25 ms·

Show HN: Top books mentioned in comments on Hacker News

463 points by leandot 10y ago

leandot 10y ago
Hacker News Books is a service that aggregates all links to books on Amazon, Safaribooks and O’Reilly found in comments on Hacker News. It does that on a weekly basis, calculates a rank based on how often each book is mentioned and the karma of the users. So books mentioned several times by different people, having high karma will make it to the top. I’ve processed about two years worth of comments (you can also see the whole yearly list, which is pretty long - up to 1000 books). I was expecting to see way more tech books but in fact the topics are really diverse like startup, management, parenting, mindfulness, etc. especially when the links don’t come from a long discussion about functional programming for example. I’ve added a newsletter in case people want to keep up-to-date and I plan to maintain the service as I’ve found some unique books while I was coding the website. There is also search that searches only the submitted books, so this is another good way to browse the collections. Currently there is a newsletter popup, which may be annoying to some users, please click away if that is the case. I will rework it to be less intrusive. Any recommendations and feedback are welcome. Disclaimer: For amazon links there are referrals, the other links don't have those.
- paulrosenzweig 10y ago
  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.
  - leandot 10y ago
    Yes, on the todo list. Still have a day job to do, but it will come soon. Thanks for the feedback!
- danmaz74 10y ago
  Nice site; I would have loved to see monthly and yearly lists too.
  - lukethomas 10y ago
    same - would love top books by month/year.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    There are yearly lists, although that's a bit harder to find. Here's 2015: http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2015 http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2015
    - epalmer 10y ago
      Thank you.
    - danmaz74 10y ago
      Thanks
- brudgers 10y ago
  Playing with the site search, I thought the site was broken because it did not return results for a book that I know I mentioned. That is, until I read this comment. I will often mention books without posting an Amazon/etc. link figuring that anyone interested can bing with Duck Duck Google to find it. Other times, I will link to the author/publisher page. Anyway, there's a natural language processing cum machine learning project in their somewhere. One interesting possibility it would open up is surfacing books in electronic form that pass across Hacker News as links to PDF's, eBooks, and HTML. Good luck.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    Yes, I think my tendency to always provide links has skewed the lists. At least 12 of the books in the top 100 for 2015 are from my posts.
    - brudgers 10y ago
      Hmm...my tendencies to use my local public library and buy books used might be why I don't often link to Amazon.
  - nocman 10y ago
    Maybe that's why I didn't immediately recognize any of the books on the list as being mentioned regularly on Hacker News. There were some (but not many) that I recognized, but I don't remember them being mentioned.
- bambax 10y ago
  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, but maybe I should.
  - joyeuse6701 10y ago
    Because it works. General e-commerce practice. The value of an email address is incredibly high. It's a very strong signal of interest and allows a business to reach out to you with new product offerings, receive feedback etc. Without it, you're just a session on the site and not much else and doesn't lead to much actionable data.
    - bambax 10y ago
      I understand the value of an email address; I dispute the fact that it "works". Maybe it helps collect more email addresses than before, but the cost is bugging the hell out of every single visitor: is it worth it?
      - blitzd 10y ago
        In my books it's an instant reason to not visit any website that does it. I also feel that the people who do give out their email address within the first 15 seconds of visiting a website are probably not likely to use their real e-mail address, or likely to unsubscribe just as quickly as they gave it out.
- nazgob 10y ago
  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 the other-hand its a great idea to find less popular gems. Perhaps you can consider both options?
- jrs235 10y ago
  Be up front here and add that the site is monetized with affiliate links. Edit: you don't have to mention that in the site, but mention it in your description above.
  - leandot 10y ago
    Just did, thx.
    - jrs235 10y ago
      Now in a month, do blog post on how much the affiliate links made for you, like patio11 user to do with bcc. I'm sure lots of folks would like to know. In fact track the monthly revenue for a year and do monthly updates.
      - tedmiston 10y ago
        That would be cool if OP decided to write it, but the tone you used here comes off as demanding which seems odd to me.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        jrs235 10y ago
        You're right. I should have prefaced my comment with, "I'd highly suggest that you" and end with "then you would be able to keep your site active and in the mind of HN users periodically." I would suggest he does the write ups on "hidden" pages on his domain and just link to them from his future posts regarding them. Much like patio11 use to do (he'd write up the revenue/expense update on a blog page on his own domain and then he or someone else, finding it interesting and useful, would submit the link to HN).
        jrs235 10y ago
        Someone had just posted some snarky comment about "Winning Through Intimidation" listed in my profile as a must read so they implied my standard operating procedure must demanding and aggressive. I tried responding to their comment but they apparently deleted it before I could hit submit on my reply. So here is what I was going to say: "Winning Through Intimidation" is not about what you think it is. It's actually a fascinating story about a fellow in [commercial] real estate from the 70's? and the things he learned. Somethings include "marketing" and projection and how he went about getting big deals done. One thing I found fascinating, and perhaps where the title came from, was after he got burned a few times he started thinking "If the seller has a lawyer and the buyer has a lawyer (to get through the paper work and finalize the deal) in the room (to which he wasn't in) then maybe he, the broker, should have a lawyer in the room too since he too was a party to the transaction but didn't have fair representation. So he started hiring his own lawyer to sit with the other lawyers to hash things out and soon learned that the buyer and seller lawyers didn't seem so work so hard to find a way to remove him from the transaction and not pay his fees.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  I guess it's time for tptacek or some other high-karma user to write a book and start mentioning their book in the HN comments a lot. They would quickly rise to the top of your list and hopefully rake in some money ;)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on the ranking methodology eg is it: sum([u.karma for u in users_who_mentioned]) Or something more complicated?
  - leandot 10y ago
    book_entry['rank'] = (avg_karma_count * avg_karma + book_entry['karma'] * book_entry['karma_count']) / (book_entry['karma_count'] + avg_karma_count) Where avg_karma_count and avg_karma are the weekly values.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Also, as someone actively reducing the amount of email newsletters they receive, I'm wondering if you plan to offer an alternate format, like an RSS feed.
  - dramaturg 10y ago
    +1 for RSS
- dahart 10y ago
  Here are the first few things that came to my mind: - I want this & will use it, it's a great idea! - I didn't understand the rankings based on visiting the site, I assumed it was number of mentions, but so far after some browsing, I've only seen a single comment listed under any book. Is karma used only as a tie breaker, or can a high karma with low mentions rise above a book with high mentions? - I'd love to see a top 10 monthly or yearly. Weekly is just so much volume. And it looks like weekly lists usually top out with a single mention? I want to see which books get many mentions, whatever time window that takes. Also I can't read a book a week, so I don't shop for books weekly. This means I'm afraid with a weekly list I'd probably miss all the good stuff. - The signup popup came up too quickly. I see other people complaining about it and saying remove it. But I would probably have signed up if I understood what I was getting. Seeing it before I even have a chance to see the value or understand who and what this is made me dismiss it immediately. But I'd gladly give my email address to get a monthly email with a top 10 list, and speaking personally it'd help me to have a sense for whether this is strictly a side project, or you'll be doing some marketing. The aggressive popup w/ little info just makes it feel like I'm getting trapped into something and I try to escape, when your intent may have been 100% to generously give people a no-nag opt-in reminder.
  - HiroshiSan 10y ago
    I really agree with your third point and I too would love to see different ranking options. A week to week basis is too much volume to weed out books I'm not interested in.
  - leandot 10y ago
    Thanks for the heads up! - The rankings use karma and number of mentions, which for a week basically bring books by top karma users to the top. The actual formula is: book_entry['rank'] = (avg_karma_count * avg_karma + book_entry['karma'] * book_entry['karma_count']) / (book_entry['karma_count'] + avg_karma_count) - I plan to make Top 10 monthly or yearly, just wanted to see if people would like the idea at all. Seems like people like it. As a side remark I also did http://hnbuzz.com/ http://hnbuzz.com/ where you can filter, segment HN posts daily, weekly, monthly etc. It is not about books though. - Yep the signup seems too aggressive, it will get changed :) After I clicked it away the first time it didn't bother me anymore while coding the website so I got carried away and left it as is. But it is also a learning experience to see what people think about those. The project is totally side project, I actually do that often - build something I like to have and use a new tech to do it to learn. Drop me a mail if you want to know more.
