I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.
I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
Not long ago I came across this book in an HN thread about AI and the future. The moment I saw the title, I knew I had to read it. Crypto, AI, collective intelligence — it hits all the right notes for me.
If you want some other portrayals of the Singularity, see The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and Friendship is Optimal (and also Caelum Est Conterrens)
I really appreciate Cory Doctorow's work on digital rights, enshittification and other topics, but I couldn't make it more than half way through 'Rapture of the nerds'. Just too strange, I couldn't connect to it. It is very original though. Some people will probably love it.
You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11 mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian Chronicles" appears to be referencing "The Martian" instead.
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
Surprised TCP/IP Illustrated (Volume 1) has only been mentioned 6 times. It's been so helpful for me, so many times. Perhaps it's because most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job, but it's such a fundamental technology I would have thought learning about it in depth would be suggested far more frequently.
Also, a proper first edition copy is really high quality with lovely thick paper. My copy of Volume 2 on the other hand is not of the same quality, both in content and physical properties.
I think some of the book associations are wrong. It shows "the martian chronicles" for mentions of andy weir's "the martian".
Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read this year mentioned. Except "Mein Kampf" of course, interesting top mention there. perhaps lots of people are reading it to understand the past? I'll need to see if it's worth it, I always considered it the equivalent of drinking water from the river thames to understand victorian england better.
Yesterday I finished a long listen of the audio book "The Raise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer (on audible, 60 hours). He frequently quotes "Mein Kampf". I am not sure one can stomach the whole thing but it's interesting to read quotes of it in context.
I think "Mein Kampf" is the equivalent of celebrity gossip: you are very superficially interested because why not. The depth of the book is similar to the depth of this gossip's interest.
I had a look at the book a few years ago. After a few pages (somewhere in the middle of the book), you can see the writing style (not very good, overexcited, and that would appeal to people who look for it), but it would take longer to get a grasp on the content.
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon by Cixin Liu.
I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.
Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.
This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.
Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally life-changing, truly a masterpiece.
I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.
Asimov was a brilliant mind, but I'm not sure the Foundation series holds up very well since chaos theory become established (it is 40+ years since I read the books though, so I could be remembering wrongly).
This is a clever aggregation project, but I think the methodology might miss some important signal-to-noise distinctions. A book mentioned once in passing ("oh yeah, like in [book]") carries very different weight than a book recommended explicitly ("you should read [book] if you want to understand X"). Are you parsing comment sentiment or just doing keyword extraction?
The real value would be in clustering books by topic and showing which ones appear together in discussions. If someone mentions "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and "Database Internals" in the same comment, that's a stronger signal than two isolated mentions. You could build a recommendation engine from that co-occurrence data.
Also curious about the temporal aspect - tracking which books surge during certain news cycles. For example, did "Chip War" mentions spike when the AI compute restrictions hit? That contextual analysis would make this way more useful than a static ranked list. Would definitely use this if it had those features.
It's already pretty useful with the number of mentions available. Higher a number, the more that generally find a work of interest. Unless there are members who just love to spam the names of particular books. My main gripe is that this isn't a repo/gist, as a site this specialized is more likely to disappear into the wind at any time. Also the Amazon buy links; would prefer a link to Wikipedia, or even Goodreads.
Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN.
Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading habits than stereotypes suggest.
One bug: looks like "The Martian" by Andy Weir is getting grouped with "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. Might want to add some disambiguation logic for common title collisions.
How are you doing the extraction? LLM-based NER or something more traditional like regex + entity matching?
I was recently reading through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, and she has so many great quotes that are directly relevant to this situation.
Here's a shorter one:
> “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”
And a longer one:
> “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
Engaging with fantasy and scifi helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. It helps find what truly moves and inspires us. It teaches us to dream of a different, better world.
> I'd assumed HN skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading habits than stereotypes suggest.
Seeing 1984, Dune, Foundation as the top fiction is about as on-brand and unsurprising as it gets. I don't I could pick more expected fiction except for some popular cyberpunk and something from LOTR.
Throw in a hitchhikers guide, zen motorcycle and something from Feynman and you've covered all the bases.
I was surprised to see "An Abundance of Katherines", given that it's not John Green's newest or most highly regarded work. I looked into the comments to see why it was being discussed, but it seems to be a classification error - all of the comments are discussing "Abundance", the political nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. That one makes more sense on the list, given that it was released this March
It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped book so that users could link to, say, the entry for A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics.
