Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

Posted by seinvak 12/21/2025

Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025(hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app)

613 points | 212 commentspage 3

atlasunshrugged 12/22/2025|

Probably most surprising here was how many mentions Twilight got! Not the book I expected to see mentioned often on this forum

libraryofbabel 12/21/2025||

Good to see Designing Data-Intensive Applications on there, but it should be higher — certainly above the thoroughly middling Clean Code at least! DDIA is still the first book I tell every junior to read after they’ve got a couple years experience under their belt. Can’t wait for the 2nd edition!

card_zero 12/21/2025||

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 12/21/2025|

> 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 12/21/2025||

This isn't slashdot :)

cwnyth 12/21/2025||

There's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts Programming Rust as the same book.

joshdavham 12/21/2025||

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.

WillAdams 12/21/2025||

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 12/21/2025||

I haven’t even read your recommendation and know you are right.

mirashii 12/21/2025||

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 12/21/2025||

> 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)

thoughtpeddler 12/22/2025||

Is anyone else surprised that Gödel, Escher, Bach is as low on the list as it is? My experience on HN would have me believe it would be in the top 10 for sure. I wonder if it’s a string-matching issue.

ilteris 12/21/2025||

I bet it's the same books every year

therobots927 12/21/2025||

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.

JDEW 12/22/2025||

Nice! The entry for Abundance [0] is listed as another book (An Abundance of Katherines [1])

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444106-abundance [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215526423-an-abundance-o...

GuB-42 12/23/2025|

How are the data processed? It doesn't look easy. For instance there is "Foundation" in the list, a common word, how does the algorithm distinguish between just the word and a mention of the book. Same idea for "The holy Bible". It is almost always just referred to as just "the Bible" but "Bible" is also used to refer to all sorts of reference books.

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