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Posted by roansh 20 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.

1443 points | 243 commentspage 5
pndy 19 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 19 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 19 hours ago|
fixing it now. a "suggest a correction" button is a good idea too
WalterBright 17 hours ago||
"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...

I've mentioned it a couple times.

no1guangming 10 hours ago||
Love the site! It loads so fast that it actually survived the initial HN hug of death, which is already a miracle for any side project.
r0fl 9 hours ago|
It's hosted on cloudflare. The CDN there can handle millions of hits per day without breaking a sweat.
rushil_b_patel 15 hours ago||
Why not open source the repo ? People find something interesting and will built on top of it.
cation234 12 hours ago||
I bought and read Permutation City because it was mentioned here.
bawolff 18 hours ago||
It would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)
sheepjumpmoons 18 hours 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 17 hours ago||
AI can help with that too! Have it pwn the library's public endpoints to get access to their catalog.
guest__user 4 hours ago||
would be nice to select multiple radio buttons , as well as filter by nonfiction or fiction and genre
shouvik12 17 hours 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
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