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Extracting Hacker News book recommendations with the ChatGPT API
- SquareWheel 3y agoSeems pretty lousy to take other people's recommendations and slap your referral link on them. This is honestly bordering on spam content.
- amelius 3y agoPerhaps they are trying to offset the carbon emissions from their GPU use.
- bwb 3y agoThe author did a lot of work and analysis to build this. This is not easy to do and I've found that people doing anything with books are doing it for passion, not money. Background: I run hackernewsbooks.com, and the only thing affiliate revenue covers is the hosting and mailing list costs (~$50 a month). It is a fun project I bought from the original owner to learn (and because I loved the idea). I want to add more visuals and unique navigation to it. I also run Shepherd.com, which is a much larger book website and we are not covering our costs yet, it is a struggle. There is a tendency on H.N. to think everything is a scam; I'd love to see that moderated a bit so that people realize it's people like them building cool stuff that excites them.
- kortilla 3y agoIt’s still sleazy hijacking other people’s recommendations to monetize them.
- 55555 3y agoYour comments here and elsewhere are indirectly being monetized too. I think most people who recommend a book do it to help the world and spread knowledge and would be glad to have their recommendation reshared.
- bwb 3y agoAnd to add, it also is a HUGE help to authors. There is a huge problem in the book industry with"winner takes all" within Amazon and other big book websites. It means we as readers are getting less and less exposed to books that we would like but fail to get noticed. The more recommendations and distribution of unique recommendations the better.
- bwb 3y agoI find it hilarious that you would say this when you used to work for Google :) All Google does is hijack other people's hard-written content and slap ads around it. I am half-kidding, as I love Google, but I think your comment lacks some self-awareness about the reality of curation and what it offers to people. And how the world is funded. I mean how much of your house is paid for from ad revenue while you worked at Google?
- kortilla 3y agoGoogle didn’t steal people’s content when I left. Snippets weren’t a thing. It was a search engine that actually directed traffic to content creators. Google didn’t make money on the curation, they made money from the separate ads on the side. I would have no problem if the author jammed ads off on the side. The fact that you think ad revenue is the same as adding and replacing referral links from things that people already curated is pretty disturbing.
- bwb 3y agoGoogle entirely makes money on curation :), that is what they do. Curate and organize the web. They also sub in their own product links everywhere. The creator of this project threw in some referral links, but he didn't replace them. And maybe he made $20 to $50 bucks for what was a huge chunk of his time to create this fun data analysis project. Seems a weird thing to complain about.
- ryanklee 3y agoI find the idea that everyone gets to hoard and constrain the value of their own output sleazy.
- sockaddr 3y agoFrom my perspective he's putting in the work to collect all of these into one spot that is easy and fun for me to peruse (also without banner ads and other garbage on the site). That seems sufficiently transformative to make his referral links okay.
- distantsounds 3y agothe "author" fed a bunch of text into a prompt generator and spit out a list with referral links web 3.0 looking good
- chrischen 3y agoIf you don't want to support them then don't click on the link or extract the raw link from the source? The person who made this is under no obligation to make it easy for you to use his thing for free.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoBut I'm also supporting them by participating on Hacker News.
- creativenolo 3y agoIf I knew it was an Amazon link before clicking it, I would be 100% ok with it. But as it is, I agree.
- Kiro 3y agoOut of all things you can "steal" I can't think of anything with less intrinsic value than the mentioning of a book title. Pretty sure no-one who posts a recommendation on a public forum has any expectations of ownership or attribution, unless they are quoted word-by-word but this is just aggregating the titles.
- odyssey7 3y agoFunny, my first thought was: wow, what an easy way to make money — I wish I’d done this.
- frontman1988 3y agoHow much money do 50 odd affiliate links to sub 5 dollar books even make? I doubt OP is making some enviable amount of money.
- column 3y agoSo.. what was the prompt? You talk about your results and they are valuable, but the prompt would be great
- tangue 3y agoI’m surprised that Knuth’s book isn’t in the top 5 and I’m very surprised to see Descarte’s meditation as even in France no one longer reads this ( must be related to the various posts about meditation on HN imho ) and Franck ( not Brian ) Herbert wrote Dune. I don’t trust this post and indeed I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.
