Made games version of this, still more indexing to do.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50341635

On the subject of reading (since the 'decline' in literacy is being raised in this thread) -- especially if you haven't read in a while and are thinking about reading but are maybe struggling to because you feel like it's "been too long" or that you'll struggle to concentrate on a book...

Please give reading (especially fiction) another chance. I had a stretch of about a decade where I finished maybe two or three books total. Partly, I didn't think I "needed to read" because of how much time I spend reading HN and other non-fiction sources, especially on the internet: or that I was "too busy".

I was running my startup, and had a copy of Infinite Jest on my bedside table for nearly 2 years -- telling myself that I would finish it. It's an amazing book (the part I've read anyway), but it was such an intricate piece of work that I managed to convince myself I basically had reading-ADHD and there was no point in me trying to read other books.

Last year, I started reading (fiction!) books that were just interesting to me or that other people were talking about, instead of picking up "aspirational" fiction or non-fiction and reading the first chapter.

I've been getting through a book every month or two since and am absolutely loving it. I read a lot of fiction as a child and teenager and I'd forgotten just how visceral good fiction can be. Reading properly again also helped convince me to write stories, too.

If this sounds like you, I challenge you (with kindness) to pick up a piece of approachable fiction and see how much more you get out of it than you expected to!

I second this.

For quite a long period in my 20s I would buy very worthy intellectual non-fiction books (based on reviews or recommendations) and then struggle to make headway with them. In retrospect, I think I was just usually too tired from work and life to have the mental energy to focus.

I then read an article by (IIRC) Irvine Welsh, the nub of which was ‘just read something’ - and reading fiction rather than non-fiction, and even trashy fiction rather than worthy fiction, was immeasurably better than not reading at all.

It was like I was given permission to not have to try and be intellectual and serious: (or pretentious?) and I’ve never looked back. Amongst many others, and to my surprise, I found I enjoy (what one might call) mid-level science-fiction and have happily worked through quite a lot now.

I read SO much military sci-fi, and it’s the best. I can tear through a book in a day because it’s just fun.

Marko Kloos, Joel Shepherd, Glynn Stewart. All write good sci-fi with cool ideas.

I don't read nearly as much as I should but I do listen to a lot of audiobooks. My wife scoffs at my collection, a lot of spy or military thrillers like Mitch Rapp and Jack Ryan (The Company is one of my favorites) but also Bobiverse and Expanse are great. Meanwhile she buys lots of books but reads none of them. Audiobooks aren't a perfect substitute for reading but they do stop me from doomscrolling or listening to stupid podcasts.

As for podcasts, Hardcore History and Blowback are my favorites that aren't political junk. I know people have their opinions on pop history media but it's interesting content and entertaining.

Why would reading trashy fiction be better than not reading? Being alone with your mind is a healthier option in my opinion.

A couple of reasons I can think of.

- Reading helps hone your ability to focus your attention on one thing for sustained periods.

- Getting back into the habit of reading by reading "trashy" or otherwise easy books can serve as a stepping stone to reading more difficult or rewarding books. This worked for me when I fell out of the reading habit for a while and was bouncing off books that I wanted to read that were less immediately engaging.

I would also say that while I agree that being alone with your mind is quite healthy and something we would all ideally make time for, I don't think that it's the alternative most people are opting for over reading.

I’ll add: re-read books. When reading a book a second time (or third, or fourth) you’ll get new things out of it because you’ll spend less time and energy focused on the obvious things you’re already familiar with. And if it’s been some good number of years I think you’ll also find your memory of the book isn’t as good as you might have thought.

As I age, reading has become a bit less enjoyable because I have to wear reading glasses (yes, I'm a baby). But I found that I really enjoy audio books- they give a different experience, it's very weird listening to books that I previously had read. One reason is that I read much faster than the audio book reading rate, and I find the slowness is a good thing- more time to experience and think I guess.

Whenever this topic comes up I always wonder if people mean reading as all long-form reading (including pop fiction) or if they mean “serious” reading. To me it’s actually quite strange but I feel like I have “lessened” as a reader over the past decades.

I used to be able to read some of the more classic novels a bit easier and now I just find them…a tad tedious? Is that the decline of reading that people are mentioning, or just… not reading at all?

I find it remarkably easy to read the popcorn fiction novels or anything very plot driven where characterization and world building is only in the service of the plot, but somehow this just feels like watching a movie but in book form. Is that also considered “reading”?

I’ll add to this for cases where the problem is motivation for reading and spending time “non-productively.”

