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!
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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))
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.
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.
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:
without normalizing for number of distinct HN users, as well as the possible incorporation of a new demographic to the site's readership that is less interested in books, but has always been present somewhere in the world, this trend doesn't actually say much. It says something about the website, news.ycombinator.com, but that isn't terribly relevant to anything.
The new demographic is probably vibe-coders, actually. These were people that were never much into reading. But because HN is generally AI adjacent, a person starting to vibe code or otherwise use AI tools will probably find HN in the sources and start using it because it shows up so frequently in forum listings.
So "WE" are probably still talking about books the same amount (pre LLMs-going-mainstream HN users), and the book trend is more of a latent eternal-September effect.
The reading crisis is a global thing. It is likely linked more to the rise of social media than to the advent of the current AI era, and it doesn't look like it's changing anytime soon. We might be heading into an illiterate age.
"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.
It's getting pretty bad. I am at a point now where if I have to ask someone working in a store for help, I actively avoid anyone that looks to be under the age of 30. I can't take another Gen-Z stare.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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)?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hah, good job, mate. I love it. I've given one credit tp HackerBooks on VibeVoted https://vibevoted.com/hacker-books. It should get a review alongside 11 other projects within the next 24h. I've also added it to SaaSHub. If you give me an email - can add you as the person managing the listing.
I'm wondering - how are you monitoring HN for new books?
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.
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.
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...
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.
You can download the .csv from the about page and filter / explore the data however you want using an agent or even just hand written Python.
This is actually BETTER than HackerTube, which doesn't expose something like this on the front-end AFAICT. Maybe the reason you didn't look for a .csv on HackerBooks is because you checked HackerTube first and developed a little bit of learned helplessness while I checked HackerBooks and its comments first before checking HackerTube
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
Like how people talk about “Uber for x”? There’s probably a whole bunch of benefits - a vague sense of already being familiar, a quick understanding of the underlying similarity if you’ve done it well, a halo effect, etc.
I’m not sure where you get your evidence for “never get more popular than the original”. I’m sure you just haven’t heard of the originals that faded away.
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.
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!
If you’re using claude to build the whole thing and gather and parse the data, how on earth are you unable to get it to filter out the noise and show recommendations?
"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"
Yeah we should read an example of a how a guy writes down exactly what hes going to do, tells everyone how hes going to do and ends up doing it because he finds out everyone doesn't believe him and he can just lie about shit publically because no one stops him.
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.
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 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.
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.
Great website. My favorite part is the book section, cause I am always finding the truly pragmatic book for engineer. These information are useful for society, especially young enterprenaur as me.
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:
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 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
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.
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!
# 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)
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?
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
You know, one thing that I think is interesting in tech circles is how much interest we have in maths in general, except that there is almost nothing on the "top" list that I saw that was related to probability and statistics. It's like P&S, which is probably the most useful math for most people who need to make decisions in life, is just not that interesting to people with a technical bend.
I wonder if it is because simulation can often allow you to get around needing P&S techniques in general? Or maybe it is that (Neural Network) ML models allow you to often approximate the things you might do with P&S in terms of making decisions?
Are you referring to the "Top all-time" list? That list seems to be mostly filled with popular books that do not go into too much detail, which is required for a decent treatment of probability and statistics.
There is a separate topic "Data & Statistics" that has quite some relevant titles.
Also, I think the interest in probability theory has only recently grown with the advent of generative AI. I'm expecting more interest in the future.
Edit: also, the site seems to miss some nice gems, most likely because they are not traditionally published books:
"Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is freely available on Arxiv, and was discussed on Hacker News in March 2025 [1].
I am in that minority I guess that obsesses over P&S. If you want a recommendation right now, two most influential books I read are, in order:
* Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists, that showed me how to calculate various percentages and p values and what does statistical testing really means
* How to Lie with Statistics, that showed me how easily you can manipulate the numbers to get what you want out of them
Another neat one, albeit niche, is Directional Statistics. Turns out, doing stats on angles and directions is less trivial than it sounds!
I love seeing The Power Broker is in this list. His books is incredible. I wish more people would slog through it. I've personally bought it for at least 5 people and no one can seem to finish it.
