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Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments

1043 points by gkst 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
SloopJon 11y ago
Here's a discussion of the original upload of Hacker News data to Google BigQuery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 At 4 GB, I'd just as soon query this locally, but this looks like a fun exercise. I notice that there were 10,729 distinct ASINs out of 15,583 Amazon links in 8,399,417 comments. Since I don't generally (ever?) post Amazon links, I'd be interested in expanding on this in two ways. First, I'd reduce/eliminate the weight of repeated links to the same book by the same commenter. Second, I'd search for references to the linked books that aren't Amazon links. Someone links to Code Complete? Add it to the list. In a second pass, increment its count every time you see "Code Complete," whether it's in a link or not.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  > At 4 GB, I'd just as soon query this locally, but this looks like a fun exercise. This requires scraping all the Hacker News data manually, for which I have a tool to do so (https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...) which I mentioned in the post you linked, but it still requires a significant amount of time to get/process the data, hence why the BigQuery dataset has a significant advantage.
- gkst 11y ago
  Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Your seconds suggestion brings some rather complex problems, for example if a comment goes like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an endorsement, while linking to a book in most cases is. Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book. So this would require some form of sentiment analysis and also require book titles to be uniquely identifiable.
  - flubert 11y ago
    >Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book. ...but the counts might be low enough to manually check for those instances. I'm surprised the counts are so low.
    - gkst 11y ago
      The counts would be a lot higher I guess, if I searched for book titles instead of links to a particular shop.
    - tedmiston 11y ago
      I know we traditionally process tokens as case-insensitive, but... it seems reasonable to assume in HN comments that book titles would be capitalized properly (so we could ignore non-capitalized titles). Whether or not this information is present in the version on BigQuery, I'm not sure though.
      - gkst 11y ago
        The full text of the comment is available on BigQuery, but I can't write an SQL query that returns all comments containing potential book titles. To do such an analysis I'd need to download all 8M comments and process them individually and find a good way to detect book titles.
  - jkyle 11y ago
    > if a comment goes like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an endorsement True, but they read it. Which is a testament to its popularity. If the list were treated like a New York Times Best Sellers list and not a testament of absolute quality, mentions would be sufficient.
  - flubert 11y ago
    >Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Yes, it looks like at least 14 of the "The Rent Is Too Damn High" links seem to come from the user "jseliger": https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+B0078XGJXO+jseliger https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...
anc84 11y ago
Please share how much the affiliate tag generates.
- gkst 11y ago
  Do you accept any form of advertising on the web?
  - realusername 11y ago
    I would also be interested by the results, just by curiosity. I'm not judging you at all.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - akamaka 11y ago
    I think the site you built is great, and I would be happy if you also make some affliate commissions from it! If you share the numbers, that's a bonus. All HN readers love more data!
    - gkst 11y ago
      I consider doing a writeup.
  - anc84 11y ago
    Hey, people misinterpreted my post (can't blame them, it was very sparse). I am genuinely interested in the kind of money this can generate and would highly appreciate regular follow-ups if you don't mind sharing.
- source99 11y ago
  Re-tagging the most popular books. Brilliant!
- artursapek 11y ago
  I remember Jeff Atwood's 4k monitor review post [1]. Someone had calculated that he made thousands of dollars pimping that thing. I have no issue with people doing this, as long as their posts are not solely motivated by wanting an excuse to post their affiliate link. I guess the more popular you get, the more likely that is to happen. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/our-brave-new-world-of-4k-displays/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/our-brave-new-world-of-4k-displ...
nefitty 11y ago
Hard to read on mobile. Couldn't get past the first few. It is annoying to have to click a tiny thumbnail to read a bad, extracted synopsis from Amazon.
willyyr 11y ago
There is a similar site that didn't make it to the front page which has been posted recently. I think he is using the api though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014
timdorr 11y ago
It would be nice to link to the comments where the books were referenced.
- gkst 11y ago
  Good suggestion, thanks!
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    You could list them like reviews are listed on other sites.
myth_buster 11y ago
I believe people would just write the name of the really popular books like TAOCP, Hackers, Founders at work etc rather than linking to them. The list: "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" by Matthew Yglesias Publisher: Simon & Schuster "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win" by Steven Gary Blank Publisher: Cafepress.com "Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" by Thomas H. Cormen Publisher: The MIT Press "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition" by Robert B. Cialdini Publisher: Harper Business "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)" by Visit Amazon's Tom DeMarco Page Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold Publisher: Microsoft Press "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers Publisher: Prentice Hall "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate Publisher: Encounter Books "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford Publisher: O'Reilly Media "The Little Schemer - 4th Edition" by Daniel P. Friedman Publisher: The MIT Press "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber Publisher: HarperCollins "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns Publisher: Harper "Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" by Toby Segaran Publisher: O'Reilly Media "The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd Edition)" by Robin Williams Publisher: Peachpit Press "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan Publisher: Prentice Hall "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman Publisher: Basic Books "Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell Publisher: CareerCup "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith E. Stanovich Publisher: Yale University Press "On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction" by William Zinsser Publisher: Harper Perennial "Darwin's Theorem" by TJ Radcliffe Publisher: Siduri Press "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)" by Liping Ma Publisher: Routledge "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition" by Steve Krug Publisher: New Riders "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden Publisher: Prentice Hall "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin Publisher: Prentice Hall "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan Publisher: The MIT Press "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition" by Steve McConnell Publisher: Microsoft Press "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson Publisher: Princeton University Press "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Developer Best Practices)" by Steve McConnell Publisher: Microsoft Press "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional "Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty" by David Kadavy Publisher: Wiley
abstractalgebra 11y ago
In most such lists there's a distinct lack of math books even though there are tons of great math books specifically written for programmers and compsci people.
noobie 11y ago
Sad I couldn't find none of non-technical books on Audible. Any audiobook "readers" out there?
meadori 11y ago
Having owned and read through "Introduction to Algorithms" for years I agree that it is a good book. However, recently I have been feeling like it is recommended way too often without thought. It is not the best when it comes to explaining things in an intuitive manner. It is a great reference book with lots of algorithms and proofs. In recent years I have been drawn more towards Levitin's "Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms". Anyone else have similar feelings about "Introduction to Algorithms"?
- yati 11y ago
  I second you. I have found Steven Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual"[1] to be a great book in this regard. Of course, like you say, CLRS remains an excellent reference. [1]: http://www.algorist.com/ http://www.algorist.com/
  - gjm11 11y ago
    I think Skiena and CLRS are complementary, each compensating well for the limitations of the other. If you were going to have exactly two algorithms books, I'm not sure I can think of a better pair.
- eachro 11y ago
