Posted by roansh 17 hours ago
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.
I think fiction books are more important and more "wholesome" than nonfiction ones.
Besides linking to bookshop and amazon (weird choices in my opinion), you could also link to bookfinder, anna's archive, libgen. That would be really useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779266 I'd have expected it to come up as one step removed from Borges, and it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_(poignant)_Guide_to_Ru... mentioned many times, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36632010 - a surprising omission, tho I guess it's not in print.
I also finally tried "Thinking, fast and slow" recently and realised it was absolutely not for me. Even the audiobook version didn't cut it. I found it completely dry and trite. I am not trying to offend anymoe (esp. with "trite"), and I am aware how storied and awarded the author is – to me it just came across as "yet another self-help kind of book" sadly. But then a clear lack of fiction for a long time in "top all-times" puts into perspective why that book is up at the top. I think the general hn reading-taste is quite different from mine. Also, it's not about what was book about, because I never reached that, it was rather how it was written.
Any plans to add some sort of tag/genre to search feature?
I'm wondering - how are you monitoring HN for new books?
For the SaaSHub listing you can use hello@hackerbooks.org.
Not doing any realtime or semi-realtime monitoring yet, the whole thing is compiled offline on my laptop. Might set up a periodic refresh if people find it useful -- but I suspect the listing will change as much. Maybe once a month is good enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390
I planned to revive it later, but life got in the way
The book recommendation aggregation website is so common because it’s one of the few variations of this theme that can be monetized through affiliate links.
None of them last long because the traffic falls to zero basically as soon as it falls off the front page.
Hackerbooks, but for wikipedia :)
I hope you enjoy it.