I found Hacker Recommended Books [0a] on HN [0b], and began reading through the books on it, tried many books, read around 20 of them. The experience has been great, and learned many new things. Some books have expanded my mind.
If you are into books, I highly recommend searching HN with the simple keyword "books", and filter using "Ask HN" tags [1], or simply by "books". This is how I choose almost all of my English books now (I am trilingual and can read more languages)- even non-technical books. I have been doing this for more than two years, and I really like HN for books recommendations.
Many years' worth of high quality reads can be found on HN threads related to books. They are goldmines.
EDIT: There is also Hacker News Books [2]. Check out their Top Books of All Time section [3].
I decided today I will start reading a book recommended by HN.
So I went to your link at [0a], selected last 6 months. There are 58 pages of recommendations and 15 recommendations per page. So I rolled a 15 sided dice to choose the page. Then another roll to choose which book on that page.
I wish that model was updated in some time interval. It is frozen in time. :/
I understand and know the pain of maintaining a fully online model, and that is asking too much from an individual. But, say, a manual update every six months or even a year would be okay.
It's surprising that Code, by Charles Petzold, didn't make the top 50. That's one of the most approachable books out there for learning how computers really work. I see a lot of mentions of Code on HN but maybe that is skewed by the links for which I read the comments.
This is a fantastic book if you have difficulty sleeping! I had no idea such an interesting topic, the fundamentals of the operation of computers, could be rendered so lifeless and dull or that it would take so many words to do so. I'm reading through it now but it's taking an awful long time as I never get through more than 3 or 4 pages before it's lights out.
That book has parallels to "Draw the rest of the horse" - it's an awesome book, but the author definitely doesn't do a great job with the latter half, where he assumes that you not only understood the first part but also committed components to memory, so the rest of what he is saying can fit into your working memory and make sense.
Have to admit I struggled with the latter half, mainly because I didn't quite memorize the first half even though "I get it".
I do like the "teach it to me like I am 5" approach. People try to gloss over the basics nowadays like it's not complex enough intrinsically.
I’m surprised that Knuth’s book isn’t in the top 5 and I’m very surprised to see Descarte’s meditation as even in France no one longer reads this ( must be related to the various posts about meditation on HN imho ) and Franck ( not Brian ) Herbert wrote Dune. I don’t trust this post and indeed I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.
The post appended the raw data provided by GPT, allowing you to verify the integrity of the data. This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.
> I don’t trust anything published on the Internet after Llms went mainstream.
You always had to verify the integrity of the data and methods used in any publication, regardless of the medium. The responsibility of both authors and readers hasn't changed. If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.
> This makes the post trustworthy from a methodological pov.
A post is not trustworthy if it’s reposting trash, even if it shows the source.
> you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.
The nature of how LLMs hallucinate is different from how garbage used to appear on the internet. Before LLMs there was a relatively good inverse correlation between quality and blatant bullshit. Not enough to pass the verification rigor required for an academic publication by any means, but enough that you didn’t have to second guess every single statement on every web page listing something as simple as book authors.
Here's my radical take: humans hallucinate as much or more than the top LLMs. Heck, depending on the human, nearly everything they think and say is functionally a hallucination according to the metrics in use here.
When it comes to what LLM's write, I find that LLM hallucinations are like self-driving car crashes. We are hyper-aware of the machine doing something that we ourselves do every single day and consider a normal defect of biological conscious.
> Here's my radical take: humans hallucinate as much or more than the top LLMs.
I can't believe that. LLMs always talk in the same confident tone, entirely regardless of what they're saying is true or not. What is true in the real world literally doesn't come into the equation.
Whereas at least some of the time, humans will say that they're not sure and might be wrong, or otherwise sound less confident. And that's related to how true the thing they're saying is.
> humans will say that they're not sure and might be wrong
Is that so? https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-... These people were convicted by people who were 100% convinced their memory was correct. The DNA evidence, which is "harder" evidence, said otherwise, and in these cases, was exonerating. (There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other cases like this by the way, where the imprisoned innocent is NOT yet exonerated, all based on overconfident eyewitness testimony that yet managed to convince a judge/jury.)