  I use CLRS more as a reference than anything else. If I need to quickly review some data structures or algorithms for an interview, I'll look up the relevant chapters in it. If I really want to understand something like max flow-min cut, I'll turn to "Algorithm Design" by Kleinberg and Tardos, which often has a much more intuitive explanation for concepts(imo).
- myth_buster 11y ago
  For me CLRS was a book that explained concepts in an easy to absorb fashion. For example the dynamic programming chapter is top notch. While the "War Story" section in Skiena's book gave a great perspective of application of the theory.
- Kluny 11y ago
  I feel that way about "Don't Make Me Think". It was a good summary of design principles, but even as a beginner I didn't feel as if I got much new information out of it. It was pretty lite. It's overrecommended, I think.
ck2 11y ago
Now that is a website with a nice clean layout and easy to read.
- gkst 11y ago
  Thanks!
joeax 11y ago
"The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" Not where I live. What to do about it? Move. Find an employer willing to let you work remotely, and find your own quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise.
- mwsherman 11y ago
  Yes, but it’s complicated. Cities have become more valuable in the age of the Internet, against my predictions, intuitions and preferences! Too few companies offer remote, because remote is hard. My experience at Stack is that remote work really only happens when a company supports it “natively” from the start. It’ll take a generation to make a dent, sadly. I’d like to be wrong.
  - krisdol 11y ago
    Agree, fully. I add that remote feels incredibly easy when it's ingrained in the company, as it is for the one I work at right now. After experiencing it, I feel like it really doesn't have to be as hard as my previous employers made it out to be.
- krisdol 11y ago
  > quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise Some of us like living in the city :(.
  - flubert 11y ago
    In fact, people like living in a city so much, that gobs of them are willing to pay a premium in order to do so. Oh, wait...
    - krisdol 11y ago
      Absolutely. But I don't think city living needs to be expensive. Looking toward the more population-dense central Europe, average families are able to afford to live in urban areas because there is far more urban housing available throughout the countries, and it's not just concentrated in a couple of metropolitan cities. The demand for urban living outpaces supply of urban housing the United States. We need a great urban housing expansion throughout the country to make city living affordable again.
veritas3241 11y ago
This is really awesome! Thank you for putting this together.
- gkst 11y ago
  Thanks!
enitihas 11y ago
I am surprised to see the absence of SICP or anything from Dale Carnegie.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  Who links to amazon for SICP?
  - abstractalgebra 11y ago
    I do sometimes if only just for the comments.
nextos 11y ago
Is it possible that some books have been missed due to acronyms employed in comments? E.g: - SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - CTM: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming - TAOP: The Art of Prolog
- gkst 11y ago
  If the comment contained a link to amazon, then no. If only the title was mentioned then yes.
- gamesbrainiac 11y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, there was no way that SICP wasn't in that list, because its probably one of the best programming books written. And no matter who I recommend the book to, they say the same thing.
_lpa_ 11y ago
I did something pretty similar over christmas, though I used named entity recognition to extract book titles rather than looking for amazon links, and (so far) also limited it to specific "Ask HN" threads about books. You can find it here: http://www.hnreads.com/ http://www.hnreads.com/. It is interesting to see how little overlap there is between the two, though that may be due to my using far fewer (and also newer) threads!
- gkst 11y ago
  Cool project! Do you mind telling which library or service you used for the named entity recognition?
  - _lpa_ 11y ago
    I actually wrote it myself, based on conditional random fields! I would not recommend doing this - it was mostly an exercise to learn how they work. I should probably have mentioned that I manually cleaned up the results a bit. I understand nltk has NER capabilities and python bindings, though.
    - gkst 11y ago
      Thanks for your reply! Going to look into the NER capabilities of NLTK.
- jccalhoun 11y ago
  As a non-programmer I find your list more interesting.
- erispoe 11y ago
  Interesting that your list yields mainly fiction, while OP's list is mainly non-fiction.
- temo4ka 11y ago
  Many thanks for sharing this. One usability nitpick though: please consider fixing links so that they could be opened in new tabs/windows.
Ocerge 11y ago
Oh god, that algorithms book. Flashbacks to college memorizing red-black trees coming to me.
- apendleton 11y ago
  They made you memorize the red-black tree algorithm?! Why? The whole purpose of a reference book like that one is to not have to memorize it. If you need to implement a red-black tree, you just look it up (I have done exactly that, with that book and that algorithm).
  - Ocerge 11y ago
    Just for tests and stuff, but I specifically remember memorizing tree rotations and the like. I've forgotten all of them by now :)
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    To be fair, most companies don't let you bring your "Introduction to Algorithms" textbook in with you for a whiteboard interview where they expect you to regurgitate exactly how to do Red Black trees or any of a hundred other concepts from memory, so having him memorize isn't necessarily awful.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Related: There are a ton of sites set up like this. Hopefully somebody will post a list. Lotta work by HN folks on various ways of slicing and dicing the data. I wrote this curated site from HN several years ago. Got tired of people continuously asking for book recommendations. http://www.hn-books.com/ http://www.hn-books.com/ Couple points of note. This is 1) an example of a static site, 2) terrible UI, 3) contains live searches to comments on each book from all the major hacking sites, and 4) able to record a list of books that you can then share as a link, like so (which was my reason for making the site) "My favorite programming books? Here they are: http://www.hn-books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=114&B6=107&BC=7&EC=0&FC=0&QC=0 http://www.hn-books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=1... " I started writing reviews each month on the books, but because they were all awesome books, I got tired of so many superlatives! Thanks for the site.
- marai2 11y ago
  Also Related: Thanks for setting up that curated list. I'll definitely be going through it to get recommendations. I got tired of seeing such recommendations being asked repeatedly and then disappear on HN so I created this: http://www.vivalabooks.com http://www.vivalabooks.com Basically a Hackernews for books.
jacko0 11y ago
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. The best book I've ever read.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Could (should?) be a class for teenagers of all kind. Sure the gradual creation of morse code could make them thrilled.
- coldpie 11y ago
  I completely agree, this book is fantastic. I read it in high school and I've been meaning to re-read it ever since.
- cbhl 11y ago
  I find it shocking that out of eight million comments, the top book is only mentioned ~50 times, but the parent comment illustrates why -- many people mention title/author pairs without linking to the book itself. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold (http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2 http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2)
- sien 11y ago
  It's the best book to recommend for people who want a rapid introduction to computers that really provides some understanding. It really is outstanding.
- leksak 11y ago
  The replies to this comment are all endorsements as well and as such would not get picked up by this web-scraping. Great book though. Amazon link intentionally omitted
deadowl 11y ago
I've read a grand total of two of those. Working Effectively with Legacy Code seems like it would make for a good read.
clarkmoody 11y ago
Easiest way to make it to the top of Hacker News: Hacker News meta posts. Always interesting to read. But just as interesting is how quickly they pop to the top of the home page.
Sealy 11y ago
Interesting list. I clicked on the top book and Amazon peer reviews gave it 2.5 stars out of 5 with 450+ reviews. I admire the effort. Calling it Top Books is slightly misleading. Perhaps you can call it, most mentioned books.
- ssgao 11y ago
  perhaps taking a look at the negative reviews can reveal a little more secret. This is one of them: It is sad that someone published this crap and killed thousands of trees. Do you know how long it will take to regrow those trees? 20-30 years. Your selfish lust for money lead you to get up all your principals. SHAME.
niuzeta 11y ago
The absence of SICP, I imagine, is because when people refer to the SICP, they usually just link to the open link to the book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ .
- gkst 11y ago
  Yes, that is probably the case. Quoting from the post "Amazon is often the goto website for referring books, but many books have dedicated homepages as well as pages pages on their publisher's website. Moreover, many freely available are referred frequently in comments, but are not considered in this ranking." The approach used here has limitations, I hoped to make that clear by pointing them out and choosing titles and headlines accordingly.