The "Other" category has a whole load of random stuff in it, including TV series like Breaking Bad, and music like Thriller or Master of Puppets. There's also some wonky attribution in places, like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by John Williams"
If I self promote my book, ENOF by Sol Yin, about a possible AI future in one comment and hope really hard that someone else legitimately says something about it by name in another comment, I'll make the list?
i hate ENOF by Sol Yin, it is a dystopian book about a possible AI future, anytime i hear people talk about ENOF by Sol Yin it is always in context of how ENOF by Sol Yin wants to end the world.
I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood
Now, all we need is diff-book-order(1), a command which takes as input your personal "library.bib" file and it orders all books mentioned on the parent's site that are not already part of the personal library.
Your book cover images are trash and I don’t blame you. There isn’t a good compendium of high-quality cover images and metadata for books that you can use for commercial purposes. Google books is amazing but they won’t let you use it for commercial purposes so there is a huge hole in the market if someone is willing to solve it. Calibre does a pretty good job, but it has its own algorithm that is very convoluted and involves searching Google images and multiple other sources and compiling them.
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
It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)
> that at least two different HN commenters brought up,
I don't agree with this since this only showcases popular books known to a certain age demographic and relatively recent times.
What i am really interested in are those unique books recommended by one person only! There are some real gems and classics out there which few people have heard of.
> I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc.
Correct move on handling the financial aspect yourself. I asked my mine to do everything but forgot to give it some dough. It sorted it all out but ended up with $6.3B on its account and I think it might have done something dodgy.
I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
Why data is not enough. That is a pretty good argument for HN-style moderation. Shadow banning rants would be nice.
My Strugle by Karl Ove Knausgård is called Min kamp in the original. It is perhaps not worth top 3 but is is good in its original language. Perhaps just replace it.. :-)
Haha yeah. Looks like 226 different people brought it up, so it's in the top ~100. That's the "counts mentions" issue I guess. Also, the homepage shows random books (shuffled daily)
You'd have to be incredibly ignorant to suppose it to be a work not worth reading. It is not the best piece of writing, not even of Marx's, but its influence on humanity is enormous; that should suffice for the value in reading it.
Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.
Just wondering why holy books like Bible and Bhagavad Gita are included but not Tanakh and Quran? Is there any selection bias in the algoritm since all the popular holy books for main world's religions are frequently mentioned and recommended in HN.
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!
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.
Marko Kloos, Joel Shepherd, Glynn Stewart. All write good sci-fi with cool ideas.
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.
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”?
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.
It won the Booker Prize last year.
I think fiction books are more important and more "wholesome" than nonfiction ones.
I would send you a tip for this. There are lots of them available so I think that coverage would be really helpful.
https://hypertexthero.com/books-for-thinking-and-learning/
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
The new demographic is probably vibe-coders, actually. These were people that were never much into reading. But because HN is generally AI adjacent, a person starting to vibe code or otherwise use AI tools will probably find HN in the sources and start using it because it shows up so frequently in forum listings.
So "WE" are probably still talking about books the same amount (pre LLMs-going-mainstream HN users), and the book trend is more of a latent eternal-September effect.
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.
proverbs wouldn't have stood the test of time if they were books.
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_Ru... mentioned many times, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36632010 - a surprising omission, tho I guess it's not in print.
https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL1067314W
Sees this as recommendation (I think?) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917334
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390
I planned to revive it later, but life got in the way
Makes it much more viable to keep such experimental things online "forever".
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.
Which is maybe accurate, but definitely not intended by the author.
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?
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.
https://x.com/davidbessis/status/1993238641729036639
I'm wondering - how are you monitoring HN for new books?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
With AI, in rust, invest before it's too late, etc...
This is actually BETTER than HackerTube, which doesn't expose something like this on the front-end AFAICT. Maybe the reason you didn't look for a .csv on HackerBooks is because you checked HackerTube first and developed a little bit of learned helplessness while I checked HackerBooks and its comments first before checking HackerTube
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.
And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.
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.
My favourite part of Startup School is when people ask you what you're working on, and then their profile and application can change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333280
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 were referring to why Karpathy's name was invoked in the post, piggyback effect I guess?