Many life and work problems have relevant fiction books that cover similar or loosely related situations. Reading these can create a perfect “mental sandbox” for problem solving, where your brain unconsciously plays around with a topic in a safe and fun way, all while you’re following a fictional narrative.

This is an alternative to more “rational” methods, like reading non-fiction, prompting an LLM for possible approaches, or problem-solving explicitly. Brains work in weird ways, and they often need lots of unstructured time, lateral thinking, and play. Reading fiction provides all three.

I wanted to get back into reading again and started just reading comics though it was through an app, it motivated me and after a while I started reading books instead both fiction and non-fiction.

So - I find it difficult to read even fiction when things are stressful (which is perverse as I find it relaxing and refreshing). So, sometimes will go months without reading anything - then a spurt of 6-8 weeks and 30-40 books. Given the state of the world, the last couple of years have been rough. (And top that with a workload for the past year where there hasn't been a single month that I have worked less than 200-hrs (contract, so it ain't all that bad))

I can only second this message! I read a lot of non-fiction books when I was younger (during the whole improve-yourself trip of course) and most of them were so incredibly boring (always one concept explained with a 100 similar examples). Since then, I have started to read only fiction books and I learned more about society, relationships and life then with any non-fiction, while at the same time enjoying it more.

And it’s OK to read fun books, not everything has to be a classic or a guide to self improvement or some heavy tome dealing with deep issues.

Care to share something to good you've read recently?

Not OP and not "good" in the literary sense but I've enjoyed reading Warhammer books since about last year. They're brainless and depressing dystopian, possibly YA level novels but at least it's self-aware and leans into it.

Flesh, by David Szalay.

It won the Booker Prize last year.

Yes, could you please add a filter for fiction only? Since HN strongly leans towards nonfiction, the fiction ones are just interspersed, and I would like to see just them instead...

I think fiction books are more important and more "wholesome" than nonfiction ones.

On top of a fiction filter maybe you’d be willing to add DRM free ebook links (Project Gutenberg, Tor Books, Cory Doctorow, Ebooks.com has some) paid or unpaid, that would be really appreciated.

I would send you a tip for this. There are lots of them available so I think that coverage would be really helpful.

A couple of missing ones (that I expected to have been mentioned, aren't there as far as I can tell, and I found them on here with a quick google):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779266 I'd have expected it to come up as one step removed from Borges, and it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why%27s_(poignant)_Guide_to_Ruby mentioned many times, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36632010 - a surprising omission, tho I guess it's not in print.

Thanks! Why's (Poignant) Guide is in now: https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL22247013W (it wasn't in Open Library, so it needed a manual entry). The Invention of Morel: only ~3 people have mentioned it in all of HN, and yes, looks like we're missing some long-tail titles due to how the matcher works. Needs more thought to fix it while keeping the noise low.

I just read The Invention of Morel and can recommend it — unsettling, and smart. In general the approach of reading authors who were beloved by or respected by or inspirations for the authors we remember today (Borges in this instance) is quite fruitful.

We are talking less about books now. The number of book mentions in the site peaked in 2022 and has been decreasing steadily. Is this another effect of LLMs?

For all books, I summed their # of mentions across the years. The data show an increasing trend, peaking in 2022 and then decreasing since then:

2007: 1,062

2008: 3,248

2009: 5,206

2010: 8,942

2011: 8,330

2012: 8,200

2013: 9,808

2014: 10,436

2015: 12,618

2016: 14,173

2017: 15,231

2018: 18,001

2019: 17,928

2020: 19,613

2021: 19,996

2022: 22,797

2023: 20,178

2024: 16,103

2025: 13,738

2026*: 11,482

"Illiterate is an adjective and noun that primarily describes a person who has little or no formal education and is unable to read or write." More like functionally illiterate - lack of critical thinking, common sense and factual knowledge, an inability to parse complex ideas, and poor writing skills.

The number of people who are reporting that they read every single day has only gone up in the past 30 year (~25% of people in Denmark read everyday).

It is a problem that 30% of those who do not read are reporting that it's because they can't focus on ready, but that number might have been the same through out the years.

Another theory is that around that time the people who value good writing got so annoyed at the AI spam that they left

OK but what's the ratio of number of post to books mentioned?

I think the number per active yearly users would be even more interesting. Clearly there is a correlation with the traffic too. But I wouldn't be very surprised if the relative numbers were still in decline.

Nice catch! Is it possible that HN traffic is going down?