- sperglord 10y ago
  I was considering learning Swift and getting into iOS development, but it appears I was mistaken as to the current fashionable trends in technology and startup culture. I'll be picking up that Palm OS guide as soon as I can find a copy in print somewhere, thanks!
  - blitzd 10y ago
    Clearly Palm OS is making a comeback! I think the idea of this is great, but I suspect it'll become far more useful given larger aggregate ranges. Last week, last month, last six months - etc. As it stands, many books (like the Palm OS one) may only get mentioned once by someone with a lot of karma - which leads to another issue, since the algorithm is known it's now open to abuse by the HN karma-rich.
- shaggyfrog 10y ago
  I closed the page as soon as the popup happened and reset my scroll index back to the top of the page. Bad UX there.
  - asadlionpk 10y ago
    The page isn't that long so scrolling down again isn't that much of a hassle anyway. Have some tolerance for these projects instead of going into pitchfork mode.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      I don't care about the scrolling, but showing a popup like that is pretty user-hostile, and it's hard not to want to return the favor.
- nemoniac 10y ago
  > aggregates all links to books on Amazon, Safaribooks and O’Reilly found in comments on Hacker News. So just commercial books then? Plenty of excellent books are linked directly from HN, books with their entire contents online.
- mindcrash 10y ago
  Not sure if this was already mentioned but IMO it would be really helpful if a taxonomy could be added to it, so it would be easier to find related books with a certain subject. (e.g. 'economy', 'data science' or 'distributed physics'). It would also open up the possibility of faceted search (e.g. all books on 'data science' with the 'python' programming language). Other than that this already looks pretty useful :)
- supernintendo 10y ago
  No recommendations, just feedback; this is really great! Thanks.
- questionr 10y ago
  some (mostly technical) books are commonly mentioned in shorthand (eg. k&r and gof). how are those accounted for?
- chrisked 10y ago
  would love (a) different filtering (not only week), (b) see some tags, (c) maybe pull amazon ratings, and (d) the count of mentions on HN
vortegne 10y ago
Great website, but the popup subscription window is terrible.
- santiagobasulto 10y ago
  It is indeed.
- criddell 10y ago
  Yikes! I would love to hear the justification for that.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Yeah, I especially love the way dismissing it scrolled the page back to the top. That's new.
jamesfe 10y ago
My feature request is to know the frequency with which these books are mentioned! I love the simplicity of the site though - thank you!
- leandot 10y ago
  Right now I aggregate weekly, because I was personally interested in getting a digest of the books. This usually is 1 mention per book, rarely 2-3 (I filter same user spamming one link). Will soon code an aggregation for the two years, good point.
thesmallestcat 10y ago
This can't be right. There's zero chance that "Palm OS Programming" is the 16th most mentioned book.
- 4ndr3vv 10y ago
  Looks like the homepage displays last week's results; If you select "Browse" you can drill into the weekly data and the list for week 33 is the same as the main list. With the frequency of comments being 1 for each book, it will ultimately come down to karma ranking of each comment author.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  Maybe there was a thread about "which book did you buy that is least relevant today?"
RodericDay 10y ago
Terrible pop-up subscription panel hijacking my back button.
- leandot 10y ago
  Sorry for that will have a look..
  - criddell 10y ago
    Get rid of it. Nobody wants to see it.
iplaw 10y ago
Let us know how the Amazon referral program treats you.
- douche 10y ago
  I hope this isn't a criticism. Referral links are about the only reasonable way to monetize a blog, and are a whole lot less intrusive than advertising. Fundamentally, I don't have any problem with it. If you're going to link to something anyway, as would be obvious with a book list like this, it's a no-brainer to use affiliate links, get a cut, and earn back some hosting fees. The price is what it is for the consumer, whether they get there through an affiliate link or not.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    I think it's fair criticism. The title ought to be a showHN title and should include a mention that his site is monetized via affiliate links. This posting, as is, is basically the same as posts to blogs that are not much more than thinly veiled sales pages.
    - jrs235 10y ago
      Edit: It appears the mods updated the title to be a ShowHN. Thank you Mods.
  - iplaw 10y ago
    My problem is that he scrapes Hacker News data and then infringes the Hacker News name right there in the domain name to hock his wares.
jrs235 10y ago
Please let us know how much the site makes from using your affiliate links.
tropin 10y ago
It's an honest question, as I can't see anything in the guidelines: are submissions of webs with useful data but with referrals ok with HN? Just asking in case some day I have a cool idea as this.
- DanBC 10y ago
  My personal opinion is that it's fine. People seem to mind if you post referral links to threads as replies.
- dang 10y ago
  The short answer is yes it's ok, but may provoke some pushback in comments. The nuanced answer is that there's a bit of a sliding scale. Known users, who have been participating in the community for a while, can do some things that might be spammy in other contexts, such as when a new account is created only to promote something. Of course that only holds as long as they do it tastefully (e.g. don't try to hijack someone else's launch) and don't do it much.
bballer 10y ago
Highly 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 subscription, or at least make it not alter history.
kol 10y ago
Great idea! It'd also be great if someone created hackernewspapers.com too. There are so many great papers mentioned on HN. Since most links point to pdf files, it'd be possible to collect the pdfs on the same site (if there's no copyright violation).
- leandot 10y ago
  That can be done, question is how to recognize id a pdf is a paper or not. A bit trickier than books imho.
  - icen 10y ago
    You'd get pretty far just by whitelisting arxiv, .edu, .ac.uk, etc.
  - Retr0spectrum 10y ago
    That sounds like a fun application of a neural network. Finding large repositories of "real" papers to train it with should be fairly easy, too. That said, I have zero experience working with neural networks, so it might not be very easy at all.
hansc 10y ago
Funny that the first book in the list "Mother...", I cannot find when using hacker news search!?
- DanBC 10y ago
  "Mother Nature", searching comments not stories, and sorting by date, returns it.
kozikow 10y ago
Recommendation engine based on (occurs in same base post) or (suggested by the same HN user) could be interesting as well.
georgiev 10y ago
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 you thinking of handling that as well?
- leandot 10y ago
  Sure, 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.
  - 4ndr3vv 10y ago
    Think GP is referring to book titles in mentioned in comments without a buy-the-book-here link eg "Two books i always recommend reading are 'The cathedral and the bazaar' and 'The Mythical Man-Month'."
    - leandot 10y ago
      Ah, I see what you mean. Well that is another level of digging into the data, love to have the time for that.
jonbaer 10y ago
https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Geography-Everything-Global-Politics/dp/1783962437/ https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Geography-Everything-Global...
pmorici 10y ago
You 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"
- leandot 10y ago
  Well it is a rank - a simple bayesian avg of number of mentions together with karma of the user. But as someone below mentioned it kind of boils down to the karma of the user who mentioned the book. A good post about that is - http://fulmicoton.com/posts/bayesian_rating http://fulmicoton.com/posts/bayesian_rating
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - minouye 10y ago
    Why not use upvotes of the post instead of user karma? Having the community upvote the recommendation in context is more important to me than how much karma the user has. I find that some of the most insightful book recommendations come from people that are new to a community or lurk until they see an opportunity to contribute.
    - leandot 10y ago
      Tried that but there were few who had upvotes, probably a combination of the karma and upvotes would work well.
      - skept 10y ago
        You can rank by upvotes and use karma as the tiebreaker.
      - nkoren 10y ago
        Sounds like the problem is that your sample size is too small. What happens if you expand the timeframe out to a month? Or a year? That should give you books that are cited repeatedly, not just the books which have recently been mentioned by high-karma HN users.
leandot 10y ago
Btw you can also list a whole year - http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2016 http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2016
gtrubetskoy 10y ago
I see one of the books at the top links to a comment of mine, but your service would get the Amazon referral for it. Which I don't care about entirely, it just got me thinking - do we presently have a technology that would make it possible for us to split some sort of a micro-credit/payment - I think if such a thing existed, that would be quite revolutionary. People could finally get paid for all the things they refer to, not to mention ads on their blogs, etc.