corysama 11y ago
Interesting to see Influence so high, but Predictably Irrational not listed at all. I've heard Influence is a really great book, but from a quick skim it seems like Predictably Irrational covers the subject matter as least as well if not better. I'd be happy to hear the opinion of someone who has actually read both.
- misiti3780 11y ago
  Influence was a great book, but it is a bit outdated (in my opinion). Predictably Irrational and his other books were much more relevant. Thinking Fast and Slow was the best one of then all.
- agentgt 11y ago
  I was surprised not to see Dale Carnegie's book either but I suppose its rather dated and not as scientific (How to win friends and...). Carnegie's book had some of the greatest impacts on my personal life and professional.
  - jamestnz 11y ago
    Agree, that book is a real classic, I got my copy from amazon actually. As a side note, the failure of both of us to actually mention the book's full title (or include its amazon link) presumably means that neither of the services being discussed would have registered this as a vote for the book. We're part of the problem! ;)
- wbeckler 11y ago
  I've read both and Influence is far more useful if you're trying to, well, influence someone. The art of influencing is complex and involves more than just a few behavioral economics insights. Influence is a total framework for understanding the psychology and emotions of selling.
a-dub 11y ago
There are a couple of goodies in there, but tbh that list is pretty depressing.
smartial_arts 11y ago
Is this some sort of a promo trap? When clicking on book links I get taken to pages like this one http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html
- mintplant 11y ago
  That doesn't happen for me, at least with uBlock on.
- gkst 11y ago
  That page isn't linked in this post. I don't know that site and won't click that link to find out what it is about.
  - smartial_arts 11y ago
    No it is not, but I get redirected to it on my Android phone after clicking on book covers or graph.
bodecker 11y ago
Suggestion: enable arrow keys to allow for easier scrolling through the books
andy_ppp 11y ago
Here is a talk Matthew Yglesias gave about the contents of his book "The Rent Is Too Damn High": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ
Aaronontheweb 11y ago
A little surprised to see that the Mythical Man Month isn't on that list: http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF
- yaworsk 11y ago
  I'd be interested to know how many affiliate sales you get from this link :)
  - Aaronontheweb 11y ago
    After seeing other people grumbling about the affiliate stuff on the website in this thread, I couldn't resist trying to do it on the thread itself :p
    - yaworsk 11y ago
      how did it turn out?
Havoc 11y ago
Must admit I was expecting less programming books. A lot of the topics on here aren't directly programming related. Thanks for the list though. Bought the psychology one.
rplittle 11y ago
Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon
- jseliger 11y ago
  Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon At some point someone with a megaphone encouraged their listeners / viewers to brigade the book with bad reviews. They did so and the low star count is the result. I'm trying to Google for details over the brouhaha but can't find the correct keywords.
  - gsb 11y ago
    I was also curious since it was so obviously a brigade with most reviews posted on the same day. It seems he angered Breitbart fans with a tweet: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200
dankohn1 11y ago
Here is Matt Yglesias's (author of the #1 book) tweet on the analysis: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257 "The only book ranking that matters"
- bduerst 11y ago
  Probably because 60% of the reviews are 1-star for his book.
carpdiem 11y ago
I notice that this list looks like it has a very long tail. Can we get the top 100 books as well? (since many of those would have very similar mention numbers as the end of the top-30)
tern 11y ago
I maintain a list of HN hacks here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/hacker-news https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/hacker-news. I've seen a couple other book projects over the years including: http://hn-books.com/ http://hn-books.com/ and http://hackershelf.com/browse/ http://hackershelf.com/browse/.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  That's going straight to Pinboard. I've considered building the same myself. It would be lovely if you tracked the various HN reader client apps. A few that come to mind are: Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome [1], Hacker Menu for OS X [2], and Premii's HN web app [3]. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... 2: https://hackermenu.io/ https://hackermenu.io/ 3: https://hn.premii.com/ https://hn.premii.com/
  - msutherl 11y ago
    Unfortunately only adding stuff I like, and I'm not a big fan of any of the client-apps / HN makeover extensions I've seen. I do use these two Chrome extensions though: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-colors/adailobllebnhioglgkmaioilhlkdden https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-colors... + https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus....
DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
amazed that nobody talks about W. Richard Stevens anymore. i am getting old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens
mattip 11y ago
Out of 8 million data points the top book got around 50 references. I wonder how much significance should be attached to that, it looks to me to be down in the noise level.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tedmiston 11y ago
I wonder why Steve Blank would publish a book via CafePress. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win Author: Steven Gary Blank Publisher: Cafepress.com Number of links: 45
a_bonobo 11y ago
How come "Darwin's Theorem" appears so often? It's quite unknown, with one review on Goodreads and 4 reviews on Amazon Is this a result of the author spamming his own work? Edit: Looks like it, short skimming of "darwin's theorem site:news.ycombinator.com" shows that all links are from user tjradcliffe, who is the author. A case for manual curation of data.
- tagawa 11y ago
  Or a case for counting a single author's multiple links of the same book as one vote.
greesil 11y ago
Check out the review distribution of "Rent Is Too Damn High" http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/product-reviews/B0078XGJXO/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/product-r... It's the most polarized I've ever seen in my life.
- brink 11y ago
  Just like HN.
- vellum 11y ago
  He made a snarky comment about Andrew Bartbeit's death, so conservatives gave him a slew of one star reviews. If you filter by "verified purchases", it's not as polarized.
meetbryce 11y ago
Your links don't open in a new tab, despite the icon and even if I use my middle mouse button. Extremely annoying.
pjdorrell 11y ago
Possible application of Law of Unintended Consequences: every time you write a program to extract data _out_ of HN, you increase motivation for someone else to insert data _into_ HN.
beefsack 11y ago
I wonder how many books would be on the list if it were somehow easy to extract mentions by name instead of by link. Mythical Man Month is mentioned regularly here and I don't think it's linked very often because of how well known it is.
mandeepj 11y ago
I also do it most of the time. When ever I see a book recommendation here then I go to amazon either to buy it or save it in my wish list.
joshmaher 11y ago
Does that include comments on this article about books being read from links in the comments? Here's one on understanding the mindset of your investors when raising startup capital - Startup Wealth - http://amzn.to/1Jej8El http://amzn.to/1Jej8El
pentium10 11y ago
In 2015, at Crunch Practical Bigdata Conference, Budapest, I showcased what books some subreddit community talk about: startups, entrepreneur, productivity reads. Slides are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event-analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29 http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event...
dschiptsov 11y ago
How come that SICP is not here?
dpflan 11y ago
Cool - maybe this can become a monthly recap of posted books / (links)?
q-base 11y ago
Anyone who has read the #1 book (Rent is too high) and who might want to add a few comments about it? What it describes, suggests etc. Never heard about it before.
arnold_palmur 11y ago
How is A Guide to the Good Life not on here - I feel like I see it mentioned at least once a day.
spinchange 11y ago
Might as well add a link to a book I learned about on HN but never seem to run across since, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th Edition: http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-Handbook-Edition/dp/0131480057 http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-Handbook-E...
fhoffa 11y ago
Nice! On https://reddit.com/r/bigquery https://reddit.com/r/bigquery, /u/omicron_n2 left queries to repeat the experiment on HN and on reddit comments too: - https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_on_amazon_based_on_links_in_hacker/ https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_o... And a presentation by /u/Pentium10 on the same topic, using the books that redditors read: - http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event-analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29 http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event...