The recent novel Abundance seems to be agressibley grouped with the John Green novel An Abundance of Katherines - which I think is a humorous retelling of 2025 but also maybe needs some matching work
It seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements, so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John Green—"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this year.
There's EY's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which might generate cross-interest in Harry Potter for those who wouldn't have read it otherwise.
On the one hand it is indeed mostly a high school reading list, all very mainstream and relatively popular fiction/sci-fi with a sprinkle of tech literature.
Is that really such a bad thing? Most adults barely read at all, or, at the very best, consume a current random best-seller here and there. I'd say that anything from a high school reading list is an upgrade, especially since most of this stuff is lost on the kids anyway.
It's all good literature and a nice entry point for someone new to the hobby. Expecting more from a top-50 of a tech forum is a bit surprising
Books which I have read and would recommend include:
- _Ashley's Book of Knots_ --- everyone should be aware of knots and now at least the basics interesting, _The Klutz Book of Knots_ was also mentioned once
- James Clavell _Noble House_ --- part of his "Asian Saga", not sure if it has aged well --- if a person could read only one of these, I'd recommend _King Rat_, based on his experience in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.
- Hesse _Steppenwolf_ --- that Hesse is no longer read saddens me deeply, and not just because this makes _The Glass Bead Game_ less likely --- his thoughts on the difficulties of interpersonal relationships resonate even now
- Knuth _Literate Programming_ --- I _really_ wish this style f programming would gain traction and that there would be more instances of taking famous programs and re-writing as a Literate Program, e.g., http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
- Knuth _Digital Typography_ (and not just because I have a reward check)
- Knuth _Mathematical Writing_ --- if you do any work in math, you probably already have a copy --- if you don't, you probably need one
- Dewdney _The Planiverse_ --- response to the classic _Flatland_, this has a real charm and despite the dated computer technology, has held up well
- Walter jon Williams _Hardwired_ --- an amazing cyberpunk novel, part of which was published in _Omni_
- Steven Brust's _Jhereg_ --- one of my favourite fantasy novels, which I've been reading since picking it up in a Waldenbooks when I was in high school, waiting for the last two books, and esp. glad of these since they made the "Paarfi Romances" exist --- anyone who enjoys Alexandre Dumas and fantasy should read _The Phoenix Guards_
- C.J. Cherryh's _Regenesis_ --- her entire Alliance--Union series is amazing and books are so varied pretty much everyone will find something which appeals
- Trevanian _The Eiger Sanction_ and _Shibumi_ --- not sure if this and _Shibumi_ have aged well or no, but the latter was a big part of my childhood
- Ben Franklin's Autobiography --- read presidential biographies to my kind in chronological order as a trial and regret not continuing with the actual project: biographies of important persons in chronological order
- Hal Clement _Space Lash_ now available in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph... --- I recommend folks read it in reverse chronological order, starting at the back, then working to the front and bailing when things get too quaint/old-school/golden-age.
- _Foxfire_ --- a classic series what predated the "Maker" movement
- Tolkien's _The Fall of Arthur_
- Knuth _TeX: The Program_
Books which were sufficiently striking that I have made a note of them to get to read (hopefully this will work out better than _The Black Swan_ which I found annoying)
- _Visual Thinking in Mathematics_
- _Hardcore VisualBASIC_ --- still a bit bummed that I managed to miss this and MacBasic....
- _Phoebe and her Unicorn_ --- getting this for my daughter
- _Harmony with Lego(R) Bricks_ --- book on music improvisation
- Ornamental Origami
Note that a number of books weren't actually mentioned, e.g., Isaac Asimov's _Book of Facts_
Good to see Designing Data-Intensive Applications on there, but it should be higher — certainly above the thoroughly middling Clean Code at least! DDIA is still the first book I tell every junior to read after they’ve got a couple years experience under their belt. Can’t wait for the 2nd edition!
Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.
Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
I’d be curious about sentiment analysis applied to these. I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
Is anyone else surprised that Gödel, Escher, Bach is as low on the list as it is? My experience on HN would have me believe it would be in the top 10 for sure. I wonder if it’s a string-matching issue.
I tried to get into neuromancer but I’m not a fan of the nonstop dialogue. Just a personal reference but it feels more and more rare to get new science fiction books primarily driven by the narrator.