espitia 10y ago
Would love an all-time/yearly list! Also, I see a few comments criticizing the affiliate links. That's the reward you get for building cool stuff. No reason not to!
- throwanem 10y ago
  Affiliate links are fine. A newsletter signup modal that pops up when I've scrolled most the way down the page, and when dismissed scrolls me back to the top, is not. What even is that supposed to be about, to be building a page for Hacker News readers and that seems like a sensible thing to do?
  - icoder 10y ago
    Even worse, both the popup, and the dismissal of it, enter the back stack. So to get back to HN I had to click 'back' twice [edit: thrice of course]. I think it's an honest mistake. The fact that you dismissed the popup seems to be stored in a cookie, so it bothers you only once ever (twice if you use the back button). Sidenote: since I'm in the EU I think you need to need to ask me for permission, but let's not open that can of worms.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      I mean I don't doubt it's an honest mistake, but it's also an honest mistake that wouldn't have had the opportunity to be made absent the decision to annoy the user with the signup modal anti-pattern.
      - leandot 10y ago
        Will get rid of the popup (at least in that form) as soon as the load goes down a bit. Appreciate all the feedback.
      - icoder 10y ago
        I'm sure the decision itself wasn't 'to annoy the user', but I get your point
pieterr 10y ago
Nice site! Maybe add links to reviews of the books too? Example #17: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/07/book-review-c-interfaces-and-implementations-by-david-r-hanson http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/07/book-review-c-interf...
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Personally, the most helpful link for me because that's what I inevitably check out first is the list ranked descending by "helpfulness" (votes) of the negative reviews. Usually they are more interesting to me than the positive ones including the top-voted ones. For example, for one book in the list the review (with lots of ALL CAPS SENTENCES, but still interesting) in 5th place of the negative reviews by "truestara" seemed to be a good summary: https://www.amazon.com/Iodine-Crisis-What-About-Wreck/product-reviews/098603200X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt_rgt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=helpful&filterByStar=critical&pageNumber=1 https://www.amazon.com/Iodine-Crisis-What-About-Wreck/produc...
  - eriknstr 10y ago
    Here is a direct link to the comment I think you are talking about: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3NZHDP4ALNJ4I/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=098603200X https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3NZHDP4ALNJ4I/re...
Aldo_MX 10y ago
The "Hacker News Books" title raised too much my expectations, I was expecting books which talked about entrepreneurship, technical topics and good practices, not "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids"...
- criddell 10y ago
  We're getting older...
- dang 10y ago
  HN has always had this pluralistic bent, because that's the way the site founder is. The word for pg's taste is 'catholic' in the original sense. So the appearance of a book on child-rearing isn't a decline or even a change; the question is whether the book is interesting, not what it's about. It would be concerning if unpredictable, unrelated things didn't appear, still more concerning if all the things made sense and were correlated with some (any) convention, and most concerning of all if the convention were that of a majority.
cholantesh 10y ago
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.
davb 10y ago
The 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 even knowing if the site is any good or of any interest to me?
- Navarr 10y ago
  Apparently it "works." Which is really disappointing.
  - criddell 10y ago
    Sometimes (especially on mobile) it seems to be the only way to get rid of it. I should apologize to "someguy@gmail.com" and "ihateyou@gmail.com" for all the things I've signed you up for.
    - mhurron 10y ago
      > Sometimes (especially on mobile) it seems to be the only way to get rid of it. Or hit back and don't sign up at all.
    - Navarr 10y ago
      This is not terribly on topic but that hits so close to home. I get tonnes of emails at my, what i would assume to be uncommon [navarr] @ [gmail] address getting signed up for all sorts of things. Dating websites, Car dealerships, ugh its awful. Do they not accept @example.org which is a reserved domain? That would be a much better address to use EDIT: You guys suck [1] [1]: http://i.imgur.com/FaTJ4QB.png http://i.imgur.com/FaTJ4QB.png
      - criddell 10y ago
        I forgot all about example.org. The more annoying thing for me is that they often won't accept my actual email address. It seems to be due to either the period in my name or the hyphen in the domain name.
      - 10y ago
aaron695 10y ago
Canonical Lists. I remember loving them then going to hate. Guess it's where you are in life.
DanBC 10y ago
I 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 so high on the list.
fitzwatermellow 10y ago
What 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, etc, etc ;)
- sailfast 10y ago
  I expect those have been listed a lot as well, but interestingly using the "weekly" format means that there are a lot more books to take in. Now if I only had time to read them all...
- leandot 10y ago
  If there were no links with the title, then they don't get considered. As someone mentioned earlier there is tons of good stuff mentioned without a link, but that requires a whole other level of looking into the data than this hobby project ;)
  - fitzwatermellow 10y ago
    Thanks for building leandot. Lot's of interesting finds, definitely bookmark'd!
uberneo 10y ago
Nice aggregation -- Would be handy , if the books available will be by Category and Source (Amazon , Safari, O'Reilly)
louprado 10y ago
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 http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ I am surprised that someone doesn't solve this problem once and for all by allowing decent search parameters (e.g., all time, last month, by karma, by genre, etc.). This latest submission weights by karma and bins the results weekly. Those restrictions make it personally unappealing but it is a great first step. I wouldn't have thought to consider karma. Edit: clarity
- publicfig 10y ago
  I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ is pretty much the default (unofficial) search and personalized sorting site for HN. Super fast and works well in my experience.
  - ryankey721 10y ago
    From my understanding and my own desires, I think the previous comment is looking for a site that will offer a list of book links on HN with parameters to filter/sort the books. That way you can find "most mentioned books in the last year" or "highest karma book links for the last month".
kobayashi 10y ago
Would you mind adding TLS compatibility? The free LetsEncrypt CA is, of course, an easy way to do so. Great site, looking forward to the new reads.
yekim 10y ago
Nice. I'm always taking books that are mentioned in various HN comments and adding them to my reading list. Thanks for making it easy!
magic_beans 10y ago
This is amazing!!! Great idea, and really useful!
tedmiston 10y ago
I wanted to take a second to share the contrarian opinion in support of OP's use of affiliate links. He/she did a lot of work to make this project and to maintain it. I think they are done tastefully and sensibly in a service that adds value.
- criddell 10y ago
  I just searched the page for "affiliate" and most of the comments seem to be requests for how much money they generate. I'm curious myself. When somebody posts a link to Amazon in a comment thread that contains an affiliate code, I think that's fair to criticize. When somebody points to something they built that uses affiliate links, it comes down to how it's presented (and more importantly, how often it's reposted). Who wouldn't be interested in a followup post 6 months from now with a breakdown of traffic and revenue?
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Kudos to OP if he decides to share that information, as like others, I'm curious to know.
    - leandot 10y ago
      Sure thing!
- gkst 10y ago
  Having done a similar project[1], that also includes affiliate links to Amazon and being called a spammer by some people because of that, I really appreciate your stance, that if a project adds value, monetizing it is okay. Moreover, I'd like to add that affiliate links are less intrusive and dangerous wrt to malicious code and user privacy. I wonder why Adsense et al rarely get called out, but affiliate links do. Maybe it's my confirmation bias or it's because people don't see those other ads, because of using an ad blocker. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924741
  - 10y ago
Unbeliever69 10y ago
"Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition" curated content at its best! Is there some seminal work in this book I'm not aware of?
- DanBC 10y ago
  There's a link under each book taking you to the comment on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309500 > To this day, I recall with fondness poring over Palm's documentation and the book by Neil Rhodes and Julie McKeehan [1] and writing code using the MetroWorks CodeWarrior for Palm OS [2].
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Hey, where's SICP? Has nobody mentioned that and gotten enough upvotes? Because I see it all the time...
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  It's based off of links to Amazon, O'Reilly and Safari. SICP probably isn't counted much because I'd imagine most people link to the free text on MIT press.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Ahhh. I'd say that somebody should build a special case for it, but most of us know about it, and it would just take up space at the top spot :-).
leandot 10y ago