There is also the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias where individuals with limited knowledge or expertise in a particular area tend to overestimate their competence and confidently assert their opinions. We've literally seen this countless times just since the 2016 US election, just watch literally any Jordan Klepper interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoZ2Lt_aCo8 (honestly, this is a little too political for me to use as an example, but I ran out of time seeking out unbiased examples... Mandela Effect? Misplaced keys being common?)
I'm afraid you're a little off, here, on your faith in humans not hallucinating memories and knowledge.
Ironically, if you agree with pmarreck above, scarblac's comment can be seen as an example of a human hallucinating with confidence, precisely what they were arguing is less likely to occur in the organic side of the internet.
That “if” is doing a good bit of lifting though. Nobody is talking about the hallucination rate.
How many times have innocent people been wrongly convicted? The innocence project found 375 instances in a 31 year period.
How often do LLMs give false info? Hope it never gets used to write software for avionics, criminology, agriculture, or any other setting that could impact huge amounts of people…
I think this is overall a good criticism of the current generation of LLM's- They can't seem to tell you how sure (or not) they are about something. A friend mentioned to me that when it gave ChatGPT a photo of a Lego set with an Indiana Jones theme earlier today and asked it to identify the movie reference, it meandered on for 2 paragraphs arguing different possibilities when it could have just said "I'm not sure."
I think this is a valid area of improvement, and I think we'll get there.
They never did human always do it, rather that they do “some of the time”. Whereas I’ve yet to see an LLM do that.
Also experts tend to be much more accurate at evaluating how knowledgable they are (this is also part of the D-K effect). So Id much prefer to have a 130 IQ expert answer my question than an LLM
Fair enough, but given that access to a 130IQ expert on the subject matter at hand may be either expensive or impossible to obtain in the moment, and ChatGPT is always available 24/7 at very nominal cost, what do you think is the better option overall?
They do, but they are better at verifying what they've already said. So a simple prompt asking them to verify the facts they've presented often improves the accuracy. There are also other techniques like chain of thought and tree of thought that further improves accuracy.
oh here we go. You're one of those people conveniently restricting this accusation to a machine that scores a 130 IQ (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11t5bhh/i_just...), instead of also including humans, who notably will send someone to prison 1000% sure that they witnessed that person doing the thing, when in fact, later DNA evidence exonerates them (https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...). Fucking LOL. Get out of here, doomer, the rest of us have AI-enhanced work to do.
Of course humans also hallucinate, but we didn’t have to take that into account every single time we read a piece of information on the internet. Humans have well-documented cognitive biases. Also, usually, a human’s attempt to deceive has some motivation. With LLMs, the most basic of information they provide could be totally false.
I don't dispute this. What I chafe at is the default-dismissive attitude about any utility of these. "It emits inaccuracies, therefore useless" would invalidate literally every human.
That said, overall utility of anything plummets drastically as reliability goes below 100%. If a particular texting app or service only successfully sent 90% of your messages, or a person you depended on only answered 90% of your calls, you'd probably stop relying on those things.
Those are both excellent points. And I know I’m guilty of being somewhat anti-LLM just because it’s the new hotness and I’m kind of a contrarian by nature. Which is an example of bias right there! And being in academia when it blew up - I do worry about our future cohorts of computer scientists jf academia doesn’t adapt. Which it almost surely won’t. But that’s not a problem inherent to LLMs.
Did you fully read the post you blew up at? I didn’t doubt the usefulness of LLMs. It was a very specific complaint about posting LLM generated content on the Internet without specifying it as the off-the-cuff trash it usually is.
> If you took things for granted before LLMs, you shouldn't have, and if you don't trust trustworthy authors post LLMs, you should.
Blaming LLMs for everything is becoming the preferred excuse for people who like to reject what they read and substitute their own beliefs instead.