How are the data processed? It doesn't look easy. For instance there is "Foundation" in the list, a common word, how does the algorithm distinguish between just the word and a mention of the book. Same idea for "The holy Bible". It is almost always just referred to as just "the Bible" but "Bible" is also used to refer to all sorts of reference books.
Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments.
I assume this one uses a few-shot LLM approach instead, which is slower and more expensive at inference, but so much faster to build since there's no tedious labeling needed.
> Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments
Yes, I saw that project pretty impressive! Hand-labeling 4000 books is definitely not an easy task, mad-respect to tracyhenry for the passion and hardwork that was required back then.
For my project, I just used the Gemini 2.5 Flash API (since I had free credits) with the following prompt:
"""You are an expert literary assistant parsing Hacker News comments.
Rules:
1. Only extract CLEARLY identifiable books.
2. Ignore generic mentions.
3. Return JSON ARRAY only.
4. If no books found, return [].
5. A score from -10 to 10 where 10 is highly recommended, -10 is very poorly recommended and 0 is neutral.
6. If the author's name is in the comment, include it; otherwise, omit the key.
JSON format:
[
{{
"title": "book title",
"sentiment": "score",
"author" : "Name of author if mentioned"
}}
]
Text:
{text}"""
It did the job quite well. It really shows how far AI has come in just 4 years.
You have a wayyy too skewed perception of the general tech person.
I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and such.
And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost nobody knows it.
What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book list?
No offense intended towards anyone, but it usually strikes me how basic/surface level literature references are here. For a crowd pretty much defined by intellectual curiosity, it's mostly highschool reads, very mainstream scifi/fantasy and corporate self help.
I wonder if it's an american thing, for engineers to be detached of liberal arts? The vibe tends to be quite different in local engineering groups.
The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more popular (it is, after all, a popularity list).
Second is this:
> for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?
Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to the choir. What they are glorifying is how well the story depicted an issue.
I think it's more about how using "most" as a measurement, no matter who the audience is that you pool from, is not a good way of producing a valuable list. In the end, having someone learned and well read produce a hand-written list with deeper cuts brings more value.
There is some real stuff in there if you scroll through but I don’t disagree with your point. But it is easier to perform/identify oneself with intellectual curiosity than to truly be intellectually curious.
The context of these book titles appearing in comments might skew the results. Ulysses is high up on the list, but the source comments have a lot of people using it as an example of a lengthy, difficult book.
I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class, instead of something more obscure.
It seems quite obvious to me why it looks like this, and other people have explained it. All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece. If someone hasn't read something you read in high school, it's still better than they read it now.
Not surprising. It is just "herd mentality" and "parroting" which is the bane of all general Social Groups/Crowds. There are some well-known (generally not too taxing and not necessarily good) books which keep being amplified.
One or two might be worthwhile but most would be mainstream and pedestrian.
I don't think it's particularly American; people these days read at a lower level around the world. Language aside, most bookstores in Europe and the US have a fair bit in common.
Most people will barely read through a couple basics, so it can be a bit of a though sell to start recommending more niche stories. And part of the reason that some of these books are so successful is that they tend to have pretty widespread appeal, while more niche books will be more divisive and less likely to get recommended broadly.
If you're so well-read why don't you grace us with some of your non-mainstream S-tier recommendations?
From this list, one of the books that I recommend to everyone is Piranesi, which is fairly mainstream, and if they want to explore Russian magical realism then Vita Nostra. Unsong is another favorite. In general I love to explore magic systems that experiment with breaking a system, or stories that explore how different rules might interact within a system.
I think people sometimes underestimate the value of lighter more fun reads, like cultivation stories. The best western adaptation of this style of novel is probably the Cradle series, by Will Wight. Even though the stories tend to be fairly light, they're quite enjoyable for exploring new modes of thinking. For example, we can analyze the interactions of energy as an abstract / symbolic form, and how it influences human behavior; which is an abstract / symbolic application of the cultivation lens over reality. To give an easier to understand example: Feng Shui isn't real but it's true, in the sense that the way in which we organize furniture within a space determines how people navigate it and how they interact. And why might this be useful? Well, sometimes we fail to see the full picture when using a single lens, and different lens might let us see things in a new light.
I've read some terribly generic web novel slop and gotten fairly unique and interesting perspectives from them, but most people aren't good enough readers to enjoy bad books, so they can only read and enjoy good books.
In safari, if I have content blockers enabled (which I have on by default for privacy and whatnot) then the site doesn’t show me anything. I’m guessing these are all ad links or something?