This made me wonder what happened to hackernewsbooks.com? The last newsletter I got was "Hacker News Books – Week 28 Jul 05, 2026 – Jul 12, 2026".

I believe the original owner sold it and is working on https://bookdna.com/ now.

ya I sold it to a new guy to take over, as I am entirely focused on bookdna.com and launching our app here in about a month

Taking inspiration from this, created HackerProducts, products that are recommended by hackers here!

https://hackerproducts.pages.dev

Fun skimming through this. I wondered how it would deal with book nicknames and chuckled when I found this entry https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL15190817W

Good catch :) link now redirects to the actual dragon book

Now I wanna know what the original link was?

I remember there were multiple such websites before being shared in HN. I bookmarked them, and a couple years later when I finally wanted to find a book, the only thing I got is 404. I hope this one lives longer.

Pleading guilty

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390

I planned to revive it later, but life got in the way

That's why to build things as a static site generator, and then the result of that effectively needs no further maintenance, and only costs whatever the domain costs.

Makes it much more viable to keep such experimental things online "forever".

HackerTube is 404 and 503ing, so it might not last a day.

It would be interesting to see how many times this same project has been done because I feel like I was seeing it at least once a month for years.

The book recommendation aggregation website is so common because it’s one of the few variations of this theme that can be monetized through affiliate links.

None of them last long because the traffic falls to zero basically as soon as it falls off the front page.

This is why way. I vibe coded my own for personal use when the one I used went down.

Try web.archive.org

Feature suggestion: once copyright is up, link to a free online version (e.g. on archive.org, or similar online collections)

I think they’re talking about the index going away, not the books themselves.

Unfortunately, copyright won’t be up for most of these books in our lifetimes.

Impressive work! I wonder if there's any plan for refining the classification based on user feedback? I.e. Martin Klepman's the wild boar book is currently being shown in "Business & Management" category, and "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" is in "Psychology and Behavior". By the way, is there some book naming normalization based on learned context embeddings (i.e., will this mention of the wild boar book be counted)?

Likewise, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is filed under Fiction.

Which is maybe accurate, but definitely not intended by the author.

Funny to see "Clean Code" mentioned there, I feel like this is one of those that didn't age well now with code being mostly generated.

You could argue it is still relevant but I would say fuzz testing, formal proof systems, and compilers are going to be where stuff goes instead.

I'm not sure if the 'recommended' - 'neutral' - 'critical' statistic is reliable here. Like if I told you that 68% of people are neutral about a book, does it mean it's good? Bad? Is it even worth reading?

It also doesn't seem to understand sarcasm

https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL1067314W

Sees this as recommendation (I think?) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917334

I have recently tried to check around goodreads alterantives and I came face to face with these ISBNs and ASINs and how these are a hot mess. There's really no truly open metadata source that is "enough". App developers often depend on proprietary sources and sadly those are the ones which are more complete and go their own way for every source. How did you deal with that?

I also finally tried "Thinking, fast and slow" recently and realised it was absolutely not for me. Even the audiobook version didn't cut it. I found it completely dry and trite. I am not trying to offend anymoe (esp. with "trite"), and I am aware how storied and awarded the author is – to me it just came across as "yet another self-help kind of book" sadly. But then a clear lack of fiction for a long time in "top all-times" puts into perspective why that book is up at the top. I think the general hn reading-taste is quite different from mine. Also, it's not about what was book about, because I never reached that, it was rather how it was written.

Any plans to add some sort of tag/genre to search feature?

I concur "Thinking, fast and slow" I tried to get through it multiple times and failed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50341635 we got HackerGames

Here are some books that have helped me:

https://hypertexthero.com/books-for-thinking-and-learning/

Thank you :) what are your fav books? curious to see if they're listed

I swear there used to be a hackernewsbooks website some years ago?

There have been a few. Here's one I found right away: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

This was done already, back in 2021!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

Funny, I bookmark interesting things all the time on here. I had this bookmarked. I've never revisited it.

I tried to retrieve & process my favorites because I never actually do anything useful with them, and managed to get rate-limited. Someday I need to try again.

If you click on a link or comment you can favorite it. They're public though, if that's a problem.

Thanks, appreciate it! And thanks for the VibeVoted credit.

For the SaaSHub listing you can use [email protected].

Not doing any realtime or semi-realtime monitoring yet, the whole thing is compiled offline on my laptop. Might set up a periodic refresh if people find it useful -- but I suspect the listing will change as much. Maybe once a month is good enough.