Some stats if people are interested : - People online right now according to GA is about 500 and has been stable like that for the last two hours or so - ~80% of the traffic comes from HN, rest is FB, Twitter, etc. - Last two hours - 9,414 users, 16,338 pageviews Will write a blog post with more info.
- jrs235 10y ago
  Looking forward to the write up!
swalsh 10y ago
There are a lot of books rated 5 stars. They're good reads most of them, but there's another class of books. The kind where even a year later you remember them. They truely changed how you think about a topic. I'm always searching for those top class books, the kind that feel like religious experiences to read. The issue is there's no way to distinglish them from regular 5 star books, the kind where you put them down and say "wow good book", but a year from now you really can't recall much about it..
- muralimadhu 10y ago
  do you know if there is a compilation of those really awesome books somewhere ?
  - swalsh 10y ago
    I haven't found one yet :\
    - dota_fanatic 10y ago
      The problem is that your top-tier book for one person isn't a top-tier book for another, and then there's different kinds of top-tier books, ones that focus on depth vs ones that focus on context. I think it should be possible though to identify these books, classify them based on depth vs breadth vs context, and then put them in sub-tiers (eg layman, motivated amateur, budding specialist, master). Getting back to the individual though, it's very hard to know how big of an inference gap there is for the model(s) you're trying to convey and how much the person "knows" already. Some books are masterful if you've read precursor books a, b, f, and p. Some books are masterful if you're coming from the right cultural context. And then there's tightly held biases that can get in the way of some core assumption of the book, ruining the whole effort.
  - graham1776 10y ago
    There was a great post about a week ago about books you would give as a gift. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243611
lucasnemeth 10y ago
I didn't knew about "Feynman Lectures On Computation" and was reading the reviews. There's only one 2 star reviews, I clicked to see what it was about. And surprise, it is by Guido Van Rossum! (And he's not that impressed by the book) https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-P/product-reviews/0738202967/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_two?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=two_star&showViewpoints=0 https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-...
jszymborski 10y ago
Please 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 with it. Those pop-ups are jarring. I think it's great you've got an affiliate link, and I get you want to get as many recurring eyeballs on this as possible, but those pop-ups are everyone's pet peeve... it's the MIDI autoplay, MARQUEE and BLINK tag of websites today. Edit: Removed capitals for emphasis and adjusted tone to better communicate my intention and comply with HN Guidelines.
- maineldc 10y ago
  I agree that it's annoying, but I would like to see some data about conversions before I would say "Do not ever pull that 'Subscribe' pop-up crap." I have heard anecdotes to the effect that it's actually great for the publisher and it would be especially great to hear the results of site targetted to the HN crowd.
  - jszymborski 10y ago
    Keeping a mailing list is great and super convenient, but there has to be a better way... For example, the inline Subscribe form is tucked all the way down as the last thing on the page. I'm sure you'd get better conversion with it as the first thing at the top of the list, maybe with a pastel yellow background for the form. It's sort of the same thing with pop-under ads or those video ads, sure you're likely going to get more clicks on those, but you've made your website look (1) sketchy (2) difficult to use and (3) undesirable to return to.
- dang 10y ago
  When commenting here, please be civil, even though you don't like popups. Your comment is uncivil, because it rants and yells at another user who is sharing their work. That's especially bad in a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. The comment also breaks the HN guidelines by using uppercase for emphasis. Please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
samblr 10y ago
Can anybody comment on #1 in list : Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
- DanBC 10y ago
  Here's the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12316857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12316857 nkurz has over 37,000 karma, and is currently about 30-35 in the list of people by karma. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
  - samblr 10y ago
    Thank you @nkurz edit: meant @DanBC in above line but wrote nkurz. Never mind - thanks to both. :)
tmaly 10y ago
something seems off, Palm OS programming is mentioned as #16. This does not make sense.
core2pro 10y ago
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 have found the perfect goal for weekend. :)
core2pro 10y ago
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 have found the perfect goal for weekend. :)
_lpa_ 10y ago
I made something last winter (http://www.hnreads.com/ 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 book titles, perhaps something you might consider if you wanted to expand the site. I like the idea of showing the top books per time period!
marai2 10y ago
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 books and better reviews than the average review at Amazon. http://www.vivalabooks.com/ http://www.vivalabooks.com/
questionr 10y ago
some (mostly technical) books are mentioned in shorthand (eg. k&r and gof). how are those accounted for?
- questionr 10y ago
  apologies...asked under wrong comment
ultramancool 10y ago
This 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 of garbage that got referenced once in an argument (and often a bad one at that).
devin481 10y ago
WATCH MOVIE FULL HD Rome / PS3 Gaming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ZjPtVBtRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ZjPtVBtRY
Jaruzel 10y ago
I quite like this (not that my opinion really matters tbh), but a thought does occur to me - any chance of putting the title of original post on HN that contains the referring comment - i know you can click to it via the comment link, but seeing the post title alongside the book would make for interesting browsing.
samblr 10y ago
Since HN discusses about books time and again - will it be a good idea to have a group for HN in goodreads ?
nojvek 10y ago
Having a top year, month would be a 100x more attractive for me. Weekly is too much churn to figure out what is good.
mikecope 10y ago
OP, great site. Curious whether you've already been approved by the amazon affiliate program. (For others not in the know, amazon will only approve your site once you've completed your first sale.) I ask because I was recently rejected for my application (http://addonbuddy.com/ http://addonbuddy.com/). Their reason was "lack of original content." Here's part of the message I received: "A part of our criteria is that your site has to be established with enough unique content. We rejected your application due to one or more of the following reasons. - Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors - Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed" I like your site and think it offers a lot of value, but Amazon's affiliate program seems to favor blogs that have a lot of content. They can also be real sticklers about including certain text in your website indicating that you're part of the affiliate program.
tienthanh8490 10y ago
Nice project, but probably worth adding some natural language processing to avoid things like this from being added to the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11704954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11704954 --> "I loved this book for being exceptionally clear and terse. I was hooked from the first sentence: "Probability is a mathematical language for quantifying uncertainty." That one sentence makes the concept clear in a way that the entire chapter on probability from "Statistics in a Nutshell" (http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Nutshell-Sarah-Boslaugh/dp/... http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Nutshell-Sarah-Boslaugh/dp/...) did not." --> "Statistics in a Nutshell" got added to list 20 of year 2016
samwyse 10y ago
Visited the site, dismissed the pop-up, scrolled to the bottom, saw that every book had just one mention. Wound up spending more time reading comments and looking at the list, don't think I'll return as the biggest problems do not seem fixable. You are using Amazon links as a substitute for actual linguistic processing to parse out book names. It may be possible to use the links to prime the pump by creating a list of titles, then re-scanning all comments for closer approximations of those titles but I don't know the fesability of that.
chrisrock 10y ago
Any option to browse books by category?
p333347 10y ago
The idea is good and the service seems well intentioned but there is a nit I have to pick. A god awful book (GAB) that a high karma poster (HKP) mentioned to talk about its god awfulness would also make to this list, and would be worsened if other HKP mentions in a discussion/debate. Of course, one could argue that a debate amongst HKPs on a GAB making that GAB appear on the list is a positive thing as it lets the reader decide the worth of the book, but I am talking about a degenerate case without such a debate or discussion. Internet citizens are sort of programmed to attribute high value to items near the top of a list when no explicit negative context is mentioned. What I am trying to say is that it would be truly beneficial if there were a bit of context mentioned along with the book, but I guess it would have to use AI/ML for NLP which is by no means a trivial thing. But that would make this spectacular. If that is not feasible (for whatever reasons), I suggest there be a prominent message saying to the effect of "this is not a recommendation list but just lists top mentions made by HKP".