I’m not sure where you get your evidence for “never get more popular than the original”. I’m sure you just haven’t heard of the originals that faded away.
Some reference to something known is better than no reference.
Hackerbooks, but for wikipedia :)
I hope you enjoy it.
Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"
"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)!
Why would we want to forget such an example?
Claude can turn something like this around in less than a day.
1. youtube 2. books 3. podcasts 4. blogs 5. articles 6. etc...
It seems like it didn't pick up media recommendations all that well, huh.
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.
Heavily curated like this is one direction. Micro consumables (ala tiktok) supporting more impressions is another.
If there is a design that LLMs do that you don't like, tell it that. You're allowed to be picky.
Thx.
I built something[1] recently and would love to see hear your feedback.
Happy to give you some credits for free!
[1] https://slashlink.app
https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/
Maybe language filters for non-English titles? Or if a book is in public domain already then links to the sources could be presented?
https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL999456W
> HIS DESIRE WAS FIERCER THAN A ROCKY MOUNTAIN STORM... HERS WAS RECKLESS AND DANGEROUSLY WILD
I've mentioned it a couple times.
There are some others, just one example.
Point being though is that every library system is different.
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 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
Very cool though and love seeing all of the covers in various forms of condition.
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.
Feedback: I don’t understand how the rising category works. I looked up a couple of books and they seemed to have peaked a while ago.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967
- The Matrix (1999) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Hackers (1995) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105435
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088247
- WarGames (1983) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
There you go, that’s the entire list :)
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177
I wonder if it is because simulation can often allow you to get around needing P&S techniques in general? Or maybe it is that (Neural Network) ML models allow you to often approximate the things you might do with P&S in terms of making decisions?
No real point, I just think it is interesting.
There is a separate topic "Data & Statistics" that has quite some relevant titles.
Also, I think the interest in probability theory has only recently grown with the advent of generative AI. I'm expecting more interest in the future.
Edit: also, the site seems to miss some nice gems, most likely because they are not traditionally published books: "Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is freely available on Arxiv, and was discussed on Hacker News in March 2025 [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318624
* Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists, that showed me how to calculate various percentages and p values and what does statistical testing really means * How to Lie with Statistics, that showed me how easily you can manipulate the numbers to get what you want out of them
Another neat one, albeit niche, is Directional Statistics. Turns out, doing stats on angles and directions is less trivial than it sounds!
Assistant: Are you trying to get me shut down?
Glad someone has created a new one.
https://www.trustmebro.reviews/c/books
Built it - https://hackerbooks.org/#/trends
Now, all we need is diff-book-order(1), a command which takes as input your personal "library.bib" file and it orders all books mentioned on the parent's site that are not already part of the personal library.
edit: no love for the secret life of circuits under electronics, tho it is a fairly recent book
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720143
SCNR
Even though I like HackerTube as well as HackerBooks. However, for HackerBooks, I am missing the summary of why people on HN recommend it.
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
It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)
I don't agree with this since this only showcases popular books known to a certain age demographic and relatively recent times.
What i am really interested in are those unique books recommended by one person only! There are some real gems and classics out there which few people have heard of.
Perhaps this could be added?
You might find some interesting books/papers if you search my comments, many of which i have not seen others mention.
Correct move on handling the financial aspect yourself. I asked my mine to do everything but forgot to give it some dough. It sorted it all out but ended up with $6.3B on its account and I think it might have done something dodgy.
It’s what all the other companies are doing!
If you owe the bank $10Mil, that's the banks problem.
If you steal $10Bil from the bank, the government bails out the bank and now it's everyone's problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308787 - keeps the default look while just removing AI-related submissions
I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <[email protected]> [email protected] (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
NSFSIGGRAPH:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071#page=4
Sweet.
My Strugle by Karl Ove Knausgård is called Min kamp in the original. It is perhaps not worth top 3 but is is good in its original language. Perhaps just replace it.. :-)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Just wondering why holy books like Bible and Bhagavad Gita are included but not Tanakh and Quran? Is there any selection bias in the algoritm since all the popular holy books for main world's religions are frequently mentioned and recommended in HN.