
Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments - gkst
http://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/
======
_lpa_
I did something pretty similar over christmas, though I used named entity
recognition to extract book titles rather than looking for amazon links, and
(so far) also limited it to specific "Ask HN" threads about books. You can
find it here: [http://www.hnreads.com/](http://www.hnreads.com/). It is
interesting to see how little overlap there is between the two, though that
may be due to my using far fewer (and also newer) threads!

~~~
bitcointicker
Surprised to see Permutation City in that list. Given that the book is written
in 1994, Gregg displays admirable prescience about how computing would
develop. Honestly you would think it was written in the last 5 years or so.
His vision of cloud computing is absolutely outstanding. It blew me away when
I checked when the book was written after reading the first few chapters.

I'd read Schild's Ladder prior to reading Permutation city, which is also a
good read. It does seem to get bogged down in the technical and descriptive
side of things at times, however, it's a fantastic idea for a story. The main
premise of the film would make a great movie.

Whilst I'm on the subject of good "Hard sci-fi" novels, Tau Zero is also worth
reading.

Edit - I'll also throw this in:
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0814703259](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0814703259)

Magic :-)

~~~
jcrites
If you like Permutation City, you might also enjoy another of Egan's works,
Diaspora. [http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-Novel-Greg-
Egan/dp/1597805424...](http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-Novel-Greg-
Egan/dp/1597805424/)

"Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured
itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become
conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic
bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction.
Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships.

And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of
Earth—some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the
air—while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny."

Egan's books have been some of the most thought-provoking I've ever read as
far as science fiction technology. A lot of the works were out of print until
recently; I'm glad to see there's been a resurgence of interest in his
writing, and the availability of his works.

~~~
ngoldbaum
Another Egan book well worth reading is Schild's Ladder, which reminds me a
lot of Diaspora and was recently reissued in the US:

[http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg-
Egan/dp/1597...](http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg-
Egan/dp/1597805440)

~~~
ChrisClark
Those are all great, in fact I'd recommend reading pretty much all of his
books. I've got a shelf full of them. :)

------
SloopJon
Here's a discussion of the original upload of Hacker News data to Google
BigQuery:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502)

At 4 GB, I'd just as soon query this locally, but this looks like a fun
exercise.

I notice that there were 10,729 distinct ASINs out of 15,583 Amazon links in
8,399,417 comments. Since I don't generally (ever?) post Amazon links, I'd be
interested in expanding on this in two ways.

First, I'd reduce/eliminate the weight of repeated links to the same book by
the same commenter.

Second, I'd search for references to the linked books that aren't Amazon
links. Someone links to _Code Complete_? Add it to the list. In a second pass,
increment its count every time you see "Code Complete," whether it's in a link
or not.

~~~
gkst
Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Your seconds
suggestion brings some rather complex problems, for example if a comment goes
like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an
endorsement, while linking to a book in most cases is. Also a sentence like
"programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book.

So this would require some form of sentiment analysis and also require book
titles to be uniquely identifiable.

~~~
flubert
>Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to
the book.

...but the counts might be low enough to manually check for those instances.
I'm surprised the counts are so low.

~~~
tedmiston
I know we traditionally process tokens as case-insensitive, but... it seems
reasonable to assume in HN comments that book titles would be capitalized
properly (so we could ignore non-capitalized titles). Whether or not this
information is present in the version on BigQuery, I'm not sure though.

~~~
gkst
The full text of the comment is available on BigQuery, but I can't write an
SQL query that returns all comments containing potential book titles.

To do such an analysis I'd need to download all 8M comments and process them
individually and find a good way to detect book titles.

------
niuzeta
The absence of SICP, I imagine, is because when people refer to the SICP, they
usually just link to the open link to the book:
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) .

~~~
gkst
Yes, that is probably the case. Quoting from the post

"Amazon is often the goto website for referring books, but many books have
dedicated homepages as well as pages pages on their publisher's website.
Moreover, many freely available are referred frequently in comments, but are
not considered in this ranking."

The approach used here has limitations, I hoped to make that clear by pointing
them out and choosing titles and headlines accordingly.

------
meadori
Having owned and read through "Introduction to Algorithms" for years I agree
that it is a good book. However, recently I have been feeling like it is
recommended way too often without thought.

It is _not_ the best when it comes to explaining things in an intuitive
manner. It _is_ a great reference book with lots of algorithms and proofs.

In recent years I have been drawn more towards Levitin's "Introduction to the
Design and Analysis of Algorithms".

Anyone else have similar feelings about "Introduction to Algorithms"?