463 points by leandot 10y ago

Hacker News Books is a service that aggregates all links to books on Amazon, Safaribooks and O’Reilly found in comments on Hacker News. It does that on a weekly basis, calculates a rank based on how often each book is mentioned and the karma of the users. So books mentioned several times by different people, having high karma will make it to the top. I’ve processed about two years worth of comments (you can also see the whole yearly list, which is pretty long - up to 1000 books). I was expecting to see way more tech books but in fact the topics are really diverse like startup, management, parenting, mindfulness, etc. especially when the links don’t come from a long discussion about functional programming for example. I’ve added a newsletter in case people want to keep up-to-date and I plan to maintain the service as I’ve found some unique books while I was coding the website. There is also search that searches only the submitted books, so this is another good way to browse the collections. Currently there is a newsletter popup, which may be annoying to some users, please click away if that is the case. I will rework it to be less intrusive. Any recommendations and feedback are welcome. Disclaimer: For amazon links there are referrals, the other links don't have those.

paulrosenzweig 10y ago
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.
- leandot 10y ago
  Yes, on the todo list. Still have a day job to do, but it will come soon. Thanks for the feedback!
danmaz74 10y ago
Nice site; I would have loved to see monthly and yearly lists too.
- lukethomas 10y ago
  same - would love top books by month/year.
- DanBC 10y ago
  There are yearly lists, although that's a bit harder to find. Here's 2015: http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2015 http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2015
  - epalmer 10y ago
    Thank you.
  - danmaz74 10y ago
    Thanks
brudgers 10y ago
Playing with the site search, I thought the site was broken because it did not return results for a book that I know I mentioned. That is, until I read this comment. I will often mention books without posting an Amazon/etc. link figuring that anyone interested can bing with Duck Duck Google to find it. Other times, I will link to the author/publisher page. Anyway, there's a natural language processing cum machine learning project in their somewhere. One interesting possibility it would open up is surfacing books in electronic form that pass across Hacker News as links to PDF's, eBooks, and HTML. Good luck.
- DanBC 10y ago
  Yes, I think my tendency to always provide links has skewed the lists. At least 12 of the books in the top 100 for 2015 are from my posts.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Hmm...my tendencies to use my local public library and buy books used might be why I don't often link to Amazon.
- nocman 10y ago
  Maybe that's why I didn't immediately recognize any of the books on the list as being mentioned regularly on Hacker News. There were some (but not many) that I recognized, but I don't remember them being mentioned.
bambax 10y ago
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, but maybe I should.
- joyeuse6701 10y ago
  Because it works. General e-commerce practice. The value of an email address is incredibly high. It's a very strong signal of interest and allows a business to reach out to you with new product offerings, receive feedback etc. Without it, you're just a session on the site and not much else and doesn't lead to much actionable data.
  - bambax 10y ago
    I understand the value of an email address; I dispute the fact that it "works". Maybe it helps collect more email addresses than before, but the cost is bugging the hell out of every single visitor: is it worth it?
    - blitzd 10y ago
      In my books it's an instant reason to not visit any website that does it. I also feel that the people who do give out their email address within the first 15 seconds of visiting a website are probably not likely to use their real e-mail address, or likely to unsubscribe just as quickly as they gave it out.
nazgob 10y ago
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 the other-hand its a great idea to find less popular gems. Perhaps you can consider both options?
jrs235 10y ago
Be up front here and add that the site is monetized with affiliate links. Edit: you don't have to mention that in the site, but mention it in your description above.
- leandot 10y ago
  Just did, thx.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    Now in a month, do blog post on how much the affiliate links made for you, like patio11 user to do with bcc. I'm sure lots of folks would like to know. In fact track the monthly revenue for a year and do monthly updates.
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      That would be cool if OP decided to write it, but the tone you used here comes off as demanding which seems odd to me.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - jrs235 10y ago
        You're right. I should have prefaced my comment with, "I'd highly suggest that you" and end with "then you would be able to keep your site active and in the mind of HN users periodically." I would suggest he does the write ups on "hidden" pages on his domain and just link to them from his future posts regarding them. Much like patio11 use to do (he'd write up the revenue/expense update on a blog page on his own domain and then he or someone else, finding it interesting and useful, would submit the link to HN).
      - jrs235 10y ago
        Someone had just posted some snarky comment about "Winning Through Intimidation" listed in my profile as a must read so they implied my standard operating procedure must demanding and aggressive. I tried responding to their comment but they apparently deleted it before I could hit submit on my reply. So here is what I was going to say: "Winning Through Intimidation" is not about what you think it is. It's actually a fascinating story about a fellow in [commercial] real estate from the 70's? and the things he learned. Somethings include "marketing" and projection and how he went about getting big deals done. One thing I found fascinating, and perhaps where the title came from, was after he got burned a few times he started thinking "If the seller has a lawyer and the buyer has a lawyer (to get through the paper work and finalize the deal) in the room (to which he wasn't in) then maybe he, the broker, should have a lawyer in the room too since he too was a party to the transaction but didn't have fair representation. So he started hiring his own lawyer to sit with the other lawyers to hash things out and soon learned that the buyer and seller lawyers didn't seem so work so hard to find a way to remove him from the transaction and not pay his fees.
eriknstr 10y ago
I guess it's time for tptacek or some other high-karma user to write a book and start mentioning their book in the HN comments a lot. They would quickly rise to the top of your list and hopefully rake in some money ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tedmiston 10y ago
Can you elaborate on the ranking methodology eg is it: sum([u.karma for u in users_who_mentioned]) Or something more complicated?
- leandot 10y ago
  book_entry['rank'] = (avg_karma_count * avg_karma + book_entry['karma'] * book_entry['karma_count']) / (book_entry['karma_count'] + avg_karma_count) Where avg_karma_count and avg_karma are the weekly values.
tedmiston 10y ago
Also, as someone actively reducing the amount of email newsletters they receive, I'm wondering if you plan to offer an alternate format, like an RSS feed.
- dramaturg 10y ago
  +1 for RSS
dahart 10y ago
Here are the first few things that came to my mind: - I want this & will use it, it's a great idea! - I didn't understand the rankings based on visiting the site, I assumed it was number of mentions, but so far after some browsing, I've only seen a single comment listed under any book. Is karma used only as a tie breaker, or can a high karma with low mentions rise above a book with high mentions? - I'd love to see a top 10 monthly or yearly. Weekly is just so much volume. And it looks like weekly lists usually top out with a single mention? I want to see which books get many mentions, whatever time window that takes. Also I can't read a book a week, so I don't shop for books weekly. This means I'm afraid with a weekly list I'd probably miss all the good stuff. - The signup popup came up too quickly. I see other people complaining about it and saying remove it. But I would probably have signed up if I understood what I was getting. Seeing it before I even have a chance to see the value or understand who and what this is made me dismiss it immediately. But I'd gladly give my email address to get a monthly email with a top 10 list, and speaking personally it'd help me to have a sense for whether this is strictly a side project, or you'll be doing some marketing. The aggressive popup w/ little info just makes it feel like I'm getting trapped into something and I try to escape, when your intent may have been 100% to generously give people a no-nag opt-in reminder.
- HiroshiSan 10y ago
  I really agree with your third point and I too would love to see different ranking options. A week to week basis is too much volume to weed out books I'm not interested in.
- leandot 10y ago
  Thanks for the heads up! - The rankings use karma and number of mentions, which for a week basically bring books by top karma users to the top. The actual formula is: book_entry['rank'] = (avg_karma_count * avg_karma + book_entry['karma'] * book_entry['karma_count']) / (book_entry['karma_count'] + avg_karma_count) - I plan to make Top 10 monthly or yearly, just wanted to see if people would like the idea at all. Seems like people like it. As a side remark I also did http://hnbuzz.com/ http://hnbuzz.com/ where you can filter, segment HN posts daily, weekly, monthly etc. It is not about books though. - Yep the signup seems too aggressive, it will get changed :) After I clicked it away the first time it didn't bother me anymore while coding the website so I got carried away and left it as is. But it is also a learning experience to see what people think about those. The project is totally side project, I actually do that often - build something I like to have and use a new tech to do it to learn. Drop me a mail if you want to know more.
sperglord 10y ago
I was considering learning Swift and getting into iOS development, but it appears I was mistaken as to the current fashionable trends in technology and startup culture. I'll be picking up that Palm OS guide as soon as I can find a copy in print somewhere, thanks!
- blitzd 10y ago
  Clearly Palm OS is making a comeback! I think the idea of this is great, but I suspect it'll become far more useful given larger aggregate ranges. Last week, last month, last six months - etc. As it stands, many books (like the Palm OS one) may only get mentioned once by someone with a lot of karma - which leads to another issue, since the algorithm is known it's now open to abuse by the HN karma-rich.
shaggyfrog 10y ago
I closed the page as soon as the popup happened and reset my scroll index back to the top of the page. Bad UX there.
- asadlionpk 10y ago
  The page isn't that long so scrolling down again isn't that much of a hassle anyway. Have some tolerance for these projects instead of going into pitchfork mode.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I don't care about the scrolling, but showing a popup like that is pretty user-hostile, and it's hard not to want to return the favor.
nemoniac 10y ago
> aggregates all links to books on Amazon, Safaribooks and O’Reilly found in comments on Hacker News. So just commercial books then? Plenty of excellent books are linked directly from HN, books with their entire contents online.
mindcrash 10y ago
Not sure if this was already mentioned but IMO it would be really helpful if a taxonomy could be added to it, so it would be easier to find related books with a certain subject. (e.g. 'economy', 'data science' or 'distributed physics'). It would also open up the possibility of faceted search (e.g. all books on 'data science' with the 'python' programming language). Other than that this already looks pretty useful :)
supernintendo 10y ago
No recommendations, just feedback; this is really great! Thanks.
questionr 10y ago
some (mostly technical) books are commonly mentioned in shorthand (eg. k&r and gof). how are those accounted for?
chrisked 10y ago
would love (a) different filtering (not only week), (b) see some tags, (c) maybe pull amazon ratings, and (d) the count of mentions on HN