1043 points by gkst 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Here's a discussion of the original upload of Hacker News data to Google BigQuery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502 At 4 GB, I'd just as soon query this locally, but this looks like a fun exercise. I notice that there were 10,729 distinct ASINs out of 15,583 Amazon links in 8,399,417 comments. Since I don't generally (ever?) post Amazon links, I'd be interested in expanding on this in two ways. First, I'd reduce/eliminate the weight of repeated links to the same book by the same commenter. Second, I'd search for references to the linked books that aren't Amazon links. Someone links to Code Complete? Add it to the list. In a second pass, increment its count every time you see "Code Complete," whether it's in a link or not.

minimaxir 11y ago
> At 4 GB, I'd just as soon query this locally, but this looks like a fun exercise. This requires scraping all the Hacker News data manually, for which I have a tool to do so (https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news-submissions...) which I mentioned in the post you linked, but it still requires a significant amount of time to get/process the data, hence why the BigQuery dataset has a significant advantage.
gkst 11y ago
Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Your seconds suggestion brings some rather complex problems, for example if a comment goes like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an endorsement, while linking to a book in most cases is. Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book. So this would require some form of sentiment analysis and also require book titles to be uniquely identifiable.
- flubert 11y ago
  >Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book. ...but the counts might be low enough to manually check for those instances. I'm surprised the counts are so low.
  - gkst 11y ago
    The counts would be a lot higher I guess, if I searched for book titles instead of links to a particular shop.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    I know we traditionally process tokens as case-insensitive, but... it seems reasonable to assume in HN comments that book titles would be capitalized properly (so we could ignore non-capitalized titles). Whether or not this information is present in the version on BigQuery, I'm not sure though.
    - gkst 11y ago
      The full text of the comment is available on BigQuery, but I can't write an SQL query that returns all comments containing potential book titles. To do such an analysis I'd need to download all 8M comments and process them individually and find a good way to detect book titles.
- jkyle 11y ago
  > if a comment goes like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an endorsement True, but they read it. Which is a testament to its popularity. If the list were treated like a New York Times Best Sellers list and not a testament of absolute quality, mentions would be sufficient.
- flubert 11y ago
  >Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Yes, it looks like at least 14 of the "The Rent Is Too Damn High" links seem to come from the user "jseliger": https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+B0078XGJXO+jseliger https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...

