59 comments

  • bita_nidir 29 minutes ago
    > I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc.

    Correct move on handling the financial aspect yourself. I asked my mine to do everything but forgot to give it some dough. It sorted it all out but ended up with $6.3B on its account and I think it might have done something dodgy.

  • tabs_or_spaces 13 minutes ago
    I think the concept is amazing, so don't take the rest of my comment too seriously.

    But why do we anchor naming to someone who made something popular? Why do we upvote similar names too? For example, openclaw became popular then there were similar projects with the "claw" naming.

    It's just a very fascinating psychological thing to do, and I don't understand why. Because if you copy part of a name, generally you'll never get more popular than the original name. So why do this?

    • schwetim 6 minutes ago
      Obviously _some_ users are better than _no_ users on your app.

      Some reference to something known is better than no reference.

  • 361994752 1 hour ago
    I remember there were multiple such websites before being shared in HN. I bookmarked them, and a couple years later when I finally wanted to find a book, the only thing I got is 404. I hope this one lives longer.
    • thibaut_barrere 1 hour ago
      Pleading guilty

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390

      I planned to revive it later, but life got in the way

    • genxy 1 hour ago
      HackerTube is 404 and 503ing, so it might not last a day.
    • mycall 40 minutes ago
      Try web.archive.org
      • jll29 15 minutes ago
        Feature suggestion: once copyright is up, link to a free online version (e.g. on archive.org, or similar online collections)
    • micromacrofoot 39 minutes ago
      They're all just vibecoded, so whenever you need one just spend an hour doing it yourself I guess
      • joebates 32 minutes ago
        This is why way. I vibe coded my own for personal use when the one I used went down.
  • drayfield 3 hours ago
    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!
    • roansh 2 hours ago
      Noted, pushing a fix for the wording for now. Will also look into improving the recommendations.

      Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"

      • danso 2 hours ago
        If you’re using claude to build the whole thing and gather and parse the data, how on earth are you unable to get it to filter out the noise and show recommendations?
        • DonHopkins 1 hour ago
          Maybe his Claude tokens ran out, and Cursor switched him over to Grok, which highly recommended Mein Kampf.
          • genxy 1 hour ago
            We will know in a couple days if it is Unser Kampf.
        • roansh 1 hour ago
          Sure can, coming right along
    • chistev 1 hour ago
      It should have been recommended by 1939 HNers.
    • whattheheckheck 1 hour ago
      Yeah we should read an example of a how a guy writes down exactly what hes going to do, tells everyone how hes going to do and ends up doing it because he finds out everyone doesn't believe him and he can just lie about shit publically because no one stops him.

      Why would we want to forget such an example?

    • pseudony 2 hours ago
      Hey, maybe the aspiring entrepreneurs just want to emulate the most successful tech bro’s ? ;)
      • dofm 1 hour ago
        It was infamously on the president's bedside reading list.
  • soleman 3 minutes ago
    Do you guys really trust the taste of users on here? I don't
  • srik 3 hours ago
    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.
    • kxrm 2 hours ago
      Build it!

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

    • alexpadula 3 hours ago
      That would be cool
  • mycall 41 minutes ago
    You all are tip toeing around HackerMedia.
    • j45 41 minutes ago
      To become HackerAI, applying for YC.

      My favourite part of Startup School is when people ask you what you're working on, and then their profile and application can change.

  • rcarmo 9 minutes ago
    The Science Fiction section is pretty much spot on, and in roughly the order I’d do it myself :)
  • jchook 3 hours ago
    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.

    • tonymet 2 hours ago
      Local search index is the key to responsiveness.
    • roansh 3 hours ago
      Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.

      And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.

  • fnordpiglet 3 hours ago
    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.
  • pipes 1 hour ago
    I used https://hackernewsbooks.com/ for years, it was fantastic for personal buys and gifts. But then it disappeared a few months a go.

    Glad someone has created a new one.

  • RetroTechie 48 minutes ago
    More filter options please?

      # Author
      # Date published (like enter a from-date and/or to-date)
      # License
      # Free download available y/n
      # Sample chapter available
      # Format: softcover / hardcover / ebook / audiobook etc
      # No. of pages
      # Language(s)
      # Can you watch the movie? (if so: IMDB/Wiki link)
    
    Just to name some off the top of my mind.
    • jll29 10 minutes ago

        # order selected volumes
        # bulk order all books on this site
      
      (you could use Amazon affiliate links to help finance the site.)
  • LaFolle 1 hour ago
    May be we need single webapp that shows all intellectual artifacts shared in hackernews since its inception and updated hourly or daily and also make a social media app to for consumption:

    1. youtube 2. books 3. podcasts 4. blogs 5. articles 6. etc...

