I remember there were multiple such websites before being shared in HN. I bookmarked them, and a couple years later when I finally wanted to find a book, the only thing I got is 404.
I hope this one lives longer.
I like the idea, but the wording might need to change as to how it counts a recommendation. As it stands Mein Kampf has been "recommended" by 651 HNers, a troubling statistic!
If you’re using claude to build the whole thing and gather and parse the data, how on earth are you unable to get it to filter out the noise and show recommendations?
Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.
And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.
Slightly different take - use the Claude / OpenAI / muse desktop navigation integration to actually go into your YouTube account and like all the videos and watch them for a bit to seed your algorithm.
I want this but for podcasts. I pick a podcast I subscribe to say the Tim Ferris show and I see book mentions by episode/theme/tim/guest with links to favorite/library/amazon. Life's too fragile for me to make something public like that but it's fairly easy is'nt it. Every passing year I'm surprised it doesn't exist yet, especially nowadays given how easy it is to obtain transcripts.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The “mentions since” picker appears to be broken, nothing in the list changes as far as I can see. Also I wish it wouldn’t add another page to my history.
Good catch, thanks! The filter was using a book's most recent mention on HN, which is pretty much always recent for popular books, thats why nothing changed? It now filters by when a book was first mentioned instead. and filters shouldn't add to history anymore.
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
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.
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 :)
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?
The next stage is "HackerTime", a startup providing enough time to watch all the video and read all the books and play all the game and read all the news on "HackerZ for Z in tube, books, games, news".
With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...
The "Other" category has a whole load of random stuff in it, including TV series like Breaking, and music like Thriller or Master of Puppets. There's also some wonky attribution in places, like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams"
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.
I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood
I am really loving what people are building on similar ideas close to HackerTube and I am tinkering something of my own as well with these new ideas.
Awesome Idea and I would love to see what else community tinkers with things like these :-D
Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.
Edit: I will try to read thinking fast and slow because of HN recommendations. I have heard some good things about the book but I will try to read it in future given HN's immense recommendations, so your website has already had a negative net positive for me :-D
It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.
We've banned this account for repeatedly (exclusively?) posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Haha yeah. Looks like 226 different people brought it up, so it's in the top ~100. That's the "counts mentions" issue I guess. Also, the homepage shows random books (shuffled daily)
You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to suppose it to be a work not worth reading. It is not the best piece of writing, not even of Marx's, but its influence on humanity is enormous; that should suffice for the value in reading it.
Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.
"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...
I've mentioned it a couple times.
I remember there were multiple such websites before being shared in HN. I bookmarked them, and a couple years later when I finally wanted to find a book, the only thing I got is 404. I hope this one lives longer.
I like the idea, but the wording might need to change as to how it counts a recommendation. As it stands Mein Kampf has been "recommended" by 651 HNers, a troubling statistic!
It should have been recommended by 1939 HNers.
Noted, pushing a fix for the wording for now. Will also look into improving the recommendations.
Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"
If you’re using claude to build the whole thing and gather and parse the data, how on earth are you unable to get it to filter out the noise and show recommendations?
Maybe his Claude tokens ran out, and Cursor switched him over to Grok, which highly recommended Mein Kampf.
Sure can, coming right along
Hey, maybe the aspiring entrepreneurs just want to emulate the most successful tech bro’s ? ;)
It was infamously on the president's bedside reading list.
I'm beginning to like this new internet…
Content curation will be overhauled for a world with WAY more content of lower average quality.
Heavily curated like this is one direction. Micro consumables (ala tiktok) supporting more impressions is another.
The site is really fast. I see HTTP/3, OpenGraph, and Cloudflare. Can you expand on the technologies used?
Also... "Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it."
> Please don't put generated text in HN posts.
Claude speak gives me a gag reflex these days.
Local search index is the key to responsiveness.
Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.
And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.
Slightly different take - use the Claude / OpenAI / muse desktop navigation integration to actually go into your YouTube account and like all the videos and watch them for a bit to seed your algorithm.
I want this but for podcasts. I pick a podcast I subscribe to say the Tim Ferris show and I see book mentions by episode/theme/tim/guest with links to favorite/library/amazon. Life's too fragile for me to make something public like that but it's fairly easy is'nt it. Every passing year I'm surprised it doesn't exist yet, especially nowadays given how easy it is to obtain transcripts.
