31 comments

  • MYEUHD 1 hour ago
    This was done already, back in 2021!

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

    • jjordan 9 minutes ago
      Funny, I bookmark interesting things all the time on here. I had this bookmarked. I've never revisited it.
      • DonHopkins 3 minutes ago
        Now we need HackerBookmarks - HackerBook, but for bookmarks.
  • drayfield 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Noted, pushing a fix for the wording for now. Will also look into improving the recommendations.

      Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"

      • danso 14 minutes 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?
        • roansh 1 minute ago
          Sure can, coming right along
        • DonHopkins 1 minute ago
          Maybe his Claude tokens ran out, and Cursor switched him over to Grok, which highly recommended Mein Kampf.
    • pseudony 23 minutes ago
      Hey, maybe the aspiring entrepreneurs just want to emulate the most successful tech bro’s ? ;)
  • low_tech_punk 1 hour ago
    Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
  • srik 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Build it!

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

    • alexpadula 1 hour ago
      That would be cool
  • fnordpiglet 1 hour 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.
  • jchook 1 hour 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 33 minutes ago
      Local search index is the key to responsiveness.
    • roansh 1 hour 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.

  • 5555watch 39 minutes 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.

  • polishdude20 1 hour ago
    I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
  • pndy 32 minutes 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?

  • mattfrommars 46 minutes 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
    • radiospiel 42 minutes 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 34 minutes ago
      This is the stock claude UI
    • roansh 33 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • vigilantpuma 1 hour 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 58 minutes 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 1 hour ago
      If this is the bug-reporting subthread: "Show more comments" stops working after clicking it once.
      • roansh 57 minutes 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 1 hour ago
    This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
  • DuncanCoffee 44 minutes 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 35 minutes ago
      fixing it now. a "suggest a correction" button is a good idea too
  • phtrivier 1 hour 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...

  • bilater 1 hour ago
    Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.

    https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

  • jmathai 1 hour ago
    I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
  • Erlangen 39 minutes 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 34 minutes ago
      yep, you're right, fixing it so it only counts comments that actually mention thackeray
  • laxisOp 21 minutes ago
    Gold gold . Thanks .now i need one for yt and one for only science papers
  • addandsubtract 23 minutes ago
    Have AI create a clean room rewrite of each book, so we can read them on the site.
  • alex_young 1 hour 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.
  • yreg 20 minutes ago
    Hacker Music tomorrow?
  • sleiben 1 hour ago
    Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
  • amiune 52 minutes ago
    HackerMovies someone with free tokens please
  • oidar 20 minutes ago
    I'd love to see a books and youtube thing for metafilter too. It has a similarly good recommendation history for me.
  • alex_young 1 hour ago
    Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on hacker hack
    • busymom0 1 hour ago
      Will that be a list of websites we should all hack?
  • alexpadula 1 hour ago
    I expected way more books for software engineering.
  • hyperman1 51 minutes 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
  • Imustaskforhelp 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
    Ayn Rand so high, though!
  • deployvet 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • beanjuiceII 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 55 minutes 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.