were
| great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally
| life-changing, truly a masterpiece.
|
| I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start
| with it during Christmas break.
| ajcp wrote:
| FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem
| "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt
| the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon
| by Cixin Liu.
| ruraljuror wrote:
| Woah, what an unexpected surprise!
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is absent. We cultists have
| fallen down on the job.
| seinvak wrote:
| By searching in all categories, I can see it's mentioned once :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659243#42662874
|
| For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing
| though :/
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort
| proselytizing though :/
|
| I think we take for granted having dang as a member and it
| makes us apathetic.
| card_zero wrote:
| Some more errors:
|
| _Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at
| Norwich, A.D. 1373_ wasn 't really mentioned ever. Those mentions
| are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.
|
| _Beowulf_ mentions are all referencing the Old English epic
| poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic
| poem
|
| Knowing the HN crowd, it can also be a reference to beowulf
| clusters as well.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| This isn't slashdot :)
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| My favorite reads of 2025 came from an HN recommendation (the
| Steerswoman series). I don't see it on this site so maybe the
| comment I saw was too oblique of a reference
| krick wrote:
| Not really, there are quite a few books "missing" that I
| definitely saw mentioned in discussions not so long ago.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I think some of the book associations are wrong. It shows "the
| martian chronicles" for mentions of andy weir's "the martian".
|
| Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read this year
| mentioned. Except "Mein Kampf" of course, interesting top mention
| there. perhaps lots of people are reading it to understand the
| past? I'll need to see if it's worth it, I always considered it
| the equivalent of drinking water from the river thames to
| understand victorian england better.
| Erlangen wrote:
| Another mistake is to place "The Road"(Cormac McCarthy) under
| "On the Road"(Jack Kerouac).
| johngossman wrote:
| Imagine you were expecting one of those and read the other!
| krick wrote:
| CSV export (just the book list) would be welcome.
| Cheetah26 wrote:
| Has a lot in common with NPR's top 100 sci-fi and fantasy list
| from 2011 [0]. Cool to see how the classics stay relevant.
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-
| top-100-...
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The indexing must be flakey. I have mentioned various books
| multiple times with links to their respective Amazon pages. No
| mentions of them.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| extremely cool thanks.
|
| See a few of my mentions on here, a few of them not [0]
|
| Regardless, this is a real treat
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977536
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| If you are the creator of this site can you grab one of the
| covers for hypermedia systems off the website?
|
| https://hypermedia.systems
|
| thank you for making this!
| analogpixel wrote:
| Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention
| books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to
| be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll through them
| all, but would be more curious to see books with 2 or more
| mentions.
|
| It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books,
| since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped
| out.)
| krick wrote:
| Here, did it for you (.tsv):
| https://limewire.com/d/iZp6i#ZEhH4XXWBC
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Why does this list sound like a 16 year olds "I am very Smart"
| list?
|
| These are classics yes, but I was expecting something close to
| the forefront of the culture
| xandrius wrote:
| You have a wayyy too skewed perception of the general tech
| person.
|
| I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my
| philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the
| usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and
| such.
|
| And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of
| known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost
| nobody knows it.
|
| What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book
| list?
| stevenfoster wrote:
| Picked up my two mentions of the Interior Castle by Teresa of
| Avila. Going to be looking to see if any of the other doctors
| have been mentioned.
| yboris wrote:
| I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is
| _Accelerando_ and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it
| suggesting I try his _The Rapture of the Nerds_ he co-wrote with
| Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.
|
| I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days
| (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub
| repositories).
| number6 wrote:
| Accelerando is one of my favourite too! Thanks for sharing the
| reply, always love book recommendations
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Best HN post of the year. I just surfaced after hours exploring.
| therobots927 wrote:
| I tried to get into neuromancer but I'm not a fan of the nonstop
| dialogue. Just a personal reference but it feels more and more
| rare to get new science fiction books primarily driven by the
| narrator.
| blintz wrote:
| I tend to avoid sci-fi that hits too close to home (don't love
| any of the AI/internet/crypto classics, same reason I can't bear
| to watch Silicon Valley), so I was a little bored by the top of
| the the list.
|
| But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down
| the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The
| Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation,
| Children Of Time, Dune.
|
| Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the
| keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get
| too bored by descriptions of rock.
| specproc wrote:
| So I'm guessing we passed HN through an LLM, looking for book
| mentions.
|
| A number of posts here flagging disambiguation issues, I've run
| into this a lot.
|
| I've been dealing with the problem using cosine distance between
| embeddings, but find it tricky to verify at scale.
|
| Anyone else struggling with this?
| defrost wrote:
| Good work, thanks for this.
|
| It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped
| book so that users could link to, say, the entry for _A Texbook
| of Engineering Mathematics_.
|
| _The TeXbook_ by Donald Knuth has been mapped to _A Texbook of
| Engineering Mathematics_ by N.P. Bali from this source comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399031#45400264
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