This is great! I love to see the aggregated comments of HN users next to each book.

Besides linking to bookshop and amazon (weird choices in my opinion), you could also link to bookfinder, anna's archive, libgen. That would be really useful.

And https://standardebooks.org/

Tbh, I was expecting more from HN recommendations. Some are to be expected, like tech books that are kinda irrelevant in a post AI era.

Same problem as last time somebody made one of these: what I want to see is not most recommended, but least recommended, like books mentioned exactly twice. But there's no button to sort that way. So I'm flailing around at the top of your infinite scroll trying hopelessly to reach the bottom.

This is your sign to read some Carl Jung, it matches perfectly with what you are asking. I just checked and I'm like half the mentions of Aion. Just read until you get into the fish symbolism chapters.

To what end?

Mining.

It does load faster than Hacker News itself here…

Ow it doesnt load anymore

Local search index is the key to responsiveness.

Where does hacker books and hackertube get the data from? Is there a regular dump somewhere? Scraped, api?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563

I believe there’s a hackernews dump on google big query public datasets.

Also Hacker news does have a public API. It's ugly and awkward and they're never going to improve it but it's also free and not rate limited.

Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.

And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.

I wonder if plain JS will make a comeback with how good AIs are at writing code (at least for one off simple sites)

i'm on a performance grind rn so also looked into it. claudeslop disclaimer below:

Hacker Books painted in 0.48 seconds on a fresh mobile visit. The first book cards were in the DOM by 0.79 seconds, and the largest visible image painted at 1.52 seconds. On a repeat visit, that image painted in 0.21 seconds.

Homepage median Fresh browser cache Repeat visit

First byte 112 ms 86 ms

First contentful paint 480 ms 168 ms

First book cards inserted 793 ms 188 ms

Largest contentful paint 1,520 ms 212 ms

Three runs per condition in Chrome at 390 × 844, with 1.6 Mbps download, 120 ms emulated latency and 4× CPU slowdown. These are navigation-start lab timings from one location. All three fresh visits beat your 1.5-second FCP target. Hacker Books

What makes it feel fast

- The first screen needs very little code. The HTML is about 3 KB, its single blocking stylesheet 5 KB, and its vanilla JavaScript module 26 KB, all gzip-compressed. The HTML contains the header, search box and navigation, so those can paint before the catalog arrives. There’s no React runtime to download or hydrate.

- They publish a small answer to the first query. The homepage preloads a 33 KB index of the top 600 books alongside the app code. The full 692 KB index of 15,362 books loads in the background. Once it arrives, browsing and search can reuse it locally. Covers are 320 px WebPs, and additional cards render in batches as you scroll.

- A book click can show the title immediately. The app changes the URL hash, renders the book information already in memory, then fills in comments and related material from a per-book JSON file. Hovering or focusing a card for 80 ms starts that fetch early. Repeat visits reuse the result. This is targeted data prefetching; it costs much less than prerendering an entire destination.

- Cloudflare helps on both visits. My HTML request was a cache HIT at Cloudflare’s San Jose edge. The versioned CSS, JS and index files advertise a one-year immutable browser cache. Chrome recorded zero transfer bytes for those files on all three repeat visits. HTTP/3 was real, too: two fresh visits negotiated H3 and one negotiated H2. All three painted within 468–500 ms, so the site was fast on either protocol in this sample.

- Open Graph handles sharing. The title, description and URL tags describe the site to link-preview crawlers. They don’t accelerate rendering. The page also includes Cloudflare Web Analytics.

47,699 products, places and tools ranked from 13,576,547 opinions on Reddit and HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333280

I think the concept is amazing, so don't take the rest of my comment too seriously.

But why do we anchor naming to someone who made something popular? Why do we upvote similar names too? For example, openclaw became popular then there were similar projects with the "claw" naming.

It's just a very fascinating psychological thing to do, and I don't understand why. Because if you copy part of a name, generally you'll never get more popular than the original name. So why do this?

If you are referring to the "Hacker" part, I guess it makes sense since this is a list of books referred in "HackerNews".

If you were referring to why Karpathy's name was invoked in the post, piggyback effect I guess?

It's a nice gesture I think. My question is why do we anchor naming to things we don't like: anti-capitalism, anti-ai, etc. That seems to inextricably link the new effort with the thing it was supposed to be an alternative to.

Describing things by reference to other, similar things is sort of how language works. Humans aren't quite Tamarians, but denotative meanings do often derive from connotations that originally attach via metaphor, analogy, or other forms of comparison.