- NhanH 3y agoThe author name is wrong for Meditations (though it links to the correct book) It’s Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius).
- kristianp 3y agoAuthor here. There are at least 2 books referred to as Meditations, so probably that item on the list should be split into Decartes [1] and Aurelius. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosoph...
- jamestimmins 3y agoKnuth's work is the computer science version of "industry-specific canon that few people have actually read", much like The Powerbroker in urban planning. I own several of his books (admittedly they were gifts), and have never read them. So them not showing up in the top five doesn't surprise me much.
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- laurent_du 3y agoI don't think Knuth's work is canon in our specific industry, be it web dev, system dev, or whatever it is people around here are doing. Knuth belongs to Academia, not industry.
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- __rito__ 3y agoI found Hacker Recommended Books [0a] on HN [0b], and began reading through the books on it, tried many books, read around 20 of them. The experience has been great, and learned many new things. Some books have expanded my mind. If you are into books, I highly recommend searching HN with the simple keyword "books", and filter using "Ask HN" tags [1], or simply by "books". This is how I choose almost all of my English books now (I am trilingual and can read more languages)- even non-technical books. I have been doing this for more than two years, and I really like HN for books recommendations. Many years' worth of high quality reads can be found on HN threads related to books. They are goldmines. EDIT: There is also Hacker News Books [2]. Check out their Top Books of All Time section [3]. [0a]: https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-time/page/0/0 https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t... [0b]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967 [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Ask+HN+books https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Ask+HN+books [2]:https://hackernewsbooks.com https://hackernewsbooks.com [3]: https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news
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- FrankyHollywood 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967 ("Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning") is great, I still regularly use it!
- __rito__ 3y agoI wish that model was updated in some time interval. It is frozen in time. :/ I understand and know the pain of maintaining a fully online model, and that is asking too much from an individual. But, say, a manual update every six months or even a year would be okay.
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- theusus 3y agoWhy do you need ChatGPT some Algolia and Data analysis would suffice. What novel and hard work have you done for this?
- netsharc 3y agoit'd be incredible if they analyzed what sorts of users (based on their comments) recommend each book, I guess with percentages (e.g. "80% who recommend Ayn Rand are right-leaning")
- HenryBemis 3y agoMoving away on the method, and sticking to the list (however imperfectly drafted). Would it be better to read in the order #50 --#> 1 or #1 --> #50?
- thread_id 3y agoChat GPT missed a few (and probably more): https://hn.algolia.com/?q=A+non-standard+book+list+for+software+developers https://hn.algolia.com/?q=A+non-standard+book+list+for+softw... ... and more in the comments... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30651273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30651273 The website looks like a clever way to generate a lot of clicks to Amazon using his affiliate link.
- jassyr 3y agoAre people still making money on Amazon affiliate programs? I thought that ship sailed like 10 years ago.
- q87b 3y agoHow to make cheap Amazon affiliate link spam even less about quality: Use "AI" to generate it.
- ramshorst 3y agoWould be interesting if ChatGPT could get ePubs for these ;)
- bwb 3y agoSo you can illegally steal from authors? What is wrong with you?
- rcarmo 3y agoSad that none of Douglas Adams’ books are listed.
- samokhvalov 3y agoit's no 29
- rcarmo 3y agoOh. Must have scrolled past. Was expecting it to be much higher up.
- robinoh 3y agoI keep being amazed how `Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions` gets so little love here.
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- geonic 3y agoThe authors for Dune (Frank Herbert) and Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) are not correct
- tobbe2064 3y agoWhat a pretentious list
- pvdoom 3y agoJesus Christ, are there some incredibly bad books at very high place - i.e. the How to wind friends, or the Atlas Shrugged drivel ...
- usgroup 3y agoThe "Meditations" referred to in the list seems to be the work by Marcus Aurelius in the raw data (available at the bottom of the page): not Descartes -- presumably -- "Meditations on First Philosophy". It was just a spot check -- not exhaustive. Also many who refer to Descartes in the raw data, do so regarding other works. I think this is an interesting mistake.
- a_c 3y agoTangentially related, I always want a service to show all books mentioned in a book, like a web of html, but made out of books. I often find my next book that way. I wonder if there is such service out there? Would love to see the network and the visualisation of connected books
- quickthrower2 3y agoSome HN cliches there! Are we this predictable?
