Hacker News Books
Data
book recommendations aggregator
SHOW HN2016
463points
184comments
#24of 2,264 in 2016
Top 2%of 2016 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
17 positive, 54 neutral or asking, 7 mixed, 32 critical, out of 110 comments about the project. Thread score -0.18.
Design: 1 for, 19 againstExecution: 0 for, 9 againstIdea: 5 for, 2 againstPricing: 5 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Simple, useful site for finding books
From 3 comments
Absolutely fantastic site I do have to say. Thanks for sharing, I think I will - and did already - find some interesting books to read. Thanks for this repository, I am sure I…
core2pro on HNNice. I'm always taking books that are mentioned in various HN comments and adding them to my reading list. Thanks for making it easy!
yekim on HNThis is amazing!!! Great idea, and really useful!
magic_beans on HN
Good way to find less popular gems
From 1 comment
Very cool! It seems that you weight karma a lot. In 2016 3rd book is about fractals (I'm sure its great) but probably only because its recommended by user with 110k karma ;) On…
nazgob on HN
Objections
Subscribe popup is intrusive and hijacks the back button
From 4 comments
Terrible pop-up subscription panel hijacking my back button.
RodericDay on HNHighly recommend "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator", number 18 on the list. Like others have said, for the love of god please get rid of the popup…
bballer on HNPlease do not ever pull that "Subscribe" pop-up stuff. Pleeasse don't do it... especially on a website whose target audience is the HackerNews folk, because they will not put up…
jszymborski on HNThe popup asking me to subscribe is an annoying trend I'm seeing on a lot of sites. It's the first time I've been to the site, why on earth would I sign up for anything without…
davb on HN
Rankings skewed by karma and affiliate-linked mentions; odd books rank high
From 4 comments
Very cool! It seems that you weight karma a lot. In 2016 3rd book is about fractals (I'm sure its great) but probably only because its recommended by user with 110k karma ;) On…
nazgob on HNYou should remove the numbering. It gives the impressions of some kind of ranking and I really doubt anyone should be looking to purchase "Palm OS Programming Second Edition"
pmorici on HNThis can't be top... there's so few technical books and a book about Palm OS programming is showing up here. Is there an 'all time' list that would be better? This contains a lot…
ultramancool on HNI love this. I think it gives too much weight to me. Look at 2016, and there's a bunch of books I've linked to. I believe these are great books, but it's a bit weird to see them…
DanBC on HN
Only books with Amazon, Safari or O'Reilly links are detected, missing many mentions
From 3 comments
But there's also a lot more books that are mentioned without the Amazon link. On the top of my head "The cathedral and the bazaar" is probably mentioned zillions of times. Are…
georgiev on HNSure, now only Amazon, Safari and O'Reilly links are processed, for the rest I'd need to recognize the website, make sure that it is a book and then get some meta.
leandot on HNWhat no "Zero to One"? No "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius"? Where's the "Innovator's Dilemma", or "Hard Things", or "Lean Startup", or "Creativity, Inc.", or "Black Swans", etc,…
fitzwatermellow on HN
Possible data errors such as duplicate entries and a Palm OS book ranked high
From 3 comments
Not sure if it's an anomaly or a repeating issue, but I notice that in week 30, Exploring Expect is listed twice, at positions 11 and 12.
cholantesh on HNThis can't be right. There's zero chance that "Palm OS Programming" is the 16th most mentioned book.
thesmallestcat on HNsomething seems off, Palm OS programming is mentioned as #16. This does not make sense.
tmaly on HN
Requests
Browse by category
From 2 comments
Nice site! Personally, I'd like to have the option to view by category. Maybe you could just pull this from Amazon or manually curate your own topics.
paulrosenzweig on HNAny option to browse books by category?
chrisrock on HN
Monthly and yearly top lists
From 3 comments
Nice site; I would have loved to see monthly and yearly lists too.
danmaz74 on HNsame - would love top books by month/year.
lukethomas on HNHaving a top year, month would be a 100x more attractive for me. Weekly is too much churn to figure out what is good.
nojvek on HN
Show mention frequency
From 1 comment
My feature request is to know the frequency with which these books are mentioned! I love the simplicity of the site though - thank you!
jamesfe on HN
Remove or soften the subscribe popup
From 2 comments
Nice project. The modal dialog to subscribe to the mailing list is annoying; why is every site doing this now. I too usually don't put a link to Amazon when mentioning a book,…
bambax on HNHighly recommend "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator", number 18 on the list. Like others have said, for the love of god please get rid of the popup…
bballer on HN
Questions
What new tech was used to build it
From 1 comment
What's the new tech you used for it?
vram22 on HN
How are shorthand book mentions like K&R handled
From 1 comment
some (mostly technical) books are mentioned in shorthand (eg. k&r and gof). how are those accounted for?
questionr on HN
Alternatives named
hnreads.com book finder using named entity recognition
From 1 comment
I made something last winter (http://www.hnreads.com/), though I haven't fixed a couple of bugs or updated it since. I used named entity recognition rather than links to find…
_lpa_ on HN
ramiro.org top Amazon-linked HN books list
From 1 comment
There are quite a few book recommenders based on HN data. This recent one came to mind: Top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments…
louprado on HN
vivalabooks.com book review site
From 1 comment
I'd like to shamelessly plug my own site here. The itch I was trying to scratch was to have an HN like site for books that could lead to discovering and promoting higher quality…
marai2 on HN