vortegne 10y ago

Great website, but the popup subscription window is terrible.

santiagobasulto 10y ago
It is indeed.
criddell 10y ago
Yikes! I would love to hear the justification for that.
throwanem 10y ago
Yeah, I especially love the way dismissing it scrolled the page back to the top. That's new.

jamesfe 10y ago

My feature request is to know the frequency with which these books are mentioned! I love the simplicity of the site though - thank you!

leandot 10y ago
Right now I aggregate weekly, because I was personally interested in getting a digest of the books. This usually is 1 mention per book, rarely 2-3 (I filter same user spamming one link). Will soon code an aggregation for the two years, good point.

thesmallestcat 10y ago

This can't be right. There's zero chance that "Palm OS Programming" is the 16th most mentioned book.

4ndr3vv 10y ago
Looks like the homepage displays last week's results; If you select "Browse" you can drill into the weekly data and the list for week 33 is the same as the main list. With the frequency of comments being 1 for each book, it will ultimately come down to karma ranking of each comment author.
clifanatic 10y ago
Maybe there was a thread about "which book did you buy that is least relevant today?"

RodericDay 10y ago

Terrible pop-up subscription panel hijacking my back button.

leandot 10y ago
Sorry for that will have a look..
- criddell 10y ago
  Get rid of it. Nobody wants to see it.

iplaw 10y ago

Let us know how the Amazon referral program treats you.

douche 10y ago
I hope this isn't a criticism. Referral links are about the only reasonable way to monetize a blog, and are a whole lot less intrusive than advertising. Fundamentally, I don't have any problem with it. If you're going to link to something anyway, as would be obvious with a book list like this, it's a no-brainer to use affiliate links, get a cut, and earn back some hosting fees. The price is what it is for the consumer, whether they get there through an affiliate link or not.
- jrs235 10y ago
  I think it's fair criticism. The title ought to be a showHN title and should include a mention that his site is monetized via affiliate links. This posting, as is, is basically the same as posts to blogs that are not much more than thinly veiled sales pages.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    Edit: It appears the mods updated the title to be a ShowHN. Thank you Mods.
- iplaw 10y ago
  My problem is that he scrapes Hacker News data and then infringes the Hacker News name right there in the domain name to hock his wares.

jrs235 10y ago

Please let us know how much the site makes from using your affiliate links.

tropin 10y ago

It's an honest question, as I can't see anything in the guidelines: are submissions of webs with useful data but with referrals ok with HN? Just asking in case some day I have a cool idea as this.

DanBC 10y ago
My personal opinion is that it's fine. People seem to mind if you post referral links to threads as replies.
dang 10y ago
The short answer is yes it's ok, but may provoke some pushback in comments. The nuanced answer is that there's a bit of a sliding scale. Known users, who have been participating in the community for a while, can do some things that might be spammy in other contexts, such as when a new account is created only to promote something. Of course that only holds as long as they do it tastefully (e.g. don't try to hijack someone else's launch) and don't do it much.

bballer 10y ago

Highly 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 subscription, or at least make it not alter history.

kol 10y ago

Great idea! It'd also be great if someone created hackernewspapers.com too. There are so many great papers mentioned on HN. Since most links point to pdf files, it'd be possible to collect the pdfs on the same site (if there's no copyright violation).

leandot 10y ago
That can be done, question is how to recognize id a pdf is a paper or not. A bit trickier than books imho.
- icen 10y ago
  You'd get pretty far just by whitelisting arxiv, .edu, .ac.uk, etc.
- Retr0spectrum 10y ago
  That sounds like a fun application of a neural network. Finding large repositories of "real" papers to train it with should be fairly easy, too. That said, I have zero experience working with neural networks, so it might not be very easy at all.

hansc 10y ago

Funny that the first book in the list "Mother...", I cannot find when using hacker news search!?

DanBC 10y ago
"Mother Nature", searching comments not stories, and sorting by date, returns it.

kozikow 10y ago

Recommendation engine based on (occurs in same base post) or (suggested by the same HN user) could be interesting as well.

georgiev 10y ago

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 you thinking of handling that as well?

leandot 10y ago
Sure, 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.
- 4ndr3vv 10y ago
  Think GP is referring to book titles in mentioned in comments without a buy-the-book-here link eg "Two books i always recommend reading are 'The cathedral and the bazaar' and 'The Mythical Man-Month'."
  - leandot 10y ago
    Ah, I see what you mean. Well that is another level of digging into the data, love to have the time for that.

jonbaer 10y ago

https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Geography-Everything-Global-Politics/dp/1783962437/ https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Geography-Everything-Global...

pmorici 10y ago

You 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"

leandot 10y ago
Well it is a rank - a simple bayesian avg of number of mentions together with karma of the user. But as someone below mentioned it kind of boils down to the karma of the user who mentioned the book. A good post about that is - http://fulmicoton.com/posts/bayesian_rating http://fulmicoton.com/posts/bayesian_rating
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- minouye 10y ago
  Why not use upvotes of the post instead of user karma? Having the community upvote the recommendation in context is more important to me than how much karma the user has. I find that some of the most insightful book recommendations come from people that are new to a community or lurk until they see an opportunity to contribute.
  - leandot 10y ago
    Tried that but there were few who had upvotes, probably a combination of the karma and upvotes would work well.
    - skept 10y ago
      You can rank by upvotes and use karma as the tiebreaker.
    - nkoren 10y ago
      Sounds like the problem is that your sample size is too small. What happens if you expand the timeframe out to a month? Or a year? That should give you books that are cited repeatedly, not just the books which have recently been mentioned by high-karma HN users.