It’s true that LLMs hallucinate and are definitely not correct all the time, but the way people are using that as an opening to reject everything on the internet and elevate their own prior beliefs to the top is strange.
Most people don't know humans hallucinate daily. Right now your brain is removing visual information by clipping out the image of your nose and replacing it with what the scene behind it theoretically looks like.
One could argue that whereas once it was necessary to verify the source, now it is necessary to verify not just the source but also the LLM derivation of it, (which may be subtly mangled) - and the source may no longer be readily apparent.
I think this is a good thing. In the past you would remind people, hey, after you find your wiki article, "please" go verify. But wiki was "good" enough most of the time, that people found verification to be often time redundant.
But now with LLMs everywhere, people will realize it is necessary to verify.
What? Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is one of the most important books in the history of Western thought. Saying that "even in France no one longer reads this" is like saying that The Origin of Species is irrelevant because one never sees passengers reading it on the London Tube.
No one reads Origin of Species either. I’ll bet that there’s a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin’s book versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and Newton’s Principia are a few more that come to mind.
The ratio is much, much larger. Darwin's book is not an easy read but luckily you don't need to read Darwin's book, Almost like a Whale by Steve Jones is an excellent rewrite of it. Chapter by chapter, the same arguments are presented but where Darwin could only guess, Jones could rely on genetics and other advances in sciences.
Newton’s Principia is totally and absolutely impossible to understand to the average curious person raised on Cauchy and Weierstrass. There was a course at university aimed at people with advanced math knowledge to prepare you to read it.
People who want a deeper understanding of the related fields do read these. Furthermore, to reiterate the GP's reaction to GGP's sentiment about few reading them, their readership or lack thereof is not a variable in the question of their value. We can speak to many technical guides that would increase people's productivity if they only read them.
Popularity is more a question of marketability, especially in the dire non-fiction category. Reading is a secondary use for most of these books, and it makes it even harder to discern which lifestyle books are resume-padding filler or truly generalizable advice.
Darwin is far more readable than any of the others you mention.
Possibly Mein Kampf could compete in short passages by a "reading difficulty" score, but it's really tedious and much longer (by a factor of 5!). Darwin could actually write. Origin of Species was intended for the educated public as well as for scientists.
One time. But I did read it. Not all. Unconvincing.
And I did read all of Gabriel Marcel's Metaphysical Journal. So ... not a matter of Slack. If one in 100 reads Origin that's a rough approximation to the number of masochists
For me, the repetition is a feature, not a bug. It's similar to Buddhist meditation practices, which also involve a lot of repetition. It really helps my brain to fully absorb the message and walk away feeling more calm and in control. But as with any philosophical text, your mileage may vary.
It’s repetitive, but also not particularly long. Also easier to skim those parts. It is more of an issue when you’re trying to consume the audio version…
Knuth's work is the computer science version of "industry-specific canon that few people have actually read", much like The Powerbroker in urban planning.
I own several of his books (admittedly they were gifts), and have never read them. So them not showing up in the top five doesn't surprise me much.
Richard: You just pick things up. People tell you these things, and that happened to some with Bloomberg. They’d come to us and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing this optimization,” and I said “Never occurred to me.” “Well, can you do it?” “Let’s see what we can do,” and then it would go in, so, yeah, kind of figure it out as you went along. I had to invent a lot of this myself. Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.
Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.
Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?
Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does.
It’s massively overrated too. It’s a detailed handbook on the engineering problems of it’s time (sorting, parsing, …) which have all been ‘solved’ since.
I don't think Knuth's work is canon in our specific industry, be it web dev, system dev, or whatever it is people around here are doing. Knuth belongs to Academia, not industry.
I am sorry that you feel this way. Software Engineering and Computer Science are thoroughly academic topics that every practicing IC and manager can greatly benefit from reading and digesting. Bill Gates put as an endorsement of TAOCP that he would hire (in industry) anyone who mastered the topics therein. Did you not go to university? Even if you didn't, where was the source of your education? Knuth wrote books that could belong to undergraduate level programming courses.