anc84 11y ago

Please share how much the affiliate tag generates.

gkst 11y ago
Do you accept any form of advertising on the web?
- realusername 11y ago
  I would also be interested by the results, just by curiosity. I'm not judging you at all.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- akamaka 11y ago
  I think the site you built is great, and I would be happy if you also make some affliate commissions from it! If you share the numbers, that's a bonus. All HN readers love more data!
  - gkst 11y ago
    I consider doing a writeup.
- anc84 11y ago
  Hey, people misinterpreted my post (can't blame them, it was very sparse). I am genuinely interested in the kind of money this can generate and would highly appreciate regular follow-ups if you don't mind sharing.
source99 11y ago
Re-tagging the most popular books. Brilliant!
artursapek 11y ago
I remember Jeff Atwood's 4k monitor review post [1]. Someone had calculated that he made thousands of dollars pimping that thing. I have no issue with people doing this, as long as their posts are not solely motivated by wanting an excuse to post their affiliate link. I guess the more popular you get, the more likely that is to happen. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/our-brave-new-world-of-4k-displays/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/our-brave-new-world-of-4k-displ...

nefitty 11y ago

Hard to read on mobile. Couldn't get past the first few. It is annoying to have to click a tiny thumbnail to read a bad, extracted synopsis from Amazon.

willyyr 11y ago

There is a similar site that didn't make it to the front page which has been posted recently. I think he is using the api though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014

timdorr 11y ago

It would be nice to link to the comments where the books were referenced.

gkst 11y ago
Good suggestion, thanks!
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  You could list them like reviews are listed on other sites.

myth_buster 11y ago

I believe people would just write the name of the really popular books like TAOCP, Hackers, Founders at work etc rather than linking to them. The list: "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" by Matthew Yglesias Publisher: Simon & Schuster "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win" by Steven Gary Blank Publisher: Cafepress.com "Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" by Thomas H. Cormen Publisher: The MIT Press "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition" by Robert B. Cialdini Publisher: Harper Business "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)" by Visit Amazon's Tom DeMarco Page Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold Publisher: Microsoft Press "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers Publisher: Prentice Hall "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate Publisher: Encounter Books "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford Publisher: O'Reilly Media "The Little Schemer - 4th Edition" by Daniel P. Friedman Publisher: The MIT Press "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber Publisher: HarperCollins "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns Publisher: Harper "Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" by Toby Segaran Publisher: O'Reilly Media "The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd Edition)" by Robin Williams Publisher: Peachpit Press "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan Publisher: Prentice Hall "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman Publisher: Basic Books "Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell Publisher: CareerCup "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith E. Stanovich Publisher: Yale University Press "On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction" by William Zinsser Publisher: Harper Perennial "Darwin's Theorem" by TJ Radcliffe Publisher: Siduri Press "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)" by Liping Ma Publisher: Routledge "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition" by Steve Krug Publisher: New Riders "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden Publisher: Prentice Hall "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin Publisher: Prentice Hall "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan Publisher: The MIT Press "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition" by Steve McConnell Publisher: Microsoft Press "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson Publisher: Princeton University Press "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Developer Best Practices)" by Steve McConnell Publisher: Microsoft Press "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional "Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty" by David Kadavy Publisher: Wiley

abstractalgebra 11y ago

In most such lists there's a distinct lack of math books even though there are tons of great math books specifically written for programmers and compsci people.