leandot 10y ago

Btw you can also list a whole year - http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2016 http://hackernewsbooks.com/year/2016

gtrubetskoy 10y ago

I see one of the books at the top links to a comment of mine, but your service would get the Amazon referral for it. Which I don't care about entirely, it just got me thinking - do we presently have a technology that would make it possible for us to split some sort of a micro-credit/payment - I think if such a thing existed, that would be quite revolutionary. People could finally get paid for all the things they refer to, not to mention ads on their blogs, etc.

espitia 10y ago

Would love an all-time/yearly list! Also, I see a few comments criticizing the affiliate links. That's the reward you get for building cool stuff. No reason not to!

throwanem 10y ago
Affiliate links are fine. A newsletter signup modal that pops up when I've scrolled most the way down the page, and when dismissed scrolls me back to the top, is not. What even is that supposed to be about, to be building a page for Hacker News readers and that seems like a sensible thing to do?
- icoder 10y ago
  Even worse, both the popup, and the dismissal of it, enter the back stack. So to get back to HN I had to click 'back' twice [edit: thrice of course]. I think it's an honest mistake. The fact that you dismissed the popup seems to be stored in a cookie, so it bothers you only once ever (twice if you use the back button). Sidenote: since I'm in the EU I think you need to need to ask me for permission, but let's not open that can of worms.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    I mean I don't doubt it's an honest mistake, but it's also an honest mistake that wouldn't have had the opportunity to be made absent the decision to annoy the user with the signup modal anti-pattern.
    - leandot 10y ago
      Will get rid of the popup (at least in that form) as soon as the load goes down a bit. Appreciate all the feedback.
    - icoder 10y ago
      I'm sure the decision itself wasn't 'to annoy the user', but I get your point

pieterr 10y ago

Nice site! Maybe add links to reviews of the books too? Example #17: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/07/book-review-c-interfaces-and-implementations-by-david-r-hanson http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/07/book-review-c-interf...

Noseshine 10y ago
Personally, the most helpful link for me because that's what I inevitably check out first is the list ranked descending by "helpfulness" (votes) of the negative reviews. Usually they are more interesting to me than the positive ones including the top-voted ones. For example, for one book in the list the review (with lots of ALL CAPS SENTENCES, but still interesting) in 5th place of the negative reviews by "truestara" seemed to be a good summary: https://www.amazon.com/Iodine-Crisis-What-About-Wreck/product-reviews/098603200X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt_rgt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=helpful&filterByStar=critical&pageNumber=1 https://www.amazon.com/Iodine-Crisis-What-About-Wreck/produc...
- eriknstr 10y ago
  Here is a direct link to the comment I think you are talking about: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3NZHDP4ALNJ4I/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=098603200X https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3NZHDP4ALNJ4I/re...

Aldo_MX 10y ago

The "Hacker News Books" title raised too much my expectations, I was expecting books which talked about entrepreneurship, technical topics and good practices, not "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids"...

criddell 10y ago
We're getting older...
dang 10y ago
HN has always had this pluralistic bent, because that's the way the site founder is. The word for pg's taste is 'catholic' in the original sense. So the appearance of a book on child-rearing isn't a decline or even a change; the question is whether the book is interesting, not what it's about. It would be concerning if unpredictable, unrelated things didn't appear, still more concerning if all the things made sense and were correlated with some (any) convention, and most concerning of all if the convention were that of a majority.

cholantesh 10y ago

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.

davb 10y ago

The 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 even knowing if the site is any good or of any interest to me?

Navarr 10y ago
Apparently it "works." Which is really disappointing.
- criddell 10y ago
  Sometimes (especially on mobile) it seems to be the only way to get rid of it. I should apologize to "someguy@gmail.com" and "ihateyou@gmail.com" for all the things I've signed you up for.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    > Sometimes (especially on mobile) it seems to be the only way to get rid of it. Or hit back and don't sign up at all.
  - Navarr 10y ago
    This is not terribly on topic but that hits so close to home. I get tonnes of emails at my, what i would assume to be uncommon [navarr] @ [gmail] address getting signed up for all sorts of things. Dating websites, Car dealerships, ugh its awful. Do they not accept @example.org which is a reserved domain? That would be a much better address to use EDIT: You guys suck [1] [1]: http://i.imgur.com/FaTJ4QB.png http://i.imgur.com/FaTJ4QB.png
    - criddell 10y ago
      I forgot all about example.org. The more annoying thing for me is that they often won't accept my actual email address. It seems to be due to either the period in my name or the hyphen in the domain name.
    - 10y ago

aaron695 10y ago

Canonical Lists. I remember loving them then going to hate. Guess it's where you are in life.

DanBC 10y ago

I 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 so high on the list.

fitzwatermellow 10y ago

What 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, etc, etc ;)

sailfast 10y ago
I expect those have been listed a lot as well, but interestingly using the "weekly" format means that there are a lot more books to take in. Now if I only had time to read them all...
leandot 10y ago
If there were no links with the title, then they don't get considered. As someone mentioned earlier there is tons of good stuff mentioned without a link, but that requires a whole other level of looking into the data than this hobby project ;)
- fitzwatermellow 10y ago
  Thanks for building leandot. Lot's of interesting finds, definitely bookmark'd!

uberneo 10y ago

Nice aggregation -- Would be handy , if the books available will be by Category and Source (Amazon , Safari, O'Reilly)

louprado 10y ago

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 http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ I am surprised that someone doesn't solve this problem once and for all by allowing decent search parameters (e.g., all time, last month, by karma, by genre, etc.). This latest submission weights by karma and bins the results weekly. Those restrictions make it personally unappealing but it is a great first step. I wouldn't have thought to consider karma. Edit: clarity

publicfig 10y ago
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ is pretty much the default (unofficial) search and personalized sorting site for HN. Super fast and works well in my experience.
- ryankey721 10y ago
  From my understanding and my own desires, I think the previous comment is looking for a site that will offer a list of book links on HN with parameters to filter/sort the books. That way you can find "most mentioned books in the last year" or "highest karma book links for the last month".

kobayashi 10y ago

Would you mind adding TLS compatibility? The free LetsEncrypt CA is, of course, an easy way to do so. Great site, looking forward to the new reads.

yekim 10y ago

Nice. I'm always taking books that are mentioned in various HN comments and adding them to my reading list. Thanks for making it easy!

magic_beans 10y ago

This is amazing!!! Great idea, and really useful!

tedmiston 10y ago

I wanted to take a second to share the contrarian opinion in support of OP's use of affiliate links. He/she did a lot of work to make this project and to maintain it. I think they are done tastefully and sensibly in a service that adds value.

criddell 10y ago
I just searched the page for "affiliate" and most of the comments seem to be requests for how much money they generate. I'm curious myself. When somebody posts a link to Amazon in a comment thread that contains an affiliate code, I think that's fair to criticize. When somebody points to something they built that uses affiliate links, it comes down to how it's presented (and more importantly, how often it's reposted). Who wouldn't be interested in a followup post 6 months from now with a breakdown of traffic and revenue?
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Kudos to OP if he decides to share that information, as like others, I'm curious to know.
  - leandot 10y ago
    Sure thing!
gkst 10y ago
Having done a similar project[1], that also includes affiliate links to Amazon and being called a spammer by some people because of that, I really appreciate your stance, that if a project adds value, monetizing it is okay. Moreover, I'd like to add that affiliate links are less intrusive and dangerous wrt to malicious code and user privacy. I wonder why Adsense et al rarely get called out, but affiliate links do. Maybe it's my confirmation bias or it's because people don't see those other ads, because of using an ad blocker. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924741
- 10y ago

Unbeliever69 10y ago

"Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition" curated content at its best! Is there some seminal work in this book I'm not aware of?

DanBC 10y ago
There's a link under each book taking you to the comment on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309500 > To this day, I recall with fondness poring over Palm's documentation and the book by Neil Rhodes and Julie McKeehan [1] and writing code using the MetroWorks CodeWarrior for Palm OS [2].