I have read a few chapters of TAOCP for fun but I have a PhD in Mathematics, and worked in Academia, so I am an outlier. I don't think Knuth's book are a difficult read - for me. But unlike you I don't make the mistake of believing everyone is as proficient as I am. I don't know a single person, among my friends and acquaintances working in SWE, that could read a page of TAOCP.
I can assure you that Descartes Mediations is required reading for any philosophy student at some point, also in France. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, is pretty much of no relevance if you study philosophy. It's very popular in the life style and esoterics section at book stores though.
This list can't be more accurate with "Three Felonies A day" at #4, "Elements of Computing Systems" at #6, and "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" at #8. TFA list seems way more representative.
I love Ayn Rand, but not for the weird cult thing it grew into.
To me, it is the story of someone trying to create cool stuff and the world making that hard (felt like a celebration of human creativity). She is brutalistic in her messaging but it is an interesting story. I weirdly like her writing style, its like someone pounding a hammer against my skull. Haven't read her books in 10+ years but in my teens and twenties, I found them thought provoking and inspiring.
Same, and I'm very progressive and completely disagree with her Objectivist philosophy, because she's obviously not a philosopher. She's a great writer though, her work can motivate people, and has for sometime made me reflect and move forward with my life.
But I believe it might be toxic for the HN crew.
Let's be frank, people don't read much on average, so they take whatever book or author you read as your own personality, when in reality people should read many books with different ideas, so you can form your own.
One can learn a lot from reading from Friedman to Marx.
This is why I also think that one should read all the classics instead of chasing book recommendations, any community you ask will give them recommendation for non-technical subjects that are from their own worldview, which in turn, will make you not smarter, but likely more stupid than you initially started before you've read those books.
She had a really unique view of the world, I appreciated it, and it definitely helped me develop my own view of the world. I am about to read the Upanishads along a similar line of thought.
I think this is the first time I've heard anyone talk about Rand in a way that matches my own experience. Her writing definitely affected how I saw the world and I think that makes it good. But at the same time it's like nerd sniping for philosophy, I had such a visceral reaction to how well she presents an absolutely insane way of thinking that you can't just dismiss her out of hand. It forces you to genuinely learn to be able to command the vocabulary and ideas to really explain where the cracks are.
If a list includes Ayn Rand and the title for the list doesn’t start with “[N] Worst [Writers|Artists|Philsophers|Thinkers|Economists|Women] of” then it’s a bad list.
This narrow perspective doesn't sit well with me. I read Shrugged while growing up poor, and I think a thoughtful take would be that she wrote, in her own way, something which could be in the running as the "Great American Novel" alongside Gatsby or Huckleberry Finn. It captures a zeitgeist, even if I don't personally want this world at large, and I think we lose an important part of literature discussions to allow a discourse as simple as "Rand bad".
If one’s view is that Atlas Shrugged constitutes a novel at all — rather than an objectivist manifesto rattled off by “characters” with all the inherent humanity of damp toilet tissue — one’s perspective is so ludicrously narrow that all I can prescribe is anything whatsoever by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and call me once the fever breaks.
But, yes, Rand’s turds do appeal to those poor enough financially that they didn’t receive a rich and broad education and poor enough intellectually that they couldn’t give themselves one.
it'd be incredible if they analyzed what sorts of users (based on their comments) recommend each book, I guess with percentages (e.g. "80% who recommend Ayn Rand are right-leaning")
I actually find HN book recommendations useful for the opposite reason: the un-upvoted comments at the bottom that have book suggestions I've never heard of before. That is valuable, while this list of popular choices is mostly predictable.
If you dig into any "recommend me books" post, you'll find some truly great recommendations near the bottom.
does anybody else consider "how to win friends and influence people" a red flag whenever somebody mentions it as one of their favorite or most impactful books?