- criddell 3y agoLLM’s depend on it!
- amelius 3y agoA more general approach would be to train an LLM on all HN comments, then allow the user to ask this LLM questions, like: "Could you recommend me a few books on machine learning?"
- dwighttk 3y ago“Even with a temperature of 0, GPT’s results vary from call to call.” So like the number of times a book is mentioned changes? Wouldn’t you fail a cs student whose program did that?
- ninepoints 3y agoAtlas Shrugged at #8? Give me a break
- zvmaz 3y agoWhen I saw Ayn Rand in the list, it immediately lowered its credibility for me.
- negus 3y agoWhy so? Can you provide a more detailed description on why do you think her novels are unworthy?
- antupis 3y agoAs old joke goes “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." but generally you should read it, at least then you know what those libertarian types are thinking.
- negus 3y agoDo you really think this kind of jokes is a good explanation? One can easily replace "Atlas Shrugged" with almost any book in it. Your reply states that for you even the word "libertarian" is offensive.
- zvmaz 3y agoIf you have a penchant for Ayn Rand and her general outlook, I do not think your stance on her can change through rational discussion. There are "primal world beliefs" [1] that are irremediably incompatible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_world_beliefs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_world_beliefs
- keiferski 3y agoI actually find HN book recommendations useful for the opposite reason: the un-upvoted comments at the bottom that have book suggestions I've never heard of before. That is valuable, while this list of popular choices is mostly predictable. If you dig into any "recommend me books" post, you'll find some truly great recommendations near the bottom.
- jefc1111 3y agoYep. Same for music. Go anywhere that people are talking about a band you like, then scroll down until you start to see things you've never heard of.
- tibanne 3y agoMeditations isn't by Descartes is it?
- febeling 3y agoThere is one by Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy), but the link goes to the Marc Aurel book, so it's a mess either way.
- gooseus 3y ago"Bible" should probably have been excluded. Besides the fact that I can't imagine this many people here actually recommending reading it (rather than it just being mentioned it in passing), it's multiple books written by multiple authors across multiple centuries. If people were actually recommending the Bible, they'd probably be recommending specific books like Job or Psalms or one of the Gospels. In a similar way Fooled By Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile are all a part of the Incerto series and could have been condensed to one line item. In any case, great work! I'd like to see a post like this with the top 50-100 authors and the comments full of discussions about which of the books are the author's best / most accessible.
- jmacd 3y agoHN has given me so many great book recommendations over the years. Things I truly would not have found myself. I really get excited when I see someone mention a book in a relevant topic thread.
- antman 3y ago7 Meditations, Descartes. That is a pretty good hallucination
- maroonblazer 3y agoI'm an informavore, and even in my 50s, I realize there aren't enough years left to read all the non-fiction I want. For some books (non-fiction only), I want just a couple double-clicks into the main points, much like a grad student skimming numerous texts to extract key points for their thesis. ChatGPT has been invaluable for this. For instance, I began reading Susan Nieman's "Evil in Modern Thought" but found the writing style a bit tedious after just two chapters. I turned to ChatGPT for a chapter-by-chapter summary, which it provided brilliantly. I shared this with a friend who earned her PhD in the 2000s, and she was astounded. It's hard to overstate the time saved. [EDIT]: Here's the summary from ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/share/2f3d0aca-46d3-490b-8426-5e8813510d94 https://chat.openai.com/share/2f3d0aca-46d3-490b-8426-5e8813...
- adamgordonbell 3y agoI'm impressed the chapter by chapter worked. I tried something like that and had to use a RAG like approach where I provided the text with each question, and used Claude.
- eli 3y agoYou don't worry that it will include hallucinations? Seems like it would be hard to tell if it's summarizing a chapter or inventing a chapter based on its title and context.
- maroonblazer 3y agoGiven I'd read the first two chapters, I could judge its accuracy, which was spot on. Also note that I tried to trick it at the end, asking for a chapter that didn't exist. It didn't fall for it.
- CSMastermind 3y agoTo anyone considering reading Dawkins let me highly recommend The Ancestor's Tale over The Selfish Gene. It's easily not only the better work but Dawkin's best and one of the best books I've personally read. I always cringe when I see The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, etc listed because you're not getting his absolute best stuff.