Jut to note there seems to be a bug with the comment section. When I selected the Rust book and then selected others, the first comment from Rust book is shown in other books as well.
My favorite reads of 2025 came from an HN recommendation (the Steerswoman series). I don't see it on this site so maybe the comment I saw was too oblique of a reference
Surprised to see a lot of mentions to Children of Time, a book I picked picked up on a whim in a local Bookshop (something I probably hanger done in 5 years)
Neat. I'm seeing a lot of overlap with books mentioned on r/reddit. I didn't realize, until know, how demographically similar hacker news and reddit are.
HN used to be a site for entrepreneurs to share ideas and work on things. Now the far left Reddit crowd has crashed it and anyone who has a successful business is just "lucky" and anyone who has earned wealth should have it stolen at gunpoint by the government to redistribute to those who don't produce anything.
It’s mostly an English language site and there are a lot of English speakers in “the West” - I would expect that if there’s a China equivalent there aren’t that many Americans having discussions there.
Affiliate marketing is such a mixed bag. I absolutely love it when people can monetize their writing by adding some affiliate links that are relevant to the audience - win/win for all sides. Yet it is as slimy as anything else when the sole purpose of creating content is to publish affiliate links.
My bad — probably should’ve added a disclaimer :)
For what it’s worth, I only added sponsored links to the top ~50 books out of ~10k total. Mostly just trying to cover the cost of a decent domain so I can keep the site running.
Eh, I've shared your views before. But Amazon affiliate link payouts are trash. The OP made it to the front page of HN, but I'd be surprised if he makes more than $100. It's possible, but probably highly unlikely. Let him them make some money, it's a cool project.
But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting emails).
I tend to avoid sci-fi that hits too close to home (don't love any of the AI/internet/crypto classics, same reason I can't bear to watch Silicon Valley), so I was a little bored by the top of the the list.
But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation, Children Of Time, Dune.
Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get too bored by descriptions of rock.
Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll through them all, but would be more curious to see books with 2 or more mentions.
It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
Lovely site. Got curious about one of my own biases (that the perceived libertarian slant of HN would be similarly in favor of Ayn Rand), and clicked through the usual suspects to see the context they were discussed in.
Pleasantly surprised to see much of the discourse was along the lines of, "Oh yeah, read her stuff, found it fascinating [in the same vein as a train wreck can be], recommended just to understand how those folks think." Not going to pick up her stuff any time soon, but I was happy to have a bias prove unfounded.
yboris|2 months ago
I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
number6|2 months ago
yuzhun|2 months ago
bananaflag|2 months ago
parkersweb|2 months ago
smoyer|2 months ago
hermitcrab|2 months ago
GenerocUsername|2 months ago
QuantumNomad_|2 months ago
The author and book cover it is showing is for a comic book adaptation by John Carnell.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41725880
Instead of showing the author and book cover for the original text book by Douglas Adams.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guid...
duckerduck|2 months ago
belter|2 months ago
kaangiray26|2 months ago
furyofantares|2 months ago
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
omoikane|2 months ago
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
losvedir|2 months ago
throw0101c|2 months ago
While on the general topic, also check out the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
JDye|2 months ago
Also, a proper first edition copy is really high quality with lovely thick paper. My copy of Volume 2 on the other hand is not of the same quality, both in content and physical properties.
bashkiddie|2 months ago
A well behaved reference implementation would not be of help.
Aachen|2 months ago
yeah, I'd just look up the specific thing I want to know online
notepad0x90|2 months ago
Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read this year mentioned. Except "Mein Kampf" of course, interesting top mention there. perhaps lots of people are reading it to understand the past? I'll need to see if it's worth it, I always considered it the equivalent of drinking water from the river thames to understand victorian england better.
Try1275|2 months ago
Erlangen|2 months ago
BrandoElFollito|2 months ago
I had a look at the book a few years ago. After a few pages (somewhere in the middle of the book), you can see the writing style (not very good, overexcited, and that would appeal to people who look for it), but it would take longer to get a grasp on the content.
bdunks|2 months ago
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
nottorp|2 months ago
Oh thanks for the warning. I was avoiding him based on a hunch. Now I know I was right.
If anyone else is weird like me and likes books to not read like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse.
ajcp|2 months ago
vips7L|2 months ago
Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.