I don't think so. I see this sentiment a lot from people who haven't actually read the book. People often think it's about being manipulative or something. It's really just a super basic guide on making and maintainibg friends.
Like if you already have a group of friends and no worries about keeping that, you probably already know everything in the book. As someone who grew up as the perpetual outcast, the advice in that book was really useful for me. It was essentially cliff-notes for social skills I should have learned at the age of 10 but didn't.
The only "red flag" I see when someone mentions the book is that they were probably very socially inept at some point in the past like I was. They still might be, but they're working on it.
that's interesting. i've never read the book, maybe i'll give it a try. only had an experience with a person who highly recommended it and they weren't very trustworthy.
The advice in it certainly can be used by untrustworthy people or in malicious ways but so can any other social advice really. I'm sure some people buy the book to only read the sections about asking people to do things for you or being a better salesman (Which doesn't have to literally be selling things. Maybe I'm trying to convince my friends to try some new board game at game night instead of the same 3 we always play). But even then you'd have to ignore most of those chapters' advice about putting the buyer's needs first.
Ultimately the core of the book is "think about the other person and their perspective" and gives advice on how to apply that in cases of making friends, keeping friends and having good business relationships. Or to frame it a more selfish way, "the best way to get what you want from other people is to give them what they want first."
Like I said, it's nothing groundbreaking, but the stories and examples were helpful to me when I was socially clueless. The average person might still find value in it because even though these things are easy to know, it takes conscious effort to apply. But I also think writing "Pause and think about the other person" on your hand with a marker will have exactly the same benefit unless you really need some of these things spelled out for you.
Its impactful for people with social anxiety, on the spectrum, a mix therein, etc. This book taught me how to talk to people, and steered me from a life of intense social anxiety and isolation towards being able to talk to and get to know other humans. The majority of people I know in life would not need this book, or probably find it a bit stupid even. But for me it was pivotal, and I bet many on HN had a similar experience.
The "Meditations" referred to in the list seems to be the work by Marcus Aurelius in the raw data (available at the bottom of the page): not Descartes -- presumably -- "Meditations on First Philosophy".
It was just a spot check -- not exhaustive. Also many who refer to Descartes in the raw data, do so regarding other works.
An increasingly good question to ask oneself these days: how could this be done without direct usage of LLMs / without ML even? Then as a second step ask yourself how potential assistance from generative tools and perhaps ML could improve those solutions.
I made a version of this using boring tech (Postgres, Django, Python) by just counting the number of times a book link (not just books, youtube videos, arxiv papers etc) is posted in Hacker News comments. I also did a bunch of calculations around the poster of the link and replies to the posted link. The reality is that boring tech does not get attention and engagement.
Happy to hear (with Postgres or Python or Django) how you are going to filter out irrelevant comments, from comments mentioning books. And then how you're going to extract the book title and its author from a comment?
That doesn't look trivial at all to me... but... if you did that, please share with us a Github repo.
The site is http://hnlikes.com/ and on the About page I describe how it was done.
Like I mentioned it only looks for books that are linked (or videos, arxiv papers, Wikipedia etc.). I then use the link to get information from the site itself.
I calculate scores for the given link weighted by a number of metrics.
I'm sorry if I gave the impression this was fancier than it actually is.
I think a lot of the basic tasks with LLMs can be done without ML but what I find interesting is learning how to use LLMs to do interesting things and the ceiling being a lot higher than with traditional methods.
Learning how to use a new tool with older type of work can be useful and enlightening.
I thought this was pretty odd too but it does tend to find its way onto aggregated HN book lists (linked throughout the comments) a lot. My theory is that the short name combined with it's rather divisive content leads to people arguing about it by name which boosts these "per mention" metrics.
For example: take a look at some of the comments here https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t... while there are some recommendations (I expect this) there are also quite a lot of people using the book as a way to deride purveyors of its ideology.
I think what we're both experiencing here is an expectation that this list will be GOOD recommendations, but the methodology is popular mentions, which happen to contain some people's (subjective) GOOD recommendations but also peoples (subjective) BAD popular mentions.