- sarasasa28 3y agoWhat about this but only for fiction?
- blondie9x 3y agoWhy are there so many issues with the list? Descartes didn't write Meditations. Some links are dead or point to wrong item.
- thiago_fm 3y agoThe "Meditations" book I believe is to be from Marcus Aurelius, not Descartes (which also has a book with a similar name)
- odyssey7 3y agoAgreed — part of that stoicism trend.
- raybb 3y agoNow time to use ChatGPT to turn it into a list on Open Library!
- musha68k 3y agoAn increasingly good question to ask oneself these days: how could this be done without direct usage of LLMs / without ML even? Then as a second step ask yourself how potential assistance from generative tools and perhaps ML could improve those solutions.
- botro 3y agoI made a version of this using boring tech (Postgres, Django, Python) by just counting the number of times a book link (not just books, youtube videos, arxiv papers etc) is posted in Hacker News comments. I also did a bunch of calculations around the poster of the link and replies to the posted link. The reality is that boring tech does not get attention and engagement.
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoHappy to hear (with Postgres or Python or Django) how you are going to filter out irrelevant comments, from comments mentioning books. And then how you're going to extract the book title and its author from a comment? That doesn't look trivial at all to me... but... if you did that, please share with us a Github repo.
- botro 3y agoThe site is http://hnlikes.com/ http://hnlikes.com/ and on the About page I describe how it was done. Like I mentioned it only looks for books that are linked (or videos, arxiv papers, Wikipedia etc.). I then use the link to get information from the site itself. I calculate scores for the given link weighted by a number of metrics. I'm sorry if I gave the impression this was fancier than it actually is.
- chung8123 3y agoI think a lot of the basic tasks with LLMs can be done without ML but what I find interesting is learning how to use LLMs to do interesting things and the ceiling being a lot higher than with traditional methods. Learning how to use a new tool with older type of work can be useful and enlightening.
- BeetleB 3y agoNote: The author of Calculus is wrong in the table.
- BeetleB 3y agoI knew Never Split The Difference would show up. Do note that when it is mentioned at HN, you will likely also get some comments criticizing it.
- samirillian 3y agoFun fact, the guy the FBI claims was behind the Anthrax attacks was apparently a fan of Hofstadter: > A week later, just after 1:00 a.m. on the morning of November 8, the FBI stated that Ivins was observed throwing away "a copy of a book entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, published by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979" and "a 1992 issue of American Scientist Journal which contained an article entitled 'The Linguistics of DNA,' and discussed, among other things, codons and hidden messages".
- willtemperley 3y agoFor any readers of "Thinking: Fast and Slow", this blog on replicability with a reply from the author Daniel Kahneman is fascinating: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe... Edit: here's the article with the comment from Kahneman: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-1454 https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
- warrentr 3y agoWhere's the reply from Kahneman?
- willtemperley 3y agoEdited ... sorry
- anthomtb 3y agoIt's surprising that Code, by Charles Petzold, didn't make the top 50. That's one of the most approachable books out there for learning how computers really work. I see a lot of mentions of Code on HN but maybe that is skewed by the links for which I read the comments.
- Mimmy 3y agoi see it at #15
- anthomtb 3y agoYou are right. Its under the full title: "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software".
- botro 3y agoIt's the #2 most frequently posted Amazon link in Hacker News comments according to my site (HNLikes.com).
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- throw1234651234 3y agoThat book has parallels to "Draw the rest of the horse" - it's an awesome book, but the author definitely doesn't do a great job with the latter half, where he assumes that you not only understood the first part but also committed components to memory, so the rest of what he is saying can fit into your working memory and make sense. Have to admit I struggled with the latter half, mainly because I didn't quite memorize the first half even though "I get it". I do like the "teach it to me like I am 5" approach. People try to gloss over the basics nowadays like it's not complex enough intrinsically.
- nzgrover 3y agoThis is a fantastic book if you have difficulty sleeping! I had no idea such an interesting topic, the fundamentals of the operation of computers, could be rendered so lifeless and dull or that it would take so many words to do so. I'm reading through it now but it's taking an awful long time as I never get through more than 3 or 4 pages before it's lights out.