noobie 11y ago

Sad I couldn't find none of non-technical books on Audible. Any audiobook "readers" out there?

meadori 11y ago

Having owned and read through "Introduction to Algorithms" for years I agree that it is a good book. However, recently I have been feeling like it is recommended way too often without thought. It is not the best when it comes to explaining things in an intuitive manner. It is a great reference book with lots of algorithms and proofs. In recent years I have been drawn more towards Levitin's "Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms". Anyone else have similar feelings about "Introduction to Algorithms"?

yati 11y ago
I second you. I have found Steven Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual"[1] to be a great book in this regard. Of course, like you say, CLRS remains an excellent reference. [1]: http://www.algorist.com/ http://www.algorist.com/
- gjm11 11y ago
  I think Skiena and CLRS are complementary, each compensating well for the limitations of the other. If you were going to have exactly two algorithms books, I'm not sure I can think of a better pair.
eachro 11y ago
I use CLRS more as a reference than anything else. If I need to quickly review some data structures or algorithms for an interview, I'll look up the relevant chapters in it. If I really want to understand something like max flow-min cut, I'll turn to "Algorithm Design" by Kleinberg and Tardos, which often has a much more intuitive explanation for concepts(imo).
myth_buster 11y ago
For me CLRS was a book that explained concepts in an easy to absorb fashion. For example the dynamic programming chapter is top notch. While the "War Story" section in Skiena's book gave a great perspective of application of the theory.
Kluny 11y ago
I feel that way about "Don't Make Me Think". It was a good summary of design principles, but even as a beginner I didn't feel as if I got much new information out of it. It was pretty lite. It's overrecommended, I think.

ck2 11y ago

Now that is a website with a nice clean layout and easy to read.

gkst 11y ago
Thanks!

joeax 11y ago

"The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" Not where I live. What to do about it? Move. Find an employer willing to let you work remotely, and find your own quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise.

mwsherman 11y ago
Yes, but it’s complicated. Cities have become more valuable in the age of the Internet, against my predictions, intuitions and preferences! Too few companies offer remote, because remote is hard. My experience at Stack is that remote work really only happens when a company supports it “natively” from the start. It’ll take a generation to make a dent, sadly. I’d like to be wrong.
- krisdol 11y ago
  Agree, fully. I add that remote feels incredibly easy when it's ingrained in the company, as it is for the one I work at right now. After experiencing it, I feel like it really doesn't have to be as hard as my previous employers made it out to be.
krisdol 11y ago
> quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise Some of us like living in the city :(.
- flubert 11y ago
  In fact, people like living in a city so much, that gobs of them are willing to pay a premium in order to do so. Oh, wait...
  - krisdol 11y ago
    Absolutely. But I don't think city living needs to be expensive. Looking toward the more population-dense central Europe, average families are able to afford to live in urban areas because there is far more urban housing available throughout the countries, and it's not just concentrated in a couple of metropolitan cities. The demand for urban living outpaces supply of urban housing the United States. We need a great urban housing expansion throughout the country to make city living affordable again.

veritas3241 11y ago

This is really awesome! Thank you for putting this together.

gkst 11y ago
Thanks!

enitihas 11y ago

I am surprised to see the absence of SICP or anything from Dale Carnegie.

grayclhn 11y ago
Who links to amazon for SICP?
- abstractalgebra 11y ago
  I do sometimes if only just for the comments.

nextos 11y ago

Is it possible that some books have been missed due to acronyms employed in comments? E.g: - SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - CTM: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming - TAOP: The Art of Prolog

gkst 11y ago
If the comment contained a link to amazon, then no. If only the title was mentioned then yes.
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
I was thinking the same thing, there was no way that SICP wasn't in that list, because its probably one of the best programming books written. And no matter who I recommend the book to, they say the same thing.

_lpa_ 11y ago

I did something pretty similar over christmas, though I used named entity recognition to extract book titles rather than looking for amazon links, and (so far) also limited it to specific "Ask HN" threads about books. You can find it here: http://www.hnreads.com/ http://www.hnreads.com/. It is interesting to see how little overlap there is between the two, though that may be due to my using far fewer (and also newer) threads!

gkst 11y ago
Cool project! Do you mind telling which library or service you used for the named entity recognition?
- _lpa_ 11y ago
  I actually wrote it myself, based on conditional random fields! I would not recommend doing this - it was mostly an exercise to learn how they work. I should probably have mentioned that I manually cleaned up the results a bit. I understand nltk has NER capabilities and python bindings, though.
  - gkst 11y ago
    Thanks for your reply! Going to look into the NER capabilities of NLTK.
jccalhoun 11y ago
As a non-programmer I find your list more interesting.
erispoe 11y ago
Interesting that your list yields mainly fiction, while OP's list is mainly non-fiction.
temo4ka 11y ago
Many thanks for sharing this. One usability nitpick though: please consider fixing links so that they could be opened in new tabs/windows.