> while there are some recommendations (I expect this) there are also quite a lot of people using the book as a way to deride purveyors of its ideology.
That's a good idea. It wouldn't be too hard to get chatgpt to also return the sentiment of the book mentions. Negative sentiment comments could be ignored for the purposes of a top 50 list.
I have not had good experiences or high expectations for HN book recommendations at all. For nonfiction there are about 20 that come up reliably and a lot of them are quite great but it's still very r/books-ish and predictable. For fiction you are getting recommended dune and brandon sanderson, east of eden, maybe some philip k dick and that is that.
Well, first off, they're not very good. But also, in a way, that's not the point; no-one is reading them because they're good. They're the Objectivist equivalent of things like Battlefield Earth, overwhelmingly read because they were written by a cult founder rather than for the usual reasons one might read a novel.
I have not read her novels, but I stumbled upon her writings many times before. You'll perhaps find Massimo Pigliucci's critique [1] of her whole philosophy worth your time.
As old joke goes “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
but generally you should read it, at least then you know what those libertarian types are thinking.
If you have a penchant for Ayn Rand and her general outlook, I do not think your stance on her can change through rational discussion. There are "primal world beliefs" [1] that are irremediably incompatible.
As someone who lived the horrors of communism through my teen years and thus read Ayn Rand in my middle age, I find her books logical, rational and real-world validated. Attributes utterly lacking from her detractors, strangely enough.
I'm not a libertarian, but hold a lot of libertarian values, "Atlas Shrugged" is a joke. I was expecting to read meaningful libertarian story, but got edgy dream of someone without any power in real life. Sort of "literally me" meme, but in a book format.
See this recent Ask Reddit "What book is an immediate red flag for you when someone says it’s their favorite?" and look at the replies around Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, e.g. this sub-tree:
Sorry if the comment came across as curt, I'm not annoyed by it, though I am curious whether it's still ongoing since I haven't seen it as much lately.
"Bible" should probably have been excluded. Besides the fact that I can't imagine this many people here actually recommending reading it (rather than it just being mentioned it in passing), it's multiple books written by multiple authors across multiple centuries. If people were actually recommending the Bible, they'd probably be recommending specific books like Job or Psalms or one of the Gospels.
In a similar way Fooled By Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile are all a part of the Incerto series and could have been condensed to one line item.
In any case, great work! I'd like to see a post like this with the top 50-100 authors and the comments full of discussions about which of the books are the author's best / most accessible.
Tangentially related, I always want a service to show all books mentioned in a book, like a web of html, but made out of books. I often find my next book that way. I wonder if there is such service out there? Would love to see the network and the visualisation of connected books
I'm surprised how few books there actually are. Each time I see one of these lists I see the same books over and over again. In a single lifetime you can easily read all "good" books. Wonder what books are good but are hardly mentioned, probably none cause if they were good the would be mentioned. We have a tendency to think there is hidden knowledge but that is just not the case. These books are what there is kind depressing if you've read most of them.
It's probably isn't that few books surpass a measure of quality but how a hit based business is rate limited by the bandwidth of word of mouth trendiness.
This is a striking summary of HN's ideological leanings. Beyond the obvious programming/math classics, it's an exposition of the Californian Ideology [1].
It would be nice if there was some further sentiment analysis.
As subjective as it may be I am pretty disappointed with the list.
Here is my last 3 books. Also to disappoint.
"The Passanger" McCarty, Cormac
"Children of Time" Tchaikosvki, Adrian
"Snowcrash" Stephenson, Neal
"Antkind" Kaufman, Charlie
What did you think of Antkind? That one has been on my list forever, but I've never gotten around to it. I expect it to be either pure genius, or... 500 pages of unending navel gazing.
I looked at Godel Escher Bach and the 'first mention' link was to a comment seconding someone else's recommendation (albeit in what was likely the first HN thread to mention it), so I think the author's prompts need some refinement.