~~~
yati
I second you. I have found Steven Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual"[1] to
be a great book in this regard. Of course, like you say, CLRS remains an
excellent reference.

[1]: [http://www.algorist.com/](http://www.algorist.com/)

~~~
gjm11
I think Skiena and CLRS are complementary, each compensating well for the
limitations of the other. If you were going to have exactly two algorithms
books, I'm not sure I can think of a better pair.

------
dankohn1
Here is Matt Yglesias's (author of the #1 book) tweet on the analysis:

[https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/689169613779808257)
"The only book ranking that matters"

~~~
bduerst
Probably because 60% of the reviews are 1-star for his book.

------
a_bonobo
How come "Darwin's Theorem" appears so often? It's quite unknown, with one
review on Goodreads and 4 reviews on Amazon

Is this a result of the author spamming his own work?

Edit: Looks like it, short skimming of "darwin's theorem
site:news.ycombinator.com" shows that all links are from user tjradcliffe, who
is the author. A case for manual curation of data.

~~~
tagawa
Or a case for counting a single author's multiple links of the same book as
one vote.

------
mattip
Out of 8 million data points the top book got around 50 references. I wonder
how much significance should be attached to that, it looks to me to be down in
the noise level.

------
jacko0
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles
Petzold. The best book I've ever read.

~~~
cbhl
I find it shocking that out of eight million comments, the top book is only
mentioned ~50 times, but the parent comment illustrates why -- many people
mention title/author pairs without linking to the book itself.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
([http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2](http://amzn.com/B00JDMPOK2))

------
DanielBMarkham
Related: There are a ton of sites set up like this. Hopefully somebody will
post a list. Lotta work by HN folks on various ways of slicing and dicing the
data.

I wrote this curated site from HN several years ago. Got tired of people
continuously asking for book recommendations. [http://www.hn-
books.com/](http://www.hn-books.com/)

Couple points of note. This is 1) an example of a static site, 2) terrible UI,
3) contains live searches to comments on each book from all the major hacking
sites, and 4) able to record a list of books that you can then share as a
link, like so (which was my reason for making the site)

"My favorite programming books? Here they are: [http://www.hn-
books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=1...](http://www.hn-
books.com#B0=138&B1=15&B2=118&B3=20&B4=16&B5=114&B6=107&BC=7&EC=0&FC=0&QC=0) "

I started writing reviews each month on the books, but because they were all
awesome books, I got tired of so many superlatives!

Thanks for the site.

~~~
marai2
Also Related: Thanks for setting up that curated list. I'll definitely be
going through it to get recommendations. I got tired of seeing such
recommendations being asked repeatedly and then disappear on HN so I created
this:

[http://www.vivalabooks.com](http://www.vivalabooks.com)

Basically a Hackernews for books.

------
willyyr
There is a similar site that didn't make it to the front page which has been
posted recently. I think he is using the api though.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10808014)

------
greesil
Check out the review distribution of "Rent Is Too Damn High"

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-
ebook/product-r...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-
ebook/product-reviews/B0078XGJXO/)

It's the most polarized I've ever seen in my life.

~~~
vellum
He made a snarky comment about Andrew Bartbeit's death, so conservatives gave
him a slew of one star reviews. If you filter by "verified purchases", it's
not as polarized.

------
tern
I maintain a list of HN hacks here: [https://www.are.na/morgan-
sutherland/hacker-news](https://www.are.na/morgan-sutherland/hacker-news).
I've seen a couple other book projects over the years including: [http://hn-
books.com/](http://hn-books.com/) and
[http://hackershelf.com/browse/](http://hackershelf.com/browse/).

~~~
tedmiston
That's going straight to Pinboard.

I've considered building the same myself. It would be lovely if you tracked
the various HN reader client apps. A few that come to mind are: Hacker News
Enhancement Suite for Chrome [1], Hacker Menu for OS X [2], and Premii's HN
web app [3].

1: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en) 2:
[https://hackermenu.io/](https://hackermenu.io/) 3:
[https://hn.premii.com/](https://hn.premii.com/)

~~~
msutherl
Unfortunately only adding stuff I like, and I'm not a big fan of any of the
client-apps / HN makeover extensions I've seen. I do use these two Chrome
extensions though: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
colors...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
colors/adailobllebnhioglgkmaioilhlkdden) \+
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
discus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd).

