Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app544 points by seinvak a day ago
544 points by seinvak a day ago
This is a clever aggregation project, but I think the methodology might miss some important signal-to-noise distinctions. A book mentioned once in passing ("oh yeah, like in [book]") carries very different weight than a book recommended explicitly ("you should read [book] if you want to understand X"). Are you parsing comment sentiment or just doing keyword extraction?
The real value would be in clustering books by topic and showing which ones appear together in discussions. If someone mentions "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and "Database Internals" in the same comment, that's a stronger signal than two isolated mentions. You could build a recommendation engine from that co-occurrence data.
Also curious about the temporal aspect - tracking which books surge during certain news cycles. For example, did "Chip War" mentions spike when the AI compute restrictions hit? That contextual analysis would make this way more useful than a static ranked list. Would definitely use this if it had those features.
I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.
I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
If you want some other portrayals of the Singularity, see The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and Friendship is Optimal (and also Caelum Est Conterrens)
It was good. Depressing, but good. While not singularity, some motiff and predictions seem to align.
I would still add:
Snow crash Rainbow's end
Amazon lists it as book 3 of 3 in a series - do you need to have read the first two?
Not long ago I came across this book in an HN thread about AI and the future. The moment I saw the title, I knew I had to read it. Crypto, AI, collective intelligence — it hits all the right notes for me.
Accelerando is one of my favourite too! Thanks for sharing the reply, always love book recommendations
In a thematically similar but very different vein, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series was an enjoyable read.
I also recommend Eric Nylund's work, specifically Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered.
Edit: Well, there you go, Children of Time had 23 mentions now that I've read down further. Disappointed to see Eric Nylund's work fade into obscurity, I rate him up with Neal Stephenson.
I thought I recognized that name: Nylund also wrote some books for the Halo series which I enjoyed, although I was already a fan of the games.
I believe he was a staff writer for the Halo series in house as well, something like Marc Laidlaw at Valve, and the books emerged from internal storytelling written for the series. Very interesting stuff.
I also highly recommend his older books Pawn's Dream, Dry Water, and especially A Game Of Universe. They're available on Kindle and part of the Unlimited program so easy to check out.
I haven't been able to find Eric Nylund's "Signal to Noise" and sequel "A Signsl Shattered" in ebook format.
But they are strange and great.
Those two novels of Nylund's really captured the "dark forest" concept well, though I won't say more so as to avoid spoilers.
I haven't read the source material so I can't speak to the books, but the adaptations of 3 Body (Problem) that I've watched, both the Tencent and Netflix ones, also explore similar themes to Nylund's works. Heck, I just discovered that Liu Cixin coined the "dark forest" term, though he isn't the first to explore it.
I really appreciate Cory Doctorow's work on digital rights, enshittification and other topics, but I couldn't make it more than half way through 'Rapture of the nerds'. Just too strange, I couldn't connect to it. It is very original though. Some people will probably love it.
I was surprised to see "An Abundance of Katherines", given that it's not John Green's newest or most highly regarded work. I looked into the comments to see why it was being discussed, but it seems to be a classification error - all of the comments are discussing "Abundance", the political nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. That one makes more sense on the list, given that it was released this March
Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic level coincidence
It has wrong author.
The author and book cover it is showing is for a comic book adaptation by John Carnell.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41725880
Instead of showing the author and book cover for the original text book by Douglas Adams.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guid...
Now its 43 :'(
You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11 mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian Chronicles" appears to be referencing "The Martian" instead.
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
> I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir […]
While on the general topic, also check out the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson:
Surprised TCP/IP Illustrated (Volume 1) has only been mentioned 6 times. It's been so helpful for me, so many times. Perhaps it's because most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job, but it's such a fundamental technology I would have thought learning about it in depth would be suggested far more frequently.
Also, a proper first edition copy is really high quality with lovely thick paper. My copy of Volume 2 on the other hand is not of the same quality, both in content and physical properties.
> most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job
yeah, I'd just look up the specific thing I want to know online
I think some of the book associations are wrong. It shows "the martian chronicles" for mentions of andy weir's "the martian".
Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read this year mentioned. Except "Mein Kampf" of course, interesting top mention there. perhaps lots of people are reading it to understand the past? I'll need to see if it's worth it, I always considered it the equivalent of drinking water from the river thames to understand victorian england better.
Oddly (well to me at least) "Compilers: Principles, techniques and tools" is categorised as literature.
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.
Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.
This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.
FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon by Cixin Liu.
> Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already
Oh thanks for the warning. I was avoiding him based on a hunch. Now I know I was right.
If anyone else is weird like me and likes books to not read like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse.
For what it's worth, I found (the start of the first book of) the Expanse to be this in a bad way, but the Martian to be this in a good way. I can definitely see why some people would find The Martian annoying too, but it feels more like a passion project than a TV pitch.
Asimov was a brilliant mind, but I'm not sure the Foundation series holds up very well since chaos theory become established (it is 40+ years since I read the books though, so I could be remembering wrongly).
Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally life-changing, truly a masterpiece.
I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.
I would love more people to know about science fiction strangecore author qntm:
There Is No Antimemetics Division freaked me the hell out. Recommended.
Probably most surprising here was how many mentions Twilight got! Not the book I expected to see mentioned often on this forum
There's a really long tail in this list. What diamonds are there in the single-mention rough?
On the one hand it is indeed mostly a high school reading list, all very mainstream and relatively popular fiction/sci-fi with a sprinkle of tech literature.
Is that really such a bad thing? Most adults barely read at all, or, at the very best, consume a current random best-seller here and there. I'd say that anything from a high school reading list is an upgrade, especially since most of this stuff is lost on the kids anyway.
It's all good literature and a nice entry point for someone new to the hobby. Expecting more from a top-50 of a tech forum is a bit surprising
Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN.
Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading habits than stereotypes suggest.
One bug: looks like "The Martian" by Andy Weir is getting grouped with "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. Might want to add some disambiguation logic for common title collisions.
How are you doing the extraction? LLM-based NER or something more traditional like regex + entity matching?
I was recently reading through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, and she has so many great quotes that are directly relevant to this situation.
Here's a shorter one:
> “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”
And a longer one:
> “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
Engaging with fantasy and scifi helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. It helps find what truly moves and inspires us. It teaches us to dream of a different, better world.
What Le Guin is expressing is a beautiful idea, but it is a false beauty. It feels like truth because it aligns with how narrative engages the human mind, not because it accurately explains what stories are or why they exist. The sense that fiction reveals destiny, inner depth, or essential humanity is an illusion created by evolved cognitive machinery, not evidence of genuine insight.
From an evolutionary and cognitive standpoint, imaginative fiction is not a privileged tool for understanding who we are. It is a byproduct of more basic adaptations. The human brain evolved as a prediction engine optimized for survival in social groups. Its primary function is to anticipate outcomes, model other agents, and reduce uncertainty well enough to reproduce. Narrative arises because the brain naturally organizes experience into causal sequences involving agents, not because stories convey deeper truths about the self.
Fiction works by hijacking the same neural systems used for social reasoning, memory, and planning. When reading a story, the mind runs simulations of social situations. This feels like insight, but feeling insight is not the same as acquiring accurate models of reality. Fantasy and science fiction are not special forms of wisdom. They are simply inputs that exaggerate certain variables, making simulations emotionally vivid rather than epistemically reliable.
Le Guin’s claim that someone without stories would be ignorant of their emotional or spiritual depths is not supported by biology. Emotions are not learned through narrative. They are innate regulatory systems shaped by natural selection. Fear, attachment, anger, desire, and joy exist prior to language and independently of story exposure. Stories can name, frame, or intensify these states, but they do not create or deepen them in any fundamental sense.
The universality of storytelling also does not imply that it is an adaptive route to understanding. Evolution does not favor truth or self knowledge. It favors fitness. Many of the most persistent stories humans tell are systematically false. Myths, religious narratives, romantic ideals, and national legends endure because they exploit cognitive biases like agency detection, pattern completion, and emotional salience. Their spread demonstrates susceptibility, not insight.
