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Posted by roansh 21 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.

1491 points | 246 commentspage 6
guest__user 5 hours ago|
would be nice to select multiple radio buttons , as well as filter by nonfiction or fiction and genre
npilk 15 hours ago||
I noticed almost all of the top recommended books are written by men. A quick skim of the first 100 books on the home page and I see ~4 by women. The Fiction category was largely the same. Nothing against these books, I have read many and enjoyed them, but that's a pretty crazy ratio.

I will add some personal recommendations to maybe get picked up by the algorithm:

Science fiction:

- Parable of the Sower and Kindred, both by Octavia Butler

- The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World Is Forest, both by Ursula K Le Guin (also The Left Hand of Darkness, which I did see on there)

Non-science fiction:

- Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (essays)

- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Avicebron 12 hours ago|
I'll add my favorite. The Anvil of the World. rip Kage Baker.
armcat 15 hours ago||
I haven’t looked into the site code so don’t know if it’s some tracker or pure coincidence, but I own 15 of the first 20 books that showed up!
alex_young 20 hours 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.
thenthenthen 12 hours ago||
Some of the covers seem to be cropped? Also kinda astonished how bad a lot of cover designs are?
aunty_helen 18 hours ago||
It seems the published dates need tidied up. Brave new world is showing as published in the 2000s.

Very cool though and love seeing all of the covers in various forms of condition.

kieojk 9 hours ago||
Thank you so much. It's incredibly useful for many people
Erlangen 19 hours 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 19 hours ago|
yep, you're right, fixing it so it only counts comments that actually mention thackeray
hbarka 18 hours ago||
I assume that like Karpathy you used Claude Code Desktop. The harness seems to be more capable than VS Code or terminal. Could you have done it with TUI alone?
gtirloni 18 hours ago|
It's the same harness but in Claude Desktop (which now integrates Chat/Work/Code), you can easily install some plugins for web design, etc. Not that you can't in the TUI but in the GUI it's a few clicks away.
baxtr 16 hours ago|
Nice, I like it!

Feedback: I don’t understand how the rising category works. I looked up a couple of books and they seemed to have peaked a while ago.

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