------
nextos
Is it possible that some books have been missed due to acronyms employed in
comments?

E.g:

\- SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

\- CTM: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

\- TAOP: The Art of Prolog

~~~
gkst
If the comment contained a link to amazon, then no. If only the title was
mentioned then yes.

------
spinchange
Might as well add a link to a book I learned about on HN but never seem to run
across since, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th Edition:
[http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-
Handbook-E...](http://www.amazon.com/Linux-System-Administration-Handbook-
Edition/dp/0131480057)

------
anc84
Please share how much the affiliate tag generates.

~~~
ryangittins
"How DARE you make money from this thorough, thoughtful, and well-researched
post at no cost to me?!"

I just never understand people's hatred for affiliate links in good pieces of
content.

~~~
spdustin
Hard to read tone in text-only messages, isn't it?

I'd actually like an answer. I have no problem with the affiliate links at all
(though the listicle-like gallery presentation is awkward on mobile), and
would legitimately like to know if there are any real-world examples of
affiliate links making money when targeting a specific community. I had
affiliate links all over (organically, not in ad form) when I ran a popular
SharePoint community, and I think I made ~$300 total in the year I had the
links active. HN "feels" like a larger community than my old SharePoint
community was, so the answer to My GP's query is interesting from an academic
sense.

~~~
m52go
Brain Pickings [1] is estimated to make a significant amount of money from
affiliate links. The exact number is disputed, but it's not chump change [2].

[1] [http://brainpickings.org](http://brainpickings.org)

[2] [https://gigaom.com/2013/02/14/the-brainpickings-brouhaha-
and...](https://gigaom.com/2013/02/14/the-brainpickings-brouhaha-and-the-
problem-with-affiliate-links/)

------
myth_buster
I believe people would just write the name of the really popular books like
TAOCP, Hackers, Founders at work etc rather than linking to them.

The list:

    
    
      "The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think" by Matthew Yglesias
      Publisher: Simon & Schuster
      
      "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win" by Steven Gary Blank
      Publisher: Cafepress.com
      
      "Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition" by Thomas H. Cormen
      Publisher: The MIT Press
      
      "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition" by Robert B. Cialdini
      Publisher: Harper Business
      
      "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams   (Second Edition)" by Visit Amazon's Tom DeMarco Page
      Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated
      
      "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
      Publisher: Microsoft Press
      
      "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers
      Publisher: Prentice Hall
      
      "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by Harvey Silverglate
      Publisher: Encounter Books
      
      "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford
      Publisher: O'Reilly Media
      
      "The Little Schemer - 4th Edition" by Daniel P. Friedman
      Publisher: The MIT Press
      
      "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" by Michael E. Gerber
      Publisher: HarperCollins
      
      "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns
      Publisher: Harper
      
      "Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" by Toby Segaran
      Publisher: O'Reilly Media
      
      "The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd Edition)" by Robin Williams
      Publisher: Peachpit Press
      
      "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan
      Publisher: Prentice Hall
      
      "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman
      Publisher: Basic Books
      
      "Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions" by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
      Publisher: CareerCup
      
      "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought" by Keith E. Stanovich
      Publisher: Yale University Press
      
      "On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction" by William Zinsser
      Publisher: Harper Perennial
      
      "Darwin's Theorem" by TJ Radcliffe
      Publisher: Siduri Press
      
      "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)" by Liping Ma
      Publisher: Routledge
      
      "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition" by Steve Krug
      Publisher: New Riders
      
      "Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden
      Publisher: Prentice Hall
      
      "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin
      Publisher: Prentice Hall
      
      "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan
      Publisher: The MIT Press
      
      "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition" by Steve McConnell
      Publisher: Microsoft Press
      
      "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson
      Publisher: Princeton University Press
      
      "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Developer Best Practices)" by Steve McConnell
      Publisher: Microsoft Press
      