- lfmunoz4 3y agoI'm surprised how few books there actually are. Each time I see one of these lists I see the same books over and over again. In a single lifetime you can easily read all "good" books. Wonder what books are good but are hardly mentioned, probably none cause if they were good the would be mentioned. We have a tendency to think there is hidden knowledge but that is just not the case. These books are what there is kind depressing if you've read most of them.
- Fluorescence 3y agoIt's probably isn't that few books surpass a measure of quality but how a hit based business is rate limited by the bandwidth of word of mouth trendiness.
- boringg 3y agoHow about extracting podcasts and top blogs? Interested to see what that looks like. Also would be great to see if users were self promoting content...
- klysm 3y agoI wonder how this would compare to the results of just asking ChatGPT what books are frequently recommended on HN
- ultrasaurus 3y agoPretty good overlap: What are the ten most recommended books on Hacker News? 1. "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas 2. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari 3. "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin 4. "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman 5. "How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie 6. "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen 7. "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter 8. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman 9. "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" by Cal Newport 10. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman
- javier_e06 3y agoAs subjective as it may be I am pretty disappointed with the list. Here is my last 3 books. Also to disappoint. "The Passanger" McCarty, Cormac "Children of Time" Tchaikosvki, Adrian "Snowcrash" Stephenson, Neal "Antkind" Kaufman, Charlie I say four! four last books.
- goostavos 3y agoWhat did you think of Antkind? That one has been on my list forever, but I've never gotten around to it. I expect it to be either pure genius, or... 500 pages of unending navel gazing.
- javier_e06 3y agoIt was all that. I don't have eidetic memory but I the visuals presented in this book I recall vividly.
- pphysch 3y agoThis is a striking summary of HN's ideological leanings. Beyond the obvious programming/math classics, it's an exposition of the Californian Ideology [1]. It would be nice if there was some further sentiment analysis. [1] (PDF) - https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_Andy_1996_The_Californian_Ideology.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...
- yayitswei 3y agoI believe you can use the function calling feature to force the output to be schema-conforming JSON.
- daft_pink 3y agoIs there a link for those that just want the extraction results of your project? Would love to see aggregations of stuff like this from hacker news.
- greenie_beans 3y agodoes anybody else consider "how to win friends and influence people" a red flag whenever somebody mentions it as one of their favorite or most impactful books?
- jborden13 3y agoNo it's a solid read on human behavior
- squeaky-clean 3y agoI don't think so. I see this sentiment a lot from people who haven't actually read the book. People often think it's about being manipulative or something. It's really just a super basic guide on making and maintainibg friends. Like if you already have a group of friends and no worries about keeping that, you probably already know everything in the book. As someone who grew up as the perpetual outcast, the advice in that book was really useful for me. It was essentially cliff-notes for social skills I should have learned at the age of 10 but didn't. The only "red flag" I see when someone mentions the book is that they were probably very socially inept at some point in the past like I was. They still might be, but they're working on it.
- greenie_beans 3y agothat's interesting. i've never read the book, maybe i'll give it a try. only had an experience with a person who highly recommended it and they weren't very trustworthy.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoThe advice in it certainly can be used by untrustworthy people or in malicious ways but so can any other social advice really. I'm sure some people buy the book to only read the sections about asking people to do things for you or being a better salesman (Which doesn't have to literally be selling things. Maybe I'm trying to convince my friends to try some new board game at game night instead of the same 3 we always play). But even then you'd have to ignore most of those chapters' advice about putting the buyer's needs first. Ultimately the core of the book is "think about the other person and their perspective" and gives advice on how to apply that in cases of making friends, keeping friends and having good business relationships. Or to frame it a more selfish way, "the best way to get what you want from other people is to give them what they want first." Like I said, it's nothing groundbreaking, but the stories and examples were helpful to me when I was socially clueless. The average person might still find value in it because even though these things are easy to know, it takes conscious effort to apply. But I also think writing "Pause and think about the other person" on your hand with a marker will have exactly the same benefit unless you really need some of these things spelled out for you.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI looked at Godel Escher Bach and the 'first mention' link was to a comment seconding someone else's recommendation (albeit in what was likely the first HN thread to mention it), so I think the author's prompts need some refinement.
- PUSH_AX 3y agoAmazon affiliates are getting smarter by the day.
- hm-nah 3y ago“The Iron Heel” by London