Fantasy and science fiction do not teach us to imagine better worlds. They teach us to imagine compelling ones. A narrative can feel profound while being completely disconnected from reality. Inspiration and accuracy are orthogonal. The persuasive power of stories comes from their alignment with evolved psychological vulnerabilities, not from their correspondence with truth.
So the correct technical framing is this. Stories are not tools invented to gain understanding of humanity or destiny. They are artifacts produced by brains shaped for survival under uncertainty. They can be pleasurable, motivating, or culturally stabilizing. They can sometimes illuminate patterns of behavior. But their beauty should not be confused with truth. The feeling of depth they produce is an illusion, not a discovery.
> Emotions are not learned through narrative. They are innate regulatory systems shaped by natural selection.
Emotions are deeply shaped by culture. Infants need emotional mirroring, co-regulation, and guidance in how to deal with and “develop” emotions. In some cultures, emotions exist not isolated in individuals but only in relationships (never “I am angry”, but “there is anger between us”). In Asian cultures, you typically soak up that you cannot feel only joy from winning but at the same time feel grief because the other lost. Infants that do not receive adequate mirroring develop long term brain damage and other pathologies. The narrative is/becomes a crucial part of how we perceive ourselves and our emotions.
I should clarify a mistake in how I phrased this earlier. Emotions are shaped by both innate biology and environment. Early mirroring, co regulation, and social interaction are essential for normal emotional development. That evidence is well established. Where I disagree is the leap from that fact to the claim that narrative is a crucial or primary mechanism of emotional formation.
Emotional regulation and differentiation emerge long before narrative competence. Infants acquire affective patterns through direct interaction and embodied feedback, not stories or symbolic self models. Cultural differences reflect how emotions are framed and expressed, not that narrative creates them. Narrative comes later as a descriptive layer that organizes experience, but it is downstream of emotion, not its cause.
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
That quote is a category error. It’s about moral judgment of people, not epistemic evaluation of claims. I’m not condemning Le Guin, her character, or anyone who enjoys fiction. I’m saying a specific explanatory claim about how stories relate to truth and human cognition is false.
If “judge not” applied here, then no scientific criticism is permissible at all. You couldn’t say a theory is wrong, a model is flawed, or a claim is unsupported, because the critic is also imperfect. That standard would immediately end every serious discussion on HN.
Quoting scripture in response to an evolutionary and cognitive argument isn’t a rebuttal. It’s a frame shift from “is this claim true” to “are you allowed to say it.” That avoids engaging the substance entirely.
If you think the argument is wrong, point to the error. If not, appealing to moral humility doesn’t rescue a claim from being false.
I wouldn’t think clean code is on-brand at all.
Maybe mentioning it for what not to do?
Just search it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clean+code
All (justifiably) against clean code methodology.
https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code is a great find from that list. Thanks!
It looks like it's not handling comments correctly and counts books mentioned in ">".
Have you seen https://hackernewsbooks.com ?
Mind Games at number 2? I got that book years ago and was so disappointed I still think about it sometimes.
The fact that Mein Kampf was mentioned so often in 2025 is saying something about the political climate lol..
Nice website though, I like it.
I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just mentioned in the context of banned book threads
It would be even higher if we would add any string with "orwell" in it, since in 99% cases it's about the same idea and in the same context.
>I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times
Honestly given that the thing gets brought up about five times per day by absolutely anyone for any conceivable reason I think it's the opposite. The real dystopian picture of the future is getting hit on the head with a copy of 1984, forever.
The surveillance and censorship system being built around us is alarming.
It only takes one leadership failure to turn it into shackles.
There are no banned books in America. Not spending taxpayer money forcibly taken from citizens on books they disagree with for public school libraries is far from banning books.
If you are okay with a book indoctrinating kids with far left ideology, why not put in copies of far right books to balance it out?
No one wants kids indoctrinated in culture war garbage.
If you want to own a book, go buy it yourself.
Can you point me to one book banned by libraries that contains “far left ideology”? And one with “far right ideology” not found in libraries?
"The federal mafia" by Irwin Schiff is currently banned from sale in the USA
It seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements, so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
Mentions of “Genesis” are attributed to “Armageddon's Children (Genesis of Shannara)” by Terry Brooks.