Build it!
Claude can turn something like this around in less than a day.
That would be cool
It would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)
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.
This was done already, back in 2021!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
Funny, I bookmark interesting things all the time on here. I had this bookmarked. I've never revisited it.
Now we need HackerBookmarks - HackerBook, but for bookmarks.
Perhaps even `HackerHackerGlob`, a system for spinning out LLM generated curations of any aspect of HN.
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?
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.
this has already existed for a long time, but I think it would be cool if it was really recommendations, instead of just mentions
Yep, we can go back years to find sites like this. Here's one from 2021[1] and I swear I saw another site like this earlier this year.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
There have been a few. Here's one I found right away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
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.
The “mentions since” picker appears to be broken, nothing in the list changes as far as I can see. Also I wish it wouldn’t add another page to my history.
Good catch, thanks! The filter was using a book's most recent mention on HN, which is pretty much always recent for popular books, thats why nothing changed? It now filters by when a book was first mentioned instead. and filters shouldn't add to history anymore.
Much better now, thank you!
If this is the bug-reporting subthread: "Show more comments" stops working after clicking it once.
It only keeps 30 comments per book so the second click was the last one :) pushed a minor fix, will look into adding all comments later
This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
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
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.
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.
This is the stock claude UI
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 :)
I love this and feel it would be greatly enhanced with semantic search.
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?
The next stage is "HackerTime", a startup providing enough time to watch all the video and read all the books and play all the game and read all the news on "HackerZ for Z in tube, books, games, news".
With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...
I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.
https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/
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
fixing it now. a "suggest a correction" button is a good idea too
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.
yep, you're right, fixing it so it only counts comments that actually mention thackeray
apparently angry birds is a book? and it's more popular than the new testament in the "other" category.
The "Other" category has a whole load of random stuff in it, including TV series like Breaking, and music like Thriller or Master of Puppets. There's also some wonky attribution in places, like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams"
User: Hey Chat, is Angry Birds more popular than the New Testament?
Assistant: Are you trying to get me shut down?
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.
Have AI create a clean room rewrite of each book, so we can read them on the site.
Gold gold . Thanks .now i need one for yt and one for only science papers
Did you see this already? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510
Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
HackerMovies someone with free tokens please
close enough to https://letterboxd.com/official/list/letterboxds-top-500-fil...
Well that one is easy!
- The Matrix (1999) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Hackers (1995) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105435
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088247
- WarGames (1983) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
There you go, that’s the entire list :)
Don't forget the most prescient one!
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
"Never send a human to do a machine's job"
Hacker Music tomorrow?
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on hacker hack
Will that be a list of websites we should all hack?
I expected way more books for software engineering.
I'd love to see a books and youtube thing for metafilter too. It has a similarly good recommendation history for me.
I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood
Love this idea, building a trends page now.
Built it - https://hackerbooks.org/#/trends
I wonder if you've built it faster than I wrote that post.
I am really loving what people are building on similar ideas close to HackerTube and I am tinkering something of my own as well with these new ideas.
Awesome Idea and I would love to see what else community tinkers with things like these :-D
Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.
Edit: I will try to read thinking fast and slow because of HN recommendations. I have heard some good things about the book but I will try to read it in future given HN's immense recommendations, so your website has already had a negative net positive for me :-D
> Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.
It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)
Slop
Ayn Rand so high, though!
Let us hope it was mentions about how idiotic of a book it is...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
Or HackerNudes!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
NSFSIGGRAPH:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071#page=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hcker.news - filters out by keywords, domains and users
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308787 - keeps the default look while just removing AI-related submissions
I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.
Good idea. Maybe focus on posts that stay on the topic.
[flagged]
We've banned this account for repeatedly (exclusively?) posting unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Haha yeah. Looks like 226 different people brought it up, so it's in the top ~100. That's the "counts mentions" issue I guess. Also, the homepage shows random books (shuffled daily)
You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to suppose it to be a work not worth reading. It is not the best piece of writing, not even of Marx's, but its influence on humanity is enormous; that should suffice for the value in reading it.
Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.
It would be much more amazing if theres just a link to download all thees books as a ZIP file.
If some AI influencer could please do that and post a link here as a comment i'll give you some upvoates
FUCK whoever downvoted me, an ACTUAL CURSE upon you
Don't complain about downvotes because that just gets you downvoted even harder.