I'm an informavore, and even in my 50s, I realize there aren't enough years left to read all the non-fiction I want. For some books (non-fiction only), I want just a couple double-clicks into the main points, much like a grad student skimming numerous texts to extract key points for their thesis. ChatGPT has been invaluable for this.
For instance, I began reading Susan Nieman's "Evil in Modern Thought" but found the writing style a bit tedious after just two chapters. I turned to ChatGPT for a chapter-by-chapter summary, which it provided brilliantly. I shared this with a friend who earned her PhD in the 2000s, and she was astounded. It's hard to overstate the time saved.
I'm impressed the chapter by chapter worked. I tried something like that and had to use a RAG like approach where I provided the text with each question, and used Claude.
You don't worry that it will include hallucinations? Seems like it would be hard to tell if it's summarizing a chapter or inventing a chapter based on its title and context.
Given I'd read the first two chapters, I could judge its accuracy, which was spot on. Also note that I tried to trick it at the end, asking for a chapter that didn't exist. It didn't fall for it.
HN has given me so many great book recommendations over the years. Things I truly would not have found myself. I really get excited when I see someone mention a book in a relevant topic thread.
A more general approach would be to train an LLM on all HN comments, then allow the user to ask this LLM questions, like: "Could you recommend me a few books on machine learning?"
Pretty good overlap: What are the ten most recommended books on Hacker News?
1. "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
2. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
3. "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin
4. "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman
5. "How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
6. "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen
7. "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
8. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
9. "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" by Cal Newport
10. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman
Fun fact, the guy the FBI claims was behind the Anthrax attacks was apparently a fan of Hofstadter:
> A week later, just after 1:00 a.m. on the morning of November 8, the FBI stated that Ivins was observed throwing away "a copy of a book entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, published by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979" and "a 1992 issue of American Scientist Journal which contained an article entitled 'The Linguistics of DNA,' and discussed, among other things, codons and hidden messages".
The author did a lot of work and analysis to build this. This is not easy to do and I've found that people doing anything with books are doing it for passion, not money.
Background: I run hackernewsbooks.com, and the only thing affiliate revenue covers is the hosting and mailing list costs (~$50 a month). It is a fun project I bought from the original owner to learn (and because I loved the idea). I want to add more visuals and unique navigation to it. I also run Shepherd.com, which is a much larger book website and we are not covering our costs yet, it is a struggle.
There is a tendency on H.N. to think everything is a scam; I'd love to see that moderated a bit so that people realize it's people like them building cool stuff that excites them.
I find it hilarious that you would say this when you used to work for Google :)
All Google does is hijack other people's hard-written content and slap ads around it.
I am half-kidding, as I love Google, but I think your comment lacks some self-awareness about the reality of curation and what it offers to people. And how the world is funded. I mean how much of your house is paid for from ad revenue while you worked at Google?
Google didn’t steal people’s content when I left. Snippets weren’t a thing. It was a search engine that actually directed traffic to content creators.
Google didn’t make money on the curation, they made money from the separate ads on the side. I would have no problem if the author jammed ads off on the side.
The fact that you think ad revenue is the same as adding and replacing referral links from things that people already curated is pretty disturbing.
Google entirely makes money on curation :), that is what they do. Curate and organize the web. They also sub in their own product links everywhere.
The creator of this project threw in some referral links, but he didn't replace them. And maybe he made $20 to $50 bucks for what was a huge chunk of his time to create this fun data analysis project.
And to add, it also is a HUGE help to authors. There is a huge problem in the book industry with"winner takes all" within Amazon and other big book websites. It means we as readers are getting less and less exposed to books that we would like but fail to get noticed. The more recommendations and distribution of unique recommendations the better.
From my perspective he's putting in the work to collect all of these into one spot that is easy and fun for me to peruse (also without banner ads and other garbage on the site).
That seems sufficiently transformative to make his referral links okay.
Out of all things you can "steal" I can't think of anything with less intrinsic value than the mentioning of a book title. Pretty sure no-