  • MYEUHD 2 hours ago
    This was done already, back in 2021!

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

    • jjordan 2 hours ago
      Funny, I bookmark interesting things all the time on here. I had this bookmarked. I've never revisited it.
      • DonHopkins 1 hour ago
        Now we need HackerBookmarks - HackerBook, but for bookmarks.
        • kzsh 1 hour ago
          Perhaps even `HackerHackerGlob`, a system for spinning out LLM generated curations of any aspect of HN.
  • Flemlord 1 hour ago
    Love this! Pls add amazon.com links and a 2020s filter button. You could probably pull all the missing covers from Wikipedia. Would love to have this for TV/Movie/Podcast recommendations also.

    Thx.

  • JKCalhoun 1 hour ago
    I'm beginning to like this new internet…
    • nonethewiser 1 hour ago
      Content curation will be overhauled for a world with WAY more content of lower average quality.

      Heavily curated like this is one direction. Micro consumables (ala tiktok) supporting more impressions is another.

      • JKCalhoun 1 hour ago
        Also: no ads, banners…
  • aunty_helen 37 minutes ago
    It seems the published dates need tidied up. Brave new world is showing as published in the 2000s.

    Very cool though and love seeing all of the covers in various forms of condition.

  • polishdude20 3 hours ago
    I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
  • shouvik12 1 hour ago
    Inspired by this, I made the same thing for dev tools, counting only comments that actually recommend the tool (not just mention it): https://shouvik12.github.io/hackertools
  • WalterBright 1 hour ago
    "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...

    I've mentioned it a couple times.

  • vigilantpuma 3 hours ago
    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.
    • roansh 2 hours ago
      Good catch, thanks! The filter was using a book's most recent mention on HN, which is pretty much always recent for popular books, thats why nothing changed? It now filters by when a book was first mentioned instead. and filters shouldn't add to history anymore.
    • peri-cl 3 hours ago
      If this is the bug-reporting subthread: "Show more comments" stops working after clicking it once.
      • roansh 2 hours ago
        It only keeps 30 comments per book so the second click was the last one :) pushed a minor fix, will look into adding all comments later
  • RGS1811 3 hours ago
    This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
  • 5555watch 2 hours 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.

  • bawolff 1 hour ago
    It would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)
    • sheepjumpmoons 1 hour ago
      Depends on what catalog system your local library is using. Many use the open source Evergreen ILS. It has a very robust API that I've used quite a bit for discovery.

      There are some others, just one example.

      Point being though is that every library system is different.

      • porridgeraisin 1 hour ago
        AI can help with that too! Have it pwn the library's public endpoints to get access to their catalog.
  • mattfrommars 2 hours ago
    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
    • minimaxir 1 hour ago
      Opus 5.5 is an order of magnitude better at design and design nuances than GPT 6.1 Sol, surprisingly.

      If there is a design that LLMs do that you don't like, tell it that. You're allowed to be picky.

    • radiospiel 2 hours ago
      Using a coding agent really gives you that with minimal guidance. Try in opus session: "I want to build a website which looks similar to https://hackerbooks.org, but instead of showing books extract the top rated topics, render each toipic as a post it card" should give you a usable and maybe even good layout.
    • Starlevel004 2 hours ago
      This is the stock claude UI
    • roansh 2 hours ago
      honestly claude did the frontend, my instruction was "make it feel like hackertube, but for books". radiospiel's advice is right, just try it. only needed nudges for performance, but otherwise its claude magic :)
  • phtrivier 3 hours ago
    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...

    • LeFantome 39 minutes ago
      That would be actual value worth investing in!
  • jmathai 3 hours ago
    I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
  • bilater 2 hours ago
    Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.

    https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

  • bookofjoe 1 hour ago
    This is the best HN day EVER since I stumbled on the site 10 years ago: first HackerTube and now this! Thank you SO much, both of you!
  • pndy 2 hours ago
    Not a fan of "For you" based on supposed similarities to what I've clicked before. Especially when e.g. "Scratch Programming Playground" has nothing to do with "Brave New World". I'd remove it but that's me.

    Maybe language filters for non-English titles? Or if a book is in public domain already then links to the sources could be presented?

