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Posted by roansh 19 hours ago

Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN(hackerbooks.org)
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.

1413 points | 235 commentspage 4
5555watch 18 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.

Flemlord 17 hours 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.

roansh 10 hours ago|
added, every book page now has bookshop.org and amazon links (affiliate, disclosed). bookshop supports indie stores if you have a preference. fixing bunch of issues, feature requests in parallel too. thanks!
rishikeshs 1 hour ago||
Would you be interested in trying an Amazon link localizer[1]?

I built something[1] recently and would love to see hear your feedback.

Happy to give you some credits for free!

[1] https://slashlink.app

mattfrommars 18 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 17 hours 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 18 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 18 hours ago|||
This is the stock claude UI
roansh 18 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 :)
Iliketotalkabou 12 hours ago||
Claude is epic
jep888 6 hours ago||
Wonderful. I love the little side bonus of stumbling across alternate versions of book covers I haven't seen before.
bilater 18 hours ago||
Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.

https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

lacoolj 7 hours ago||
K someone make this into a spotify playlist please thx!
RetroTechie 16 hours 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 16 hours ago|

  # order selected volumes
  # bulk order all books on this site
(you could use Amazon affiliate links to help finance the site.)
gosen 15 hours ago||
Great idea and nice implementation, please keep it going! I'm waiting for HackerMusic and HackerNet now :)
Fordec 14 hours ago|
What I'm getting from all this is that YC is dropping the ball in not investing in their own recommendation engine.
gosen 14 hours ago||
Maybe that's their thoughtful decision and they just let people create whatever they want with HN data, which is good I guess
guest__user 4 hours ago||
would be nice to select multiple radio buttons , as well as filter by nonfiction or fiction and genre
pndy 18 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?

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