      "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler
      Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
      
      "Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty" by David Kadavy
      Publisher: Wiley

~~~
jraines
Yeah -- I'd be willing to bet that "How To Win Friends and Influence People"
is the most mentioned book here; maybe people just don't link to it.

------
nefitty
Hard to read on mobile. Couldn't get past the first few. It is annoying to
have to click a tiny thumbnail to read a bad, extracted synopsis from Amazon.

------
corysama
Interesting to see Influence so high, but Predictably Irrational not listed at
all. I've heard Influence is a really great book, but from a quick skim it
seems like Predictably Irrational covers the subject matter as least as well
if not better. I'd be happy to hear the opinion of someone who has actually
read both.

~~~
agentgt
I was surprised not to see Dale Carnegie's book either but I suppose its
rather dated and not as scientific ( _How to win friends and..._ ). Carnegie's
book had some of the greatest impacts on my personal life and professional.

~~~
jamestnz
Agree, that book is a real classic, I got my copy from amazon actually.

As a side note, the failure of both of us to actually mention the book's full
title (or include its amazon link) presumably means that neither of the
services being discussed would have registered this as a vote for the book.
We're part of the problem! ;)

------
noobie
Sad I couldn't find none of non-technical books on Audible. Any audiobook
"readers" out there?

------
fhoffa
Nice!

On [https://reddit.com/r/bigquery](https://reddit.com/r/bigquery),
/u/omicron_n2 left queries to repeat the experiment on HN and on reddit
comments too:

\-
[https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_o...](https://reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/41py1v/top_30_books_on_amazon_based_on_links_in_hacker/)

And a presentation by /u/Pentium10 on the same topic, using the books that
redditors read:

\- [http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-
event...](http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event-
analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29)

------
Ocerge
Oh god, that algorithms book. Flashbacks to college memorizing red-black trees
coming to me.

~~~
apendleton
They made you memorize the red-black tree algorithm?! Why? The whole purpose
of a reference book like that one is to not have to memorize it. If you need
to implement a red-black tree, you just look it up (I have done exactly that,
with that book and that algorithm).

~~~
Ocerge
Just for tests and stuff, but I specifically remember memorizing tree
rotations and the like. I've forgotten all of them by now :)

------
beefsack
I wonder how many books would be on the list if it were somehow easy to
extract mentions by name instead of by link. Mythical Man Month is mentioned
regularly here and I don't think it's linked very often because of how well
known it is.

------
Sealy
Interesting list. I clicked on the top book and Amazon peer reviews gave it
2.5 stars out of 5 with 450+ reviews.

I admire the effort. Calling it Top Books is slightly misleading. Perhaps you
can call it, most mentioned books.

~~~
ssgao
perhaps taking a look at the negative reviews can reveal a little more secret.
This is one of them:

    
    
      It is sad that someone published this crap and killed thousands of trees. Do you know how long it will take to regrow those trees? 20-30 years. Your selfish lust for money lead you to get up all your principals.
    
      SHAME.

------
bodecker
Suggestion: enable arrow keys to allow for easier scrolling through the books

------
timdorr
It would be nice to link to the comments where the books were referenced.

~~~
gkst
Good suggestion, thanks!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You could list them like reviews are listed on other sites.

------
abstractalgebra
In most such lists there's a distinct lack of math books even though there are
tons of great math books specifically written for programmers and compsci
people.

------
q-base
Anyone who has read the #1 book (Rent is too high) and who might want to add a
few comments about it? What it describes, suggests etc. Never heard about it
before.

------
clarkmoody
Easiest way to make it to the top of Hacker News: Hacker News meta posts.

Always interesting to read. But just as interesting is how quickly they pop to
the top of the home page.

------
pentium10
In 2015, at Crunch Practical Bigdata Conference, Budapest, I showcased what
books some subreddit community talk about: startups, entrepreneur,
productivity reads. Slides are available here:
[http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-
event...](http://www.slideshare.net/martonkodok/complex-realtime-event-
analytics-using-bigquery-crunch-warmup/29)

------
joshmaher
Does that include comments on this article about books being read from links
in the comments?

Here's one on understanding the mindset of your investors when raising startup
capital - Startup Wealth - [http://amzn.to/1Jej8El](http://amzn.to/1Jej8El)

------
smartial_arts
Is this some sort of a promo trap? When clicking on book links I get taken to
pages like this one
[http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html](http://www.freebie.guru/au/starwars/starwars625.html)