This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.
druskacik|2 months ago
I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.
hermitcrab|2 months ago
watersb|2 months ago
https://qntm.org/Self
There Is No Antimemetics Division freaked me the hell out. Recommended.
tnolet|2 months ago
lencastre|2 months ago
yoan9224|2 months ago
The real value would be in clustering books by topic and showing which ones appear together in discussions. If someone mentions "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and "Database Internals" in the same comment, that's a stronger signal than two isolated mentions. You could build a recommendation engine from that co-occurrence data.
Also curious about the temporal aspect - tracking which books surge during certain news cycles. For example, did "Chip War" mentions spike when the AI compute restrictions hit? That contextual analysis would make this way more useful than a static ranked list. Would definitely use this if it had those features.
skeledrew|2 months ago
yoan9224|2 months ago
Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading habits than stereotypes suggest.
One bug: looks like "The Martian" by Andy Weir is getting grouped with "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. Might want to add some disambiguation logic for common title collisions.
How are you doing the extraction? LLM-based NER or something more traditional like regex + entity matching?
TheAceOfHearts|2 months ago
Here's a shorter one:
> “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”
And a longer one:
> “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
Engaging with fantasy and scifi helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. It helps find what truly moves and inspires us. It teaches us to dream of a different, better world.
jasonjmcghee|2 months ago
Maybe mentioning it for what not to do?
Just search it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clean+code
All (justifiably) against clean code methodology.
BoiledCabbage|2 months ago
Seeing 1984, Dune, Foundation as the top fiction is about as on-brand and unsurprising as it gets. I don't I could pick more expected fiction except for some popular cyberpunk and something from LOTR.
Throw in a hitchhikers guide, zen motorcycle and something from Feynman and you've covered all the bases.
timerol|2 months ago
defrost|2 months ago
It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped book so that users could link to, say, the entry for A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics.
The TeXbook by Donald Knuth has been mapped to A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics by N.P. Bali from this source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399031#45400264
endlessvoid94|2 months ago
zoklet-enjoyer|2 months ago
Cloudly|2 months ago
card_zero|2 months ago
Insanity|2 months ago
Nice website though, I like it.
an0malous|2 months ago
jeffbee|2 months ago
mitthrowaway2|2 months ago
tonymet|2 months ago
mohamez|2 months ago
dgeiser13|2 months ago
giraffe333|2 months ago
by Aho, Lam, and Sethi
https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools...
thcipriani|2 months ago
emodendroket|2 months ago
harshreality|2 months ago
DoctorOW|2 months ago
DiskoHexyl|2 months ago
Is that really such a bad thing? Most adults barely read at all, or, at the very best, consume a current random best-seller here and there. I'd say that anything from a high school reading list is an upgrade, especially since most of this stuff is lost on the kids anyway.
It's all good literature and a nice entry point for someone new to the hobby. Expecting more from a top-50 of a tech forum is a bit surprising
Dowwie|2 months ago
WillAdams|2 months ago
- _Ashley's Book of Knots_ --- everyone should be aware of knots and now at least the basics interesting, _The Klutz Book of Knots_ was also mentioned once
- James Clavell _Noble House_ --- part of his "Asian Saga", not sure if it has aged well --- if a person could read only one of these, I'd recommend _King Rat_, based on his experience in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.
- Hesse _Steppenwolf_ --- that Hesse is no longer read saddens me deeply, and not just because this makes _The Glass Bead Game_ less likely --- his thoughts on the difficulties of interpersonal relationships resonate even now
- Knuth _Literate Programming_ --- I _really_ wish this style f programming would gain traction and that there would be more instances of taking famous programs and re-writing as a Literate Program, e.g., http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
- Knuth _Digital Typography_ (and not just because I have a reward check)
- Knuth _Mathematical Writing_ --- if you do any work in math, you probably already have a copy --- if you don't, you probably need one
- Dewdney _The Planiverse_ --- response to the classic _Flatland_, this has a real charm and despite the dated computer technology, has held up well
- Walter jon Williams _Hardwired_ --- an amazing cyberpunk novel, part of which was published in _Omni_
- Steven Brust's _Jhereg_ --- one of my favourite fantasy novels, which I've been reading since picking it up in a Waldenbooks when I was in high school, waiting for the last two books, and esp. glad of these since they made the "Paarfi Romances" exist --- anyone who enjoys Alexandre Dumas and fantasy should read _The Phoenix Guards_
- C.J. Cherryh's _Regenesis_ --- her entire Alliance--Union series is amazing and books are so varied pretty much everyone will find something which appeals
- Trevanian _The Eiger Sanction_ and _Shibumi_ --- not sure if this and _Shibumi_ have aged well or no, but the latter was a big part of my childhood
- Ben Franklin's Autobiography --- read presidential biographies to my kind in chronological order as a trial and regret not continuing with the actual project: biographies of important persons in chronological order
- Sanora Babb's _Whose Names Are Unknown_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197158.Whose_Names_Are_... (ob. discl., that was my mention)
Other books which only I mentioned:
- Hal Clement _Space Lash_ now available in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph... --- I recommend folks read it in reverse chronological order, starting at the back, then working to the front and bailing when things get too quaint/old-school/golden-age.
