8 ms·

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

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

by leandot 10y ago

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