Is anyone else surprised that Gödel, Escher, Bach is as low on the list as it is? My experience on HN would have me believe it would be in the top 10 for sure. I wonder if it’s a string-matching issue.
Nice! The entry for Abundance [0] is listed as another book (An Abundance of Katherines [1])
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444106-abundance [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215526423-an-abundance-o...
Harry Potter apparently either the best book to read or the one with the most for engineers to learn from, I have to conclude.
There's EY's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which might generate cross-interest in Harry Potter for those who wouldn't have read it otherwise.
The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit is listed instead of "the Dragon book"
I thought this was "the Dragon Book" Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
by Aho, Lam, and Sethi
https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools...
I prefer the first edition by Aho, Sethi and Ullman, which I own twice (single volume hardcover and two-volume softcover German translation).
The "modernized" version leaves out some fundamental parsing material.
Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John Green—"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this year.
Good work, thanks for this.
It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped book so that users could link to, say, the entry for A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics.
The TeXbook by Donald Knuth has been mapped to A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics by N.P. Bali from this source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399031#45400264
Searching Mein Kampf adds some decent data on what to filter out, or tag differently. A lot of it comes up in discussions on banned books etc.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Also, some of it is just Godwin's Law.
Godwin's law was made up as an example of dawkins meme, and now means more than its original.
The recent novel Abundance seems to be agressibley grouped with the John Green novel An Abundance of Katherines - which I think is a humorous retelling of 2025 but also maybe needs some matching work
Good to see Designing Data-Intensive Applications on there, but it should be higher — certainly above the thoroughly middling Clean Code at least! DDIA is still the first book I tell every junior to read after they’ve got a couple years experience under their belt. Can’t wait for the 2nd edition!
i mentioned 5 books in a comment[0], only 3 where registered by this tool. Wonder why :D
Given the current political climate, I'm surprised Kafka didn't make the list.
I bet it's the same books every year
Some more errors:
Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.
Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
> Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem
Knowing the HN crowd, it can also be a reference to beowulf clusters as well.
Surprised to see a lot of mentions to Children of Time, a book I picked picked up on a whim in a local Bookshop (something I probably hanger done in 5 years)
There's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts Programming Rust as the same book.
I finally managed to read Player of Games. @grok explained the structure of the book and made list of personae worth remembering.
Playboy is forced to take part in war of the worlds. 50 pages of societé, parties and games are necessary to describe this character.
Oh how I wish we could know what Iain M. Banks thinks of the LLM revolution...
Any info on how this site was implemented?
I tried to get into neuromancer but I’m not a fan of the nonstop dialogue. Just a personal reference but it feels more and more rare to get new science fiction books primarily driven by the narrator.
The top 3 programming books mentioned this year were
1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs 2. Clean Code 3. Crafting Interpreters
Also, it’s quite fascinating how often fiction books were recommended! I wouldn’t’ve expected that on HN.
I’d be curious about sentiment analysis applied to these. I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
> I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
You are quite correct! Crafting Interpreters actually has the highest average sentiment score across all books with more than 10 comments. This is the average sentiment score of all three( range being -10 to 10) :
Crafting Interpreters(7.8) > SICP(4.3) > Clean Code(-3.2)
Very strange, System Programming in Linux book was mentioned many times in HN before but apparently not in the list, but maybe just not this year [1].
[1] System Programming in Linux:
In safari, if I have content blockers enabled (which I have on by default for privacy and whatnot) then the site doesn’t show me anything. I’m guessing these are all ad links or something?
I love it.
Jut to note there seems to be a bug with the comment section. When I selected the Rust book and then selected others, the first comment from Rust book is shown in other books as well.
Great books listed here! Added some to my TBR list. Thanks! I'm a little surprised the numbers aren't higher across the board.
So I'm guessing we passed HN through an LLM, looking for book mentions.
A number of posts here flagging disambiguation issues, I've run into this a lot.
I've been dealing with the problem using cosine distance between embeddings, but find it tricky to verify at scale.
Anyone else struggling with this?