Ocerge 11y ago

Oh god, that algorithms book. Flashbacks to college memorizing red-black trees coming to me.

apendleton 11y ago
They made you memorize the red-black tree algorithm?! Why? The whole purpose of a reference book like that one is to not have to memorize it. If you need to implement a red-black tree, you just look it up (I have done exactly that, with that book and that algorithm).
- Ocerge 11y ago
  Just for tests and stuff, but I specifically remember memorizing tree rotations and the like. I've forgotten all of them by now :)
- cableshaft 11y ago
  To be fair, most companies don't let you bring your "Introduction to Algorithms" textbook in with you for a whiteboard interview where they expect you to regurgitate exactly how to do Red Black trees or any of a hundred other concepts from memory, so having him memorize isn't necessarily awful.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Related: There are a ton of sites set up like this. Hopefully somebody will post a list. Lotta work by HN folks on various ways of slicing and dicing the data. I wrote this curated site from HN several years ago. Got tired of people continuously asking for book recommendations. http://www.hn-books.com/ http://www.hn-books.com/ Couple points of note. This is 1) an example of a static site, 2) terrible UI, 3) contains live searches to comments on each book from all the major hacking sites, and 4) able to record a list of books that you can then share as a link, like so (which was my reason for making the site) "My favorite programming books? Here they are: http://www.hn-books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=114&B6=107&BC=7&EC=0&FC=0&QC=0 http://www.hn-books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=1... " I started writing reviews each month on the books, but because they were all awesome books, I got tired of so many superlatives! Thanks for the site.

marai2 11y ago
Also Related: Thanks for setting up that curated list. I'll definitely be going through it to get recommendations. I got tired of seeing such recommendations being asked repeatedly and then disappear on HN so I created this: http://www.vivalabooks.com http://www.vivalabooks.com Basically a Hackernews for books.

jacko0 11y ago

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. The best book I've ever read.

agumonkey 11y ago
Could (should?) be a class for teenagers of all kind. Sure the gradual creation of morse code could make them thrilled.
coldpie 11y ago
I completely agree, this book is fantastic. I read it in high school and I've been meaning to re-read it ever since.
cbhl 11y ago
I find it shocking that out of eight million comments, the top book is only mentioned ~50 times, but the parent comment illustrates why -- many people mention title/author pairs without linking to the book itself. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold (http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2 http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2)
sien 11y ago
It's the best book to recommend for people who want a rapid introduction to computers that really provides some understanding. It really is outstanding.
leksak 11y ago
The replies to this comment are all endorsements as well and as such would not get picked up by this web-scraping. Great book though. Amazon link intentionally omitted

deadowl 11y ago

I've read a grand total of two of those. Working Effectively with Legacy Code seems like it would make for a good read.

clarkmoody 11y ago

Easiest way to make it to the top of Hacker News: Hacker News meta posts. Always interesting to read. But just as interesting is how quickly they pop to the top of the home page.

Sealy 11y ago

Interesting list. I clicked on the top book and Amazon peer reviews gave it 2.5 stars out of 5 with 450+ reviews. I admire the effort. Calling it Top Books is slightly misleading. Perhaps you can call it, most mentioned books.

ssgao 11y ago
perhaps taking a look at the negative reviews can reveal a little more secret. This is one of them: It is sad that someone published this crap and killed thousands of trees. Do you know how long it will take to regrow those trees? 20-30 years. Your selfish lust for money lead you to get up all your principals. SHAME.

niuzeta 11y ago

The absence of SICP, I imagine, is because when people refer to the SICP, they usually just link to the open link to the book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ .

gkst 11y ago
Yes, that is probably the case. Quoting from the post "Amazon is often the goto website for referring books, but many books have dedicated homepages as well as pages pages on their publisher's website. Moreover, many freely available are referred frequently in comments, but are not considered in this ranking." The approach used here has limitations, I hoped to make that clear by pointing them out and choosing titles and headlines accordingly.

corysama 11y ago

Interesting to see Influence so high, but Predictably Irrational not listed at all. I've heard Influence is a really great book, but from a quick skim it seems like Predictably Irrational covers the subject matter as least as well if not better. I'd be happy to hear the opinion of someone who has actually read both.

misiti3780 11y ago
Influence was a great book, but it is a bit outdated (in my opinion). Predictably Irrational and his other books were much more relevant. Thinking Fast and Slow was the best one of then all.
agentgt 11y ago
I was surprised not to see Dale Carnegie's book either but I suppose its rather dated and not as scientific (How to win friends and...). Carnegie's book had some of the greatest impacts on my personal life and professional.
- jamestnz 11y ago
  Agree, that book is a real classic, I got my copy from amazon actually. As a side note, the failure of both of us to actually mention the book's full title (or include its amazon link) presumably means that neither of the services being discussed would have registered this as a vote for the book. We're part of the problem! ;)
wbeckler 11y ago
I've read both and Influence is far more useful if you're trying to, well, influence someone. The art of influencing is complex and involves more than just a few behavioral economics insights. Influence is a total framework for understanding the psychology and emotions of selling.

a-dub 11y ago

There are a couple of goodies in there, but tbh that list is pretty depressing.

smartial_arts 11y ago

Is this some sort of a promo trap? When clicking on book links I get taken to pages like this one http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html

mintplant 11y ago
That doesn't happen for me, at least with uBlock on.
gkst 11y ago
That page isn't linked in this post. I don't know that site and won't click that link to find out what it is about.
- smartial_arts 11y ago
  No it is not, but I get redirected to it on my Android phone after clicking on book covers or graph.

bodecker 11y ago

Suggestion: enable arrow keys to allow for easier scrolling through the books

andy_ppp 11y ago

Here is a talk Matthew Yglesias gave about the contents of his book "The Rent Is Too Damn High": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ

Aaronontheweb 11y ago

A little surprised to see that the Mythical Man Month isn't on that list: http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF

yaworsk 11y ago
I'd be interested to know how many affiliate sales you get from this link :)
- Aaronontheweb 11y ago
  After seeing other people grumbling about the affiliate stuff on the website in this thread, I couldn't resist trying to do it on the thread itself :p
  - yaworsk 11y ago
    how did it turn out?