- H. Beam Piper "Omnilingual" --- this should be a part of the middle school canon, lightly updated version at: http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html
- _Foxfire_ --- a classic series what predated the "Maker" movement
- Tolkien's _The Fall of Arthur_
- Knuth _TeX: The Program_
Books which were sufficiently striking that I have made a note of them to get to read (hopefully this will work out better than _The Black Swan_ which I found annoying)
- _Visual Thinking in Mathematics_
- _Hardcore VisualBASIC_ --- still a bit bummed that I managed to miss this and MacBasic....
- _Phoebe and her Unicorn_ --- getting this for my daughter
- _Harmony with Lego(R) Bricks_ --- book on music improvisation
- Ornamental Origami
Note that a number of books weren't actually mentioned, e.g., Isaac Asimov's _Book of Facts_
muzani|2 months ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Also, some of it is just Godwin's Law.
ggm|2 months ago
atlasunshrugged|2 months ago
libraryofbabel|2 months ago
card_zero|2 months ago
Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.
Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
NitpickLawyer|2 months ago
Knowing the HN crowd, it can also be a reference to beowulf clusters as well.
cwnyth|2 months ago
joshdavham|2 months ago
1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs 2. Clean Code 3. Crafting Interpreters
Also, it’s quite fascinating how often fiction books were recommended! I wouldn’t’ve expected that on HN.
WillAdams|2 months ago
https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code
mirashii|2 months ago
thoughtpeddler|2 months ago
ilteris|2 months ago
therobots927|2 months ago
JDEW|2 months ago
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444106-abundance [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215526423-an-abundance-o...
GuB-42|2 months ago
hubraumhugo|2 months ago
I assume this one uses a few-shot LLM approach instead, which is slower and more expensive at inference, but so much faster to build since there's no tedious labeling needed.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28596207
seinvak|2 months ago
Yes, I saw that project pretty impressive! Hand-labeling 4000 books is definitely not an easy task, mad-respect to tracyhenry for the passion and hardwork that was required back then.
For my project, I just used the Gemini 2.5 Flash API (since I had free credits) with the following prompt:
"""You are an expert literary assistant parsing Hacker News comments. Rules: 1. Only extract CLEARLY identifiable books. 2. Ignore generic mentions. 3. Return JSON ARRAY only. 4. If no books found, return []. 5. A score from -10 to 10 where 10 is highly recommended, -10 is very poorly recommended and 0 is neutral. 6. If the author's name is in the comment, include it; otherwise, omit the key. JSON format: [ {{ "title": "book title", "sentiment": "score", "author" : "Name of author if mentioned" }} ] Text: {text}"""
It did the job quite well. It really shows how far AI has come in just 4 years.
brcmthrowaway|2 months ago
These are classics yes, but I was expecting something close to the forefront of the culture
xandrius|2 months ago
I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and such.
And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost nobody knows it.
What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book list?
odie5533|2 months ago
kace91|2 months ago
I wonder if it's an american thing, for engineers to be detached of liberal arts? The vibe tends to be quite different in local engineering groups.
BeetleB|2 months ago
The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more popular (it is, after all, a popularity list).
Second is this:
> for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?
Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to the choir. What they are glorifying is how well the story depicted an issue.
DashAnimal|2 months ago
emodendroket|2 months ago
desmoulins|2 months ago
I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class, instead of something more obscure.
globular-toast|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
rramadass|2 months ago
One or two might be worthwhile but most would be mainstream and pedestrian.
owenversteeg|2 months ago
TheAceOfHearts|2 months ago
If you're so well-read why don't you grace us with some of your non-mainstream S-tier recommendations?