That would be ruinous, it's probably just doing a simple full text search against a database of titles.
hmm. I made a post about "Imagining All the People. Poetry Inspired by Beatles Lyrics" but it didn't make the list. I'm guessing it's because there were no comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296428 https://www.thebeatleworksltd.com/
Pleased to see that the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was mentioned exactly 42 times!
I almost wonder if that particular number was hardcoded for humour!
Seems like a great training set for a hn astroturf bot.
This is god's* work OP! Thank you!
* Or gods' work if you are polytheistic, or $god's work with "god" as a variable for all other belief systems on the Unix shell ;)
What is the cut off date?
It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
Were there any books that mentioned Hacker News?
If you are the creator of this site can you grab one of the covers for hypermedia systems off the website?
thank you for making this!
My favorite reads of 2025 came from an HN recommendation (the Steerswoman series). I don't see it on this site so maybe the comment I saw was too oblique of a reference
Picked up my two mentions of the Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila. Going to be looking to see if any of the other doctors have been mentioned.
Neat. I'm seeing a lot of overlap with books mentioned on r/reddit. I didn't realize, until know, how demographically similar hacker news and reddit are.
HN used to be a site for entrepreneurs to share ideas and work on things. Now the far left Reddit crowd has crashed it and anyone who has a successful business is just "lucky" and anyone who has earned wealth should have it stolen at gunpoint by the government to redistribute to those who don't produce anything.
If you seriously call HN "far left" you may try looking at Vox, Parler and Truth for the "centrist moderate" crowd :)
Such a great collection! I wonder how it was achieved, definitely not by LLM, was it?
CSV export (just the book list) would be welcome.
Kind of surprising that HN still is quite limited to the US-West, expected a little more diversity with the readers and discussions out there
What are some books from other regions that you hope might get discussed here more?
Maybe the German, French, and Russian classics from around 1830-1950. The material that was considered the backbone of modern literature. At least War and Peace was mentioned in the list.
They might be a bit heavy reading but pretty much understandable even for less educated reader. The literature before that is written for people who know the Bible, Homer, Ovid etc, classic philosophies and European history thoroughly. For others it looks like nonsense or they might read it but not really get much out of it.
This is just great! Thanks for building.
You missed some of mine, for example Theatre of the God's is not on your list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718536
Edit:the French edition of the Vorkosigan Saga has denfitively the wrong author https://hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app/
extremely cool thanks.
See a few of my mentions on here, a few of them not [0]
Regardless, this is a real treat
Best HN post of the year. I just surfaced after hours exploring.
No offense intended towards anyone, but it usually strikes me how basic/surface level literature references are here. For a crowd pretty much defined by intellectual curiosity, it's mostly highschool reads, very mainstream scifi/fantasy and corporate self help.
I wonder if it's an american thing, for engineers to be detached of liberal arts? The vibe tends to be quite different in local engineering groups.
It's just a naive expectation on your part.
This is a rough reference count of mentions in day to day chatter on current affairs.
A similar analysis of any forum, including your own comments, would have the same short tail.
Half because the context that books are mentioned 99% of the time isn't to make a recommendation, much less a deep or cerebral one.
I think two factors are in play:
The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more popular (it is, after all, a popularity list).
Second is this:
> for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?
Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to the choir. What they are glorifying is how well the story depicted an issue.
>although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding there, if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.
Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.
There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
>It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here.
That's the thing, there is not specific book I could recommend that is most likely change your life for the better, for the same reason there is no single specific equation I can mention that will make someone good at math if they solve it. Some exercises are better, some are pointless, but it's the act of engaging that counts in the long term.
My comment about this list had no implication that the books at the top of the list were less valuable than other hidden works; they're just a sign of a path not travelled quite far, if that makes sense.
And leaving aside the usefulness of it all, pleasant experiences not all amount to entertaining. You'd probably agree that having sex with the love of your life and watching TV are not equivalent experiences, even if you come out of both with roughly the same level of self-improvement.
> if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.
Actually, I'm flipping the two: The potential value of a fiction book is a good story - social commentary is purely optional. Fiction that has commentary padded by a story are valued only by those who are sympathetic to the commentary. Whereas I can easily love a good story even if I disagree with the commentary.
> Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.
I don't think we're in disagreement. I'm merely saying that I've yet to see someone changed by a fiction book. If there was change, it was always "change in the same direction" (e.g. "a renewed appreciation of X").
I have seen plenty of folks changed by nonfiction, though.
Incidentally, most/all of what you wrote above can be done as effectively with nonfiction. Books like When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him are extremely powerful. As was Killers of the Flower Moon. I doubt any works of fiction dealing with the same topics would be more powerful. Both of these books could have been written (and read) as fiction, but knowing the events were true makes a huge difference in appreciation.
> There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
This seems like a false dichotomy. You can have nonfiction do this very effectively without simply "telling" you.
Behold a super-satured solution. A crystal touches it and where before was a liquid, now hard unyielding crystals spring forward, hard enough to scratch diamond. Some books are seed crystals, changing the shapeless into eternal forms.
Let me know when you find such a book ;-)
All books can be seed crystals, provided they find an appropriate super saturated solution in their readers (that was my point, actually, as a counter argument to OP's "preaching to the choir". Although the super saturated solution is already there, it needs to seed crystal to (physically) transform).
I think it's more about how using "most" as a measurement, no matter who the audience is that you pool from, is not a good way of producing a valuable list. In the end, having someone learned and well read produce a hand-written list with deeper cuts brings more value.
The context of these book titles appearing in comments might skew the results. Ulysses is high up on the list, but the source comments have a lot of people using it as an example of a lengthy, difficult book.
I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class, instead of something more obscure.
There is some real stuff in there if you scroll through but I don’t disagree with your point. But it is easier to perform/identify oneself with intellectual curiosity than to truly be intellectually curious.
Most people will barely read through a couple basics, so it can be a bit of a though sell to start recommending more niche stories. And part of the reason that some of these books are so successful is that they tend to have pretty widespread appeal, while more niche books will be more divisive and less likely to get recommended broadly.
If you're so well-read why don't you grace us with some of your non-mainstream S-tier recommendations?
From this list, one of the books that I recommend to everyone is Piranesi, which is fairly mainstream, and if they want to explore Russian magical realism then Vita Nostra. Unsong is another favorite. In general I love to explore magic systems that experiment with breaking a system, or stories that explore how different rules might interact within a system.
I think people sometimes underestimate the value of lighter more fun reads, like cultivation stories. The best western adaptation of this style of novel is probably the Cradle series, by Will Wight. Even though the stories tend to be fairly light, they're quite enjoyable for exploring new modes of thinking. For example, we can analyze the interactions of energy as an abstract / symbolic form, and how it influences human behavior; which is an abstract / symbolic application of the cultivation lens over reality. To give an easier to understand example: Feng Shui isn't real but it's true, in the sense that the way in which we organize furniture within a space determines how people navigate it and how they interact. And why might this be useful? Well, sometimes we fail to see the full picture when using a single lens, and different lens might let us see things in a new light.
I've read some terribly generic web novel slop and gotten fairly unique and interesting perspectives from them, but most people aren't good enough readers to enjoy bad books, so they can only read and enjoy good books.
It seems quite obvious to me why it looks like this, and other people have explained it. All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece. If someone hasn't read something you read in high school, it's still better than they read it now.
>All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece.
I think you assumed implications in my comment that weren’t at all intended. By all means read whatever you enjoy, and by keeping at it you’ll eventually reach less known work just as a side effect of getting deeper in your niches.
As I said in another comment, I just see the selection as a sign of a lack of exploration.
It’s not that the books themselves are bad -the original super Mario is a nice game, but if it’s the only game being significantly mentioned the crowd is probably not really into gaming. It’s just surprising to me that the HN crowd isn’t really into literature.
Not surprising. It is just "herd mentality" and "parroting" which is the bane of all general Social Groups/Crowds. There are some well-known (generally not too taxing and not necessarily good) books which keep being amplified.
One or two might be worthwhile but most would be mainstream and pedestrian.