Havoc 11y ago

Must admit I was expecting less programming books. A lot of the topics on here aren't directly programming related. Thanks for the list though. Bought the psychology one.

rplittle 11y ago

Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon

jseliger 11y ago
Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon At some point someone with a megaphone encouraged their listeners / viewers to brigade the book with bad reviews. They did so and the low star count is the result. I'm trying to Google for details over the brouhaha but can't find the correct keywords.
- gsb 11y ago
  I was also curious since it was so obviously a brigade with most reviews posted on the same day. It seems he angered Breitbart fans with a tweet: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200

dankohn1 11y ago

Here is Matt Yglesias's (author of the #1 book) tweet on the analysis: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257 "The only book ranking that matters"

bduerst 11y ago
Probably because 60% of the reviews are 1-star for his book.

carpdiem 11y ago

I notice that this list looks like it has a very long tail. Can we get the top 100 books as well? (since many of those would have very similar mention numbers as the end of the top-30)

tern 11y ago

I maintain a list of HN hacks here: https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/hacker-news https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/hacker-news. I've seen a couple other book projects over the years including: http://hn-books.com/ http://hn-books.com/ and http://hackershelf.com/browse/ http://hackershelf.com/browse/.

tedmiston 11y ago
That's going straight to Pinboard. I've considered building the same myself. It would be lovely if you tracked the various HN reader client apps. A few that come to mind are: Hacker News Enhancement Suite for Chrome [1], Hacker Menu for OS X [2], and Premii's HN web app [3]. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... 2: https://hackermenu.io/ https://hackermenu.io/ 3: https://hn.premii.com/ https://hn.premii.com/
- msutherl 11y ago
  Unfortunately only adding stuff I like, and I'm not a big fan of any of the client-apps / HN makeover extensions I've seen. I do use these two Chrome extensions though: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-colors/adailobllebnhioglgkmaioilhlkdden https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-colors... + https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus....

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago

amazed that nobody talks about W. Richard Stevens anymore. i am getting old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens

mattip 11y ago

Out of 8 million data points the top book got around 50 references. I wonder how much significance should be attached to that, it looks to me to be down in the noise level.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tedmiston 11y ago

I wonder why Steve Blank would publish a book via CafePress. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win Author: Steven Gary Blank Publisher: Cafepress.com Number of links: 45

a_bonobo 11y ago

How come "Darwin's Theorem" appears so often? It's quite unknown, with one review on Goodreads and 4 reviews on Amazon Is this a result of the author spamming his own work? Edit: Looks like it, short skimming of "darwin's theorem site:news.ycombinator.com" shows that all links are from user tjradcliffe, who is the author. A case for manual curation of data.

tagawa 11y ago
Or a case for counting a single author's multiple links of the same book as one vote.

greesil 11y ago

Check out the review distribution of "Rent Is Too Damn High" http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/product-reviews/B0078XGJXO/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/product-r... It's the most polarized I've ever seen in my life.

brink 11y ago
Just like HN.
vellum 11y ago
He made a snarky comment about Andrew Bartbeit's death, so conservatives gave him a slew of one star reviews. If you filter by "verified purchases", it's not as polarized.

meetbryce 11y ago

Your links don't open in a new tab, despite the icon and even if I use my middle mouse button. Extremely annoying.

pjdorrell 11y ago

Possible application of Law of Unintended Consequences: every time you write a program to extract data _out_ of HN, you increase motivation for someone else to insert data _into_ HN.

beefsack 11y ago

I wonder how many books would be on the list if it were somehow easy to extract mentions by name instead of by link. Mythical Man Month is mentioned regularly here and I don't think it's linked very often because of how well known it is.

mandeepj 11y ago

I also do it most of the time. When ever I see a book recommendation here then I go to amazon either to buy it or save it in my wish list.

joshmaher 11y ago

Does that include comments on this article about books being read from links in the comments? Here's one on understanding the mindset of your investors when raising startup capital - Startup Wealth - http://amzn.to/1Jej8El http://amzn.to/1Jej8El

pentium10 11y ago

In 2015, at Crunch Practical Bigdata Conference, Budapest, I showcased what books some subreddit community talk about: startups, entrepreneur, productivity reads. Slides are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event-analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29 http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event...

dschiptsov 11y ago

How come that SICP is not here?

dpflan 11y ago

Cool - maybe this can become a monthly recap of posted books / (links)?

q-base 11y ago

Anyone who has read the #1 book (Rent is too high) and who might want to add a few comments about it? What it describes, suggests etc. Never heard about it before.

arnold_palmur 11y ago

How is A Guide to the Good Life not on here - I feel like I see it mentioned at least once a day.

spinchange 11y ago

Might as well add a link to a book I learned about on HN but never seem to run across since, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th Edition: http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-Handbook-Edition/dp/0131480057 http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-Handbook-E...

fhoffa 11y ago

Nice! On https://reddit.com/r/bigquery https://reddit.com/r/bigquery, /u/omicron_n2 left queries to repeat the experiment on HN and on reddit comments too: - https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_on_amazon_based_on_links_in_hacker/ https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_o... And a presentation by /u/Pentium10 on the same topic, using the books that redditors read: - http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event-analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29 http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event...