alt Hacker NewsShow HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Saw Karpathy's HackerTube and wanted the same thing for books. So I had Claude build one (Opus 5.5).
It's ~16.5k books that at least two different HN commenters brought up, from 2007 till now. Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it. Data is downloadable from the about page.
To be clear: Claude wrote almost all of it, including the data pipeline and the site. I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc.
It counts mentions, so it's not perfect (praising a book and trashing it both count). If your favourite book is missing or matched to the wrong thing, tell me.
Comments
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!
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 would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)
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.
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.
this has already existed for a long time, but I think it would be cool if it was really recommendations, instead of just mentions
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.
I love this and feel it would be greatly enhanced with semantic search.
I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
After clicking an entry, below, "What Hacker News says", we see comments with mentions and surrounding text. It's now squashed, maybe you can add a function to expand on click, to see the comment with newline separation if such exist. Cause very often these comments presents a list of their favorite book, and an explanation of why. When these are squashed, it's not clear which explanation is preceding or following the entry.
Also, clicking the link "On "...."" it doesn't bring to the exact comment, only that thread or topic, so you need to search for it. It could bring directly to that comment.
The “mentions since” picker appears to be broken, nothing in the list changes as far as I can see. Also I wish it wouldn’t add another page to my history.
This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
I 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
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?
The next stage is "HackerTime", a startup providing enough time to watch all the video and read all the books and play all the game and read all the news on "HackerZ for Z in tube, books, games, news".
With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...
I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.
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
apparently angry birds is a book? and it's more popular than the new testament in the "other" category.
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.
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.
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
Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
Hacker Music tomorrow?
I expected way more books for software engineering.
I'd love to see a books and youtube thing for metafilter too. It has a similarly good recommendation history for me.
I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood
I am really loving what people are building on similar ideas close to HackerTube and I am tinkering something of my own as well with these new ideas.
Awesome Idea and I would love to see what else community tinkers with things like these :-D
Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.
Edit: I will try to read thinking fast and slow because of HN recommendations. I have heard some good things about the book but I will try to read it in future given HN's immense recommendations, so your website has already had a negative net positive for me :-D
Slop
Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
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It would be much more amazing if theres just a link to download all thees books as a ZIP file.
If some AI influencer could please do that and post a link here as a comment i'll give you some upvoates
I'm beginning to like this new internet…