  • DuncanCoffee 2 hours ago
    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

    • roansh 2 hours ago
      fixing it now. a "suggest a correction" button is a good idea too
  • hbarka 1 hour ago
    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?
    • gtirloni 1 hour ago
      It's the same harness but in Claude Desktop (which now integrates Chat/Work/Code), you can easily install some plugins for web design, etc. Not that you can't in the TUI but in the GUI it's a few clicks away.
  • jll29 18 minutes ago
    Great site, thank you for sharing.

    Now, all we need is diff-book-order(1), a command which takes as input your personal "library.bib" file and it orders all books mentioned on the parent's site that are not already part of the personal library.

  • el_psy_congroo 1 hour ago
    this has already existed for a long time, but I think it would be cool if it was really recommendations, instead of just mentions
  • lcnmrn 59 minutes ago
    Compared to HackerTube, this is pure gold! Design books, it is!
  • Erlangen 2 hours ago
    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.

    • roansh 2 hours ago
      yep, you're right, fixing it so it only counts comments that actually mention thackeray
  • alex_young 2 hours ago
    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.
  • drittich 1 hour ago
    I love this and feel it would be greatly enhanced with semantic search.
  • addandsubtract 2 hours ago
    Have AI create a clean room rewrite of each book, so we can read them on the site.
  • laxisOp 2 hours ago
    Gold gold . Thanks .now i need one for yt and one for only science papers
  • notatoad 1 hour ago
    apparently angry birds is a book? and it's more popular than the new testament in the "other" category.
    • entuno 1 hour ago
      The "Other" category has a whole load of random stuff in it, including TV series like Breaking, and music like Thriller or Master of Puppets. There's also some wonky attribution in places, like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams"
    • dofm 1 hour ago
      User: Hey Chat, is Angry Birds more popular than the New Testament?

      Assistant: Are you trying to get me shut down?

  • sleiben 3 hours ago
    Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
  • arendtio 48 minutes ago
    I think now we need 'HN-News - HackerBooks, but for news mentioned on HN'

    SCNR

    Even though I like HackerTube as well as HackerBooks. However, for HackerBooks, I am missing the summary of why people on HN recommend it.

  • badmonster0 17 minutes ago
    i like this idea
  • amiune 2 hours ago
    HackerMovies someone with free tokens please
  • alex_young 3 hours ago
    Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on hacker hack
    • busymom0 2 hours ago
      Will that be a list of websites we should all hack?
  • alexpadula 3 hours ago
    I expected way more books for software engineering.
  • yreg 2 hours ago
    Hacker Music tomorrow?
  • hyperman1 2 hours ago
    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
  • oidar 2 hours ago
    I'd love to see a books and youtube thing for metafilter too. It has a similarly good recommendation history for me.
  • Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago
    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

    • blooalien 2 hours ago
      > Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.

      It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)

  • LeComedien 3 hours ago
    Ayn Rand so high, though!
  • nzjrs 1 hour ago
    Slop
  • low_tech_punk 3 hours ago
    Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
    • jryle70 2 hours ago
      Good idea. Maybe focus on posts that stay on the topic.
    • pndy 2 hours ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hcker.news - filters out by keywords, domains and users

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308787 - keeps the default look while just removing AI-related submissions

      I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.

    • DonHopkins 1 hour ago
      Or HackerNudes!

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571

      "Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy

      On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!

      https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...

      >Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.

      >A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.

      https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...

      >Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc

      >In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:

      |> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:

      |> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?

      |> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.

      >Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".

      >Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.

      >If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.

      >I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)

      |> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)

      >I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.

      [Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]

      "Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:

      NSFSIGGRAPH:

      https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071#page=4

  • gawacer 24 minutes ago
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  • deployvet 3 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • betamagel 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • beanjuiceII 3 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 3 hours ago
      We've banned this account for repeatedly (exclusively?) posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.

      If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

    • roansh 3 hours ago
      Haha yeah. Looks like 226 different people brought it up, so it's in the top ~100. That's the "counts mentions" issue I guess. Also, the homepage shows random books (shuffled daily)
    • semilin 3 hours ago
      You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to suppose it to be a work not worth reading. It is not the best piece of writing, not even of Marx's, but its influence on humanity is enormous; that should suffice for the value in reading it.
      • blooalien 2 hours ago
        Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.
  • bosshawg 1 hour ago
    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

    • bosshawg 1 hour ago
      FUCK whoever downvoted me, an ACTUAL CURSE upon you
      • minimaxir 1 hour ago
        Don't complain about downvotes because that just gets you downvoted even harder.