Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Saw Karpathy's HackerTube and wanted the same thing for books. So I had Claude build one (Opus 5.5). It's ~16.5k books that at least two different HN commenters brought up, from 2007 till now. Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it. Data is downloadable from the about page. To be clear: Claude wrote almost all of it, including the data pipeline and the site. I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc. It counts mentions, so it's not perfect (praising a book and trashing it both count). If your favourite book is missing or matched to the wrong thing, tell me.
Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
Imustaskforhelp
I am really loving what people are building on similar ideas close to HackerTube and I am tinkering something of my own as well with these new ideas. Awesome Idea and I would love to see what else community tinkers with things like these :-D Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways. Edit: I will try to read thinking fast and slow because of HN recommendations. I have heard some good things about the book but I will try to read it in future given HN's immense recommendations, so your website has already had a negative net positive for me :-D
LeComedien
Ayn Rand so high, though!
jmathai
I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.
jchook
The site is really fast. I see HTTP/3, OpenGraph, and Cloudflare. Can you expand on the technologies used? Also... "Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it." > Please don't put generated text in HN posts. Claude speak gives me a gag reflex these days.
vigilantpuma
The “mentions since” picker appears to be broken, nothing in the list changes as far as I can see. Also I wish it wouldn’t add another page to my history.
drayfield
I like the idea, but the wording might need to change as to how it counts a recommendation. As it stands Mein Kampf has been "recommended" by 651 HNers, a troubling statistic!
sleiben
Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
RGS1811
This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.
srik
I want this but for podcasts. I pick a podcast I subscribe to say the Tim Ferris show and I see book mentions by episode/theme/tim/guest with links to favorite/library/amazon. Life's too fragile for me to make something public like that but it's fairly easy is'nt it. Every passing year I'm surprised it doesn't exist yet, especially nowadays given how easy it is to obtain transcripts.
alexpadula
I expected way more books for software engineering.
phtrivier
The next stage is "HackerTime", a startup providing enough time to watch all the video and read all the books and play all the game and read all the news on "HackerZ for Z in tube, books, games, news". With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...
polishdude20
I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?
fnordpiglet
Slightly different take - use the Claude / OpenAI / muse desktop navigation integration to actually go into your YouTube account and like all the videos and watch them for a bit to seed your algorithm.
low_tech_punk
Next idea, build HackerNews, a website that features actual news from HackerNews.
alex_young
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on hacker hack
alex_young
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on HackerHack, like HackerBooks and HackerBooks, but with comments and other posts and news and stuff. Some say it’s just HackerNews, but those are just Luddites who don’t get it.
bilater
Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008. https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/
MYEUHD
This was done already, back in 2021! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
amiune
HackerMovies someone with free tokens please