From this list, one of the books that I recommend to everyone is Piranesi, which is fairly mainstream, and if they want to explore Russian magical realism then Vita Nostra. Unsong is another favorite. In general I love to explore magic systems that experiment with breaking a system, or stories that explore how different rules might interact within a system.
I think people sometimes underestimate the value of lighter more fun reads, like cultivation stories. The best western adaptation of this style of novel is probably the Cradle series, by Will Wight. Even though the stories tend to be fairly light, they're quite enjoyable for exploring new modes of thinking. For example, we can analyze the interactions of energy as an abstract / symbolic form, and how it influences human behavior; which is an abstract / symbolic application of the cultivation lens over reality. To give an easier to understand example: Feng Shui isn't real but it's true, in the sense that the way in which we organize furniture within a space determines how people navigate it and how they interact. And why might this be useful? Well, sometimes we fail to see the full picture when using a single lens, and different lens might let us see things in a new light.
I've read some terribly generic web novel slop and gotten fairly unique and interesting perspectives from them, but most people aren't good enough readers to enjoy bad books, so they can only read and enjoy good books.
teleforce|2 months ago
[1] System Programming in Linux:
https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux
mvkel|2 months ago
dewey|2 months ago
timonoko|2 months ago
Playboy is forced to take part in war of the worlds. 50 pages of societé, parties and games are necessary to describe this character.
datameta|2 months ago
specproc|2 months ago
A number of posts here flagging disambiguation issues, I've run into this a lot.
I've been dealing with the problem using cosine distance between embeddings, but find it tricky to verify at scale.
Anyone else struggling with this?
thrance|2 months ago
hermitcrab|2 months ago
Freak_NL|2 months ago
It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
seinvak|2 months ago
recursivedoubts|2 months ago
https://hypermedia.systems
thank you for making this!
crobertsbmw|2 months ago
faizmokh|2 months ago
Jut to note there seems to be a bug with the comment section. When I selected the Rust book and then selected others, the first comment from Rust book is shown in other books as well.
ajju|2 months ago
* Or gods' work if you are polytheistic, or $god's work with "god" as a variable for all other belief systems on the Unix shell ;)
tramtrist|2 months ago
Rebelgecko|2 months ago
krick|2 months ago
thefringthing|2 months ago
coopykins|2 months ago
babblingfish|2 months ago
silexia|2 months ago
tonymet|2 months ago
amarant|2 months ago
I almost wonder if that particular number was hardcoded for humour!
stevenfoster|2 months ago
samx18|2 months ago
xp84|2 months ago
mitthrowaway2|2 months ago
lo_zamoyski|2 months ago
seinvak|2 months ago
[deleted]
ironmagma|2 months ago
krick|2 months ago
objectdynamics|2 months ago
rienbdj|2 months ago
mcc1ane|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
novoreorx|2 months ago
4ggr0|2 months ago
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965191
jackconsidine|2 months ago
See a few of my mentions on here, a few of them not [0]
Regardless, this is a real treat
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977536
begueradj|2 months ago
bookofjoe|2 months ago
throw-12-16|2 months ago
mkbkn|2 months ago
codingdave|2 months ago
seinvak|2 months ago
whatamidoingyo|2 months ago
But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting emails).
wellpast|2 months ago
seinvak|2 months ago
https://storage.googleapis.com/globalhnbucket/normalized_boo...
kaizenb|2 months ago
kaizenb|2 months ago
tonymet|2 months ago
seinvak|2 months ago
blintz|2 months ago
But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation, Children Of Time, Dune.
Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get too bored by descriptions of rock.
frm88|2 months ago
Edit:the French edition of the Vorkosigan Saga has denfitively the wrong author https://hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app/
barddoo|2 months ago
analogpixel|2 months ago
It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
krick|2 months ago
Der_Einzige|2 months ago
Brajeshwar|2 months ago
https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/
TZubiri|2 months ago
I think some books might have a boost if we add their informal names, namely:
- Dragon book
- Wizard book
- ummm, I'm sure there's more
stego-tech|2 months ago
Pleasantly surprised to see much of the discourse was along the lines of, "Oh yeah, read her stuff, found it fascinating [in the same vein as a train wreck can be], recommended just to understand how those folks think." Not going to pick up her stuff any time soon, but I was happy to have a bias prove unfounded.
WarOnPrivacy|2 months ago
seinvak|2 months ago
For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing though :/
why-o-why|2 months ago
udev4096|2 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
Cheetah26|2 months ago
[0] https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-...