~~~
gkst
That page isn't linked in this post. I don't know that site and won't click
that link to find out what it is about.

~~~
smartial_arts
No it is not, but I get redirected to it on my Android phone after clicking on
book covers or graph.

------
arnold_palmur
How is _A Guide to the Good Life_ not on here - I feel like I see it mentioned
at least once a day.

------
andy_ppp
Here is a talk Matthew Yglesias gave about the contents of his book "The Rent
Is Too Damn High":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkti4sAUgQ)

------
joeax
"The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than
You Think"

Not where I live. What to do about it? Move. Find an employer willing to let
you work remotely, and find your own quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise.

~~~
krisdol
> quiet cost-conscious piece of paradise

Some of us like living in the city :(.

~~~
flubert
In fact, people like living in a city so much, that gobs of them are willing
to pay a premium in order to do so. Oh, wait...

~~~
krisdol
Absolutely. But I don't think city living _needs_ to be expensive. Looking
toward the more population-dense central Europe, average families are able to
afford to live in urban areas because there is far more urban housing
available throughout the countries, and it's not just concentrated in a couple
of metropolitan cities.

The demand for urban living outpaces supply of urban housing the United
States. We need a great urban housing expansion throughout the country to make
city living affordable again.

------
tedmiston
I wonder why Steve Blank would publish a book via CafePress.

    
    
      The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
      Author: Steven Gary Blank
      Publisher: Cafepress.com
      Number of links: 45

------
Aaronontheweb
A little surprised to see that the Mythical Man Month isn't on that list:
[http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF](http://amzn.to/1ZHWUlF)

~~~
yaworsk
I'd be interested to know how many affiliate sales you get from this link :)

~~~
Aaronontheweb
After seeing other people grumbling about the affiliate stuff on the website
in this thread, I couldn't resist trying to do it on the thread itself :p

~~~
yaworsk
how did it turn out?

------
pjdorrell
Possible application of Law of Unintended Consequences: every time you write a
program to extract data _out_ of HN, you increase motivation for someone else
to insert data _into_ HN.

------
ck2
Now that is a website with a nice clean layout and easy to read.

~~~
gkst
Thanks!

------
carpdiem
I notice that this list looks like it has a very long tail.

Can we get the top 100 books as well? (since many of those would have very
similar mention numbers as the end of the top-30)

------
veritas3241
This is really awesome! Thank you for putting this together.

~~~
gkst
Thanks!

------
Havoc
Must admit I was expecting less programming books. A lot of the topics on here
aren't directly programming related.

Thanks for the list though. Bought the psychology one.

------
mandeepj
I also do it most of the time. When ever I see a book recommendation here then
I go to amazon either to buy it or save it in my wish list.

------
deadowl
I've read a grand total of two of those. Working Effectively with Legacy Code
seems like it would make for a good read.

------
meetbryce
Your links don't open in a new tab, despite the icon and even if I use my
middle mouse button.

Extremely annoying.

------
DyslexicAtheist
amazed that nobody talks about W. Richard Stevens anymore. i am getting old

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens)

------
dpflan
Cool - maybe this can become a monthly recap of posted books / (links)?

------
enitihas
I am surprised to see the absence of SICP or anything from Dale Carnegie.

~~~
grayclhn
Who links to amazon for SICP?

~~~
abstractalgebra
I do sometimes if only just for the comments.

------
rplittle
Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon

~~~
jseliger
_Curious why the #1 is only 2.5 stars on Amazon_

At some point someone with a megaphone encouraged their listeners / viewers to
brigade the book with bad reviews. They did so and the low star count is the
result.

I'm trying to Google for details over the brouhaha but can't find the correct
keywords.

~~~
gsb
I was also curious since it was so obviously a brigade with most reviews
posted on the same day. It seems he angered Breitbart fans with a tweet:
[https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/175240732045619200)

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a-dub
There are a couple of goodies in there, but tbh that list is pretty
depressing.

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dschiptsov
How come that SICP is not here?

