Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
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Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app#hacker news books#book recommendations#book mentions#reading list 2025
613points
212comments
#48of 3,837 in 2025
Top 2%of 2025 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
11 positive, 40 neutral or asking, 8 mixed, 32 critical, out of 91 comments about the project. Thread score -0.21.
Execution: 0 for, 22 againstIdea: 6 for, 7 againstDesign: 1 for, 2 againstDocs: 0 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
Good list of recommended books and a fun way to explore
From 3 comments
Great books listed here! Added some to my TBR list. Thanks! I'm a little surprised the numbers aren't higher across the board.
odie5533 on HNBest HN post of the year. I just surfaced after hours exploring.
bookofjoe on HNThis is just great! Thanks for building.
kaizenb on HN
Nice to see a 2025 reading list represented
From 1 comment
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented. I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who…
bdunks on HN
Objections
Disambiguation errors merge different books with similar titles
From 6 comments
I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11 mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian…
omoikane on HNLove this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN. Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN…
yoan9224 on HNI think some of the book associations are wrong. It shows "the martian chronicles" for mentions of andy weir's "the martian". Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read…
notepad0x90 on HNSome more errors: Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in…
card_zero on HNThere's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts Programming Rust as the same book.
cwnyth on HNNice! The entry for Abundance [0] is listed as another book (An Abundance of Katherines [1]) [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444106-abundance [1]…
JDEW on HN
Mentions from quotes and unrelated contexts are counted
From 3 comments
It looks like it's not handling comments correctly and counts books mentioned in ">".
dewey on HNSearching Mein Kampf adds some decent data on what to filter out, or tag differently. A lot of it comes up in discussions on banned books etc.…
muzani on HNHow are the data processed? It doesn't look easy. For instance there is "Foundation" in the list, a common word, how does the algorithm distinguish between just the word and a…
GuB-42 on HN
Some known book mentions are missing from the list
From 3 comments
The indexing must be flakey. I have mentioned various books multiple times with links to their respective Amazon pages. No mentions of them.
lo_zamoyski on HNi mentioned 5 books in a comment[0], only 3 where registered by this tool. Wonder why :D [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965191
4ggr0 on HNVery strange, System Programming in Linux book was mentioned many times in HN before but apparently not in the list, but maybe just not this year [1]. [1] System Programming in…
teleforce on HN
Requests
CSV export of the book list
From 1 comment
CSV export (just the book list) would be welcome.
krick on HN
Filter out single-mention books or sort by fewer mentions
From 1 comment
Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll…
analogpixel on HN
Add data for 2024 and earlier years
From 2 comments
You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.…
furyofantares on HNCan you also make it for 2024 and previous years?
mkbkn on HN
Per-book URLs for linking
From 1 comment
Good work, thanks for this. It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped book so that users could link to, say, the entry for A Texbook of Engineering…
defrost on HN
Questions
How is the extraction done, LLM or traditional NER?
From 3 comments
Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN. Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN…
yoan9224 on HNWould love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments. I assume this one uses a…
hubraumhugo on HNSuch a great collection! I wonder how it was achieved, definitely not by LLM, was it?
novoreorx on HN
What is the cutoff date?
From 1 comment
What is the cut off date? It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
Freak_NL on HN
Alternatives named
hackernewsbooks.com
From 1 comment
Have you seen https://hackernewsbooks.com ?
endlessvoid94 on HN
HackerNews Readings (vercel app)
From 1 comment
There was another one, HackerNews Readings, but seems to be not updated. https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/
Brajeshwar on HN