Obviously _some_ users are better than _no_ users on your app.

Some reference to something known is better than no reference.

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!

Noted, pushing a fix for the wording for now. Will also look into improving the recommendations.

Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"

Sure can, coming right along

"Top all-time" should be called "Most mentioned" and it should display the mentions stat followed by the recommends stat

"Most recommended" can stay as it is

and then a new "Top all-time" should be a weighted sum of recommendations plus mentions with recommendations getting a higher weight (obviously) … l33t c0d1ng sk1llz for deducting negative mentions (as in "awful book", "do not recommend" etc)!

To be fair, recommending it doesn't mean endorsing it, just how people read autobiographies of someone they don't like to understand them better. There's probably a bunch of good lessons to take from reading Mein Kampf, it's just that none of them are "this guy was onto something"

Inspired by your site, I built out https://wikihack.netlify.app/

Hackerbooks, but for wikipedia :)

I hope you enjoy it.

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.

If this is the bug-reporting subthread: "Show more comments" stops working after clicking it once.

It only keeps 30 comments per book so the second click was the last one :) pushed a minor fix, will look into adding all comments later

Good catch, thanks! The filter was using a book's most recent mention on HN, which is pretty much always recent for popular books, thats why nothing changed? It now filters by when a book was first mentioned instead. and filters shouldn't add to history anymore.

I would love deeper access to the data set. I've been on a quest to understand why Godel Escher Bach, a book that I think is great, is apparently bad and is something I'm supposed to grow out of as a teenager. But that opinion, when glimpsed, like bigfoot is gone before you are able to figure out what you're seeing. It says 8% negative. It shows top 30 comments which is nice but seems to only be a snapshot of the praise.

Who says you’re supposed to grow out of GEB? Also only teenagers are reading it?? Idk about that

Right! I personally think that characterization is crazy, but it's out there. This twitter thread started me down the rabbit hole, and, maddeningly, it's very coy and vague.

https://x.com/davidbessis/status/1993238641729036639

This is wonderful. I'm delighted to see that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has been recommended over 100 times.

Permutation City, Greg Egan

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.

Build it!

Claude can turn something like this around in less than a day.

Claude or not, building has never been a blocker for me tbh. Hosting on the other hand

This is absolutely fantastic and a much more worthwhile resource than hackertube, which feels more like a graveyard of bygone thinking.

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.

I love this idea and hope the trend continues. It could even lead to finding niche communities to join.

May be we need single webapp that shows all intellectual artifacts shared in hackernews since its inception and updated hourly or daily and also make a social media app to for consumption:

1. youtube 2. books 3. podcasts 4. blogs 5. articles 6. etc...

Well kinda this: https://www.trustmebro.reviews/r/hackernews

It seems like it didn't pick up media recommendations all that well, huh.

After clicking an entry, below, "What Hacker News says", we see comments with mentions and surrounding text. It's now squashed, maybe you can add a function to expand on click, to see the comment with newline separation if such exist. Cause very often these comments presents a list of their favorite book, and an explanation of why. When these are squashed, it's not clear which explanation is preceding or following the entry.

Also, clicking the link "On "...."" it doesn't bring to the exact comment, only that thread or topic, so you need to search for it. It could bring directly to that comment.

I'm beginning to like this new internet…

Content curation will be overhauled for a world with WAY more content of lower average quality.

Heavily curated like this is one direction. Micro consumables (ala tiktok) supporting more impressions is another.

Also: no ads, banners…

I need to understand how do you guys build such slick or decent UI for websites. I get the backend but the front end, I have yet to crack. I know there is impeccable repo but I'm unsure how to go from here

Opus 5.5 is an order of magnitude better at design and design nuances than GPT 6.1 Sol, surprisingly.

If there is a design that LLMs do that you don't like, tell it that. You're allowed to be picky.

Using a coding agent really gives you that with minimal guidance. Try in opus session: "I want to build a website which looks similar to https://hackerbooks.org, but instead of showing books extract the top rated topics, render each toipic as a post it card" should give you a usable and maybe even good layout.

honestly claude did the frontend, my instruction was "make it feel like hackertube, but for books". radiospiel's advice is right, just try it. only needed nudges for performance, but otherwise its claude magic :)

Love this! Pls add amazon.com links and a 2020s filter button. You could probably pull all the missing covers from Wikipedia. Would love to have this for TV/Movie/Podcast recommendations also.