Affiliate marketing is such a mixed bag. I absolutely love it when people can monetize their writing by adding some affiliate links that are relevant to the audience - win/win for all sides. Yet it is as slimy as anything else when the sole purpose of creating content is to publish affiliate links.
My bad — probably should’ve added a disclaimer :) For what it’s worth, I only added sponsored links to the top ~50 books out of ~10k total. Mostly just trying to cover the cost of a decent domain so I can keep the site running.
> "probably should’ve added a disclaimer"
It's a violation of the Amazon Associates program to not have one.
Also, it's illegal in the US and many other countries to not disclose that you're earning money from a recommendation.[0]
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...
Eh, I've shared your views before. But Amazon affiliate link payouts are trash. The OP made it to the front page of HN, but I'd be surprised if he makes more than $100. It's possible, but probably highly unlikely. Let him them make some money, it's a cool project.
But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting emails).
Can you also make it for 2024 and previous years?
I tend to avoid sci-fi that hits too close to home (don't love any of the AI/internet/crypto classics, same reason I can't bear to watch Silicon Valley), so I was a little bored by the top of the the list.
But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation, Children Of Time, Dune.
Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get too bored by descriptions of rock.
Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll through them all, but would be more curious to see books with 2 or more mentions.
It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
The Holy Bible mentioned.
There was another one, HackerNews Readings, but seems to be not updated.
Why does this list sound like a 16 year olds "I am very Smart" list?
These are classics yes, but I was expecting something close to the forefront of the culture
You have a wayyy too skewed perception of the general tech person.
I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and such.
And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost nobody knows it.
What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book list?
The indexing must be flakey. I have mentioned various books multiple times with links to their respective Amazon pages. No mentions of them.
Love this. Is there a scrape-able list of these?
Thanks for the love.No need to scrape, just use this json containing all the data used in making the site :
https://storage.googleapis.com/globalhnbucket/normalized_boo...
The 6 first books reflect the quality comments I often see here on HN.
Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments.
I assume this one uses a few-shot LLM approach instead, which is slower and more expensive at inference, but so much faster to build since there's no tedious labeling needed.
> Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments
Yes, I saw that project pretty impressive! Hand-labeling 4000 books is definitely not an easy task, mad-respect to tracyhenry for the passion and hardwork that was required back then.
For my project, I just used the Gemini 2.5 Flash API (since I had free credits) with the following prompt:
"""You are an expert literary assistant parsing Hacker News comments. Rules: 1. Only extract CLEARLY identifiable books. 2. Ignore generic mentions. 3. Return JSON ARRAY only. 4. If no books found, return []. 5. A score from -10 to 10 where 10 is highly recommended, -10 is very poorly recommended and 0 is neutral. 6. If the author's name is in the comment, include it; otherwise, omit the key. JSON format: [ {{ "title": "book title", "sentiment": "score", "author" : "Name of author if mentioned" }} ] Text: {text}"""
It did the job quite well. It really shows how far AI has come in just 4 years.
Lovely site. Got curious about one of my own biases (that the perceived libertarian slant of HN would be similarly in favor of Ayn Rand), and clicked through the usual suspects to see the context they were discussed in.
Pleasantly surprised to see much of the discourse was along the lines of, "Oh yeah, read her stuff, found it fascinating [in the same vein as a train wreck can be], recommended just to understand how those folks think." Not going to pick up her stuff any time soon, but I was happy to have a bias prove unfounded.
Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is absent. We cultists have fallen down on the job.
By searching in all categories, I can see it's mentioned once : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659243#42662874
For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing though :/
> For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing though :/
I think we take for granted having dang as a member and it makes us apathetic.
i soooo live in a reality bubble: harry potter and the bible were 1 & 2? i don't associate with anyone that reads either. bubble on!
great project! how did you do tokenization and alignment of the titles to their ISBN / Amazon ID
Embarrassing to see 0 works by Max Stirner in this work. HN is truly spooked.
This is great!
I think some books might have a boost if we add their informal names, namely:
- Dragon book
- Wizard book
- ummm, I'm sure there's more
Has a lot in common with NPR's top 100 sci-fi and fantasy list from 2011 [0]. Cool to see how the classics stay relevant.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-...