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Hey, where's SICP? Has nobody mentioned that and gotten enough upvotes? Because I see it all the time...

squeaky-clean 10y ago
It's based off of links to Amazon, O'Reilly and Safari. SICP probably isn't counted much because I'd imagine most people link to the free text on MIT press.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Ahhh. I'd say that somebody should build a special case for it, but most of us know about it, and it would just take up space at the top spot :-).

leandot 10y ago

Some stats if people are interested : - People online right now according to GA is about 500 and has been stable like that for the last two hours or so - ~80% of the traffic comes from HN, rest is FB, Twitter, etc. - Last two hours - 9,414 users, 16,338 pageviews Will write a blog post with more info.

jrs235 10y ago
Looking forward to the write up!

swalsh 10y ago

There are a lot of books rated 5 stars. They're good reads most of them, but there's another class of books. The kind where even a year later you remember them. They truely changed how you think about a topic. I'm always searching for those top class books, the kind that feel like religious experiences to read. The issue is there's no way to distinglish them from regular 5 star books, the kind where you put them down and say "wow good book", but a year from now you really can't recall much about it..

muralimadhu 10y ago
do you know if there is a compilation of those really awesome books somewhere ?
- swalsh 10y ago
  I haven't found one yet :\
  - dota_fanatic 10y ago
    The problem is that your top-tier book for one person isn't a top-tier book for another, and then there's different kinds of top-tier books, ones that focus on depth vs ones that focus on context. I think it should be possible though to identify these books, classify them based on depth vs breadth vs context, and then put them in sub-tiers (eg layman, motivated amateur, budding specialist, master). Getting back to the individual though, it's very hard to know how big of an inference gap there is for the model(s) you're trying to convey and how much the person "knows" already. Some books are masterful if you've read precursor books a, b, f, and p. Some books are masterful if you're coming from the right cultural context. And then there's tightly held biases that can get in the way of some core assumption of the book, ruining the whole effort.
- graham1776 10y ago
  There was a great post about a week ago about books you would give as a gift. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243611

lucasnemeth 10y ago

I didn't knew about "Feynman Lectures On Computation" and was reading the reviews. There's only one 2 star reviews, I clicked to see what it was about. And surprise, it is by Guido Van Rossum! (And he's not that impressed by the book) https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-P/product-reviews/0738202967/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_two?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=two_star&showViewpoints=0 https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-...

jszymborski 10y ago

Please 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 with it. Those pop-ups are jarring. I think it's great you've got an affiliate link, and I get you want to get as many recurring eyeballs on this as possible, but those pop-ups are everyone's pet peeve... it's the MIDI autoplay, MARQUEE and BLINK tag of websites today. Edit: Removed capitals for emphasis and adjusted tone to better communicate my intention and comply with HN Guidelines.

maineldc 10y ago
I agree that it's annoying, but I would like to see some data about conversions before I would say "Do not ever pull that 'Subscribe' pop-up crap." I have heard anecdotes to the effect that it's actually great for the publisher and it would be especially great to hear the results of site targetted to the HN crowd.
- jszymborski 10y ago
  Keeping a mailing list is great and super convenient, but there has to be a better way... For example, the inline Subscribe form is tucked all the way down as the last thing on the page. I'm sure you'd get better conversion with it as the first thing at the top of the list, maybe with a pastel yellow background for the form. It's sort of the same thing with pop-under ads or those video ads, sure you're likely going to get more clicks on those, but you've made your website look (1) sketchy (2) difficult to use and (3) undesirable to return to.
dang 10y ago
When commenting here, please be civil, even though you don't like popups. Your comment is uncivil, because it rants and yells at another user who is sharing their work. That's especially bad in a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. The comment also breaks the HN guidelines by using uppercase for emphasis. Please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

samblr 10y ago

Can anybody comment on #1 in list : Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

DanBC 10y ago
Here's the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12316857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12316857 nkurz has over 37,000 karma, and is currently about 30-35 in the list of people by karma. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- samblr 10y ago
  Thank you @nkurz edit: meant @DanBC in above line but wrote nkurz. Never mind - thanks to both. :)

tmaly 10y ago

something seems off, Palm OS programming is mentioned as #16. This does not make sense.

core2pro 10y ago

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 have found the perfect goal for weekend. :)

core2pro 10y ago

_lpa_ 10y ago

I made something last winter (http://www.hnreads.com/ 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 book titles, perhaps something you might consider if you wanted to expand the site. I like the idea of showing the top books per time period!

marai2 10y ago

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 books and better reviews than the average review at Amazon. http://www.vivalabooks.com/ http://www.vivalabooks.com/

questionr 10y ago

some (mostly technical) books are mentioned in shorthand (eg. k&r and gof). how are those accounted for?

questionr 10y ago
apologies...asked under wrong comment

ultramancool 10y ago

This 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 of garbage that got referenced once in an argument (and often a bad one at that).

devin481 10y ago

WATCH MOVIE FULL HD Rome / PS3 Gaming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ZjPtVBtRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ZjPtVBtRY

Jaruzel 10y ago

I quite like this (not that my opinion really matters tbh), but a thought does occur to me - any chance of putting the title of original post on HN that contains the referring comment - i know you can click to it via the comment link, but seeing the post title alongside the book would make for interesting browsing.

samblr 10y ago

Since HN discusses about books time and again - will it be a good idea to have a group for HN in goodreads ?

nojvek 10y ago

Having a top year, month would be a 100x more attractive for me. Weekly is too much churn to figure out what is good.

mikecope 10y ago

OP, great site. Curious whether you've already been approved by the amazon affiliate program. (For others not in the know, amazon will only approve your site once you've completed your first sale.) I ask because I was recently rejected for my application (http://addonbuddy.com/ http://addonbuddy.com/). Their reason was "lack of original content." Here's part of the message I received: "A part of our criteria is that your site has to be established with enough unique content. We rejected your application due to one or more of the following reasons. - Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors - Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed" I like your site and think it offers a lot of value, but Amazon's affiliate program seems to favor blogs that have a lot of content. They can also be real sticklers about including certain text in your website indicating that you're part of the affiliate program.

tienthanh8490 10y ago

Nice project, but probably worth adding some natural language processing to avoid things like this from being added to the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11704954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11704954 --> "I loved this book for being exceptionally clear and terse. I was hooked from the first sentence: "Probability is a mathematical language for quantifying uncertainty." That one sentence makes the concept clear in a way that the entire chapter on probability from "Statistics in a Nutshell" (http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Nutshell-Sarah-Boslaugh/dp/... http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Nutshell-Sarah-Boslaugh/dp/...) did not." --> "Statistics in a Nutshell" got added to list 20 of year 2016

samwyse 10y ago

Visited the site, dismissed the pop-up, scrolled to the bottom, saw that every book had just one mention. Wound up spending more time reading comments and looking at the list, don't think I'll return as the biggest problems do not seem fixable. You are using Amazon links as a substitute for actual linguistic processing to parse out book names. It may be possible to use the links to prime the pump by creating a list of titles, then re-scanning all comments for closer approximations of those titles but I don't know the fesability of that.

chrisrock 10y ago

Any option to browse books by category?

p333347 10y ago

The idea is good and the service seems well intentioned but there is a nit I have to pick. A god awful book (GAB) that a high karma poster (HKP) mentioned to talk about its god awfulness would also make to this list, and would be worsened if other HKP mentions in a discussion/debate. Of course, one could argue that a debate amongst HKPs on a GAB making that GAB appear on the list is a positive thing as it lets the reader decide the worth of the book, but I am talking about a degenerate case without such a debate or discussion. Internet citizens are sort of programmed to attribute high value to items near the top of a list when no explicit negative context is mentioned. What I am trying to say is that it would be truly beneficial if there were a bit of context mentioned along with the book, but I guess it would have to use AI/ML for NLP which is by no means a trivial thing. But that would make this spectacular. If that is not feasible (for whatever reasons), I suggest there be a prominent message saying to the effect of "this is not a recommendation list but just lists top mentions made by HKP".