Thx.

added, every book page now has bookshop.org and amazon links (affiliate, disclosed). bookshop supports indie stores if you have a preference. fixing bunch of issues, feature requests in parallel too. thanks!

Nice. I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.

https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

More filter options please?

  # Author
  # Date published (like enter a from-date and/or to-date)
  # License
  # Free download available y/n
  # Sample chapter available
  # Format: softcover / hardcover / ebook / audiobook etc
  # No. of pages
  # Language(s)
  # Can you watch the movie? (if so: IMDB/Wiki link)

Just to name some off the top of my mind.

  # order selected volumes
  # bulk order all books on this site

(you could use Amazon affiliate links to help finance the site.)

I see some books where the same person recommended it many times. I think you should account for that.

would it be possible to crosslink each book to its amazon reviews so that one can see how it was rated there? nice thing-- useful.

Not a fan of "For you" based on supposed similarities to what I've clicked before. Especially when e.g. "Scratch Programming Playground" has nothing to do with "Brave New World". I'd remove it but that's me.

Maybe language filters for non-English titles? Or if a book is in public domain already then links to the sources could be presented?

Great idea and nice implementation, please keep it going! I'm waiting for HackerMusic and HackerNet now :)

What I'm getting from all this is that YC is dropping the ball in not investing in their own recommendation engine.

Maybe that's their thoughtful decision and they just let people create whatever they want with HN data, which is good I guess

Add a way to suggest the correct author, sometimes just reading the first comment linked in the page has the right one, for example:

https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL999456W

> HIS DESIRE WAS FIERCER THAN A ROCKY MOUNTAIN STORM... HERS WAS RECKLESS AND DANGEROUSLY WILD

fixing it now. a "suggest a correction" button is a good idea too

"Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-Amendments-Evaluative/dp/0844731285

I've mentioned it a couple times.

It would be cool if you could filter by books my local library has (no idea if that info is publicly available)

Depends on what catalog system your local library is using. Many use the open source Evergreen ILS. It has a very robust API that I've used quite a bit for discovery.

There are some others, just one example.

Point being though is that every library system is different.

I have made extensive use of this while building my library book recommender doodad https://leafle.org

The LLMs are very good at reverse engineering undocumented apis!

Can you also put books on hardware, electronics, and consumer products (hardware) in the library too please?

So how big is the catalogue? And are you going to expand it regularly?

Why not open source the repo ? People find something interesting and will built on top of it.

Inspired by this, I made the same thing for dev tools, counting only comments that actually recommend the tool (not just mention it): https://shouvik12.github.io/hackertools

Wonderful. I love the little side bonus of stumbling across alternate versions of book covers I haven't seen before.

I bought and read Permutation City because it was mentioned here.

Love the site! It loads so fast that it actually survived the initial HN hug of death, which is already a miracle for any side project.

It's hosted on cloudflare. The CDN there can handle millions of hits per day without breaking a sweat.

This is awesome.

Sometimes, I crave the directory like appearances of lycos/altavista/yahoo...

With finite reference points, directories work well. I would love to see this as a text version too.

I noticed almost all of the top recommended books are written by men. A quick skim of the first 100 books on the home page and I see ~4 by women. The Fiction category was largely the same. Nothing against these books, I have read many and enjoyed them, but that's a pretty crazy ratio.

I will add some personal recommendations to maybe get picked up by the algorithm:

Science fiction:

- Parable of the Sower and Kindred, both by Octavia Butler

- The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World Is Forest, both by Ursula K Le Guin (also The Left Hand of Darkness, which I did see on there)

Non-science fiction:

- Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (essays)

- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I'll add my favorite. The Anvil of the World. rip Kage Baker.

I haven’t looked into the site code so don’t know if it’s some tracker or pure coincidence, but I own 15 of the first 20 books that showed up!

I like the responsiveness of the website.

But there's no way Vanity Fair by Thackeray so high on "top all-time" list. It turns out that a lot of comments are about Vanity Fair magazine.

yep, you're right, fixing it so it only counts comments that actually mention thackeray

It seems the published dates need tidied up. Brave new world is showing as published in the 2000s.

Very cool though and love seeing all of the covers in various forms of condition.

I assume that like Karpathy you used Claude Code Desktop. The harness seems to be more capable than VS Code or terminal. Could you have done it with TUI alone?

It's the same harness but in Claude Desktop (which now integrates Chat/Work/Code), you can easily install some plugins for web design, etc. Not that you can't in the TUI but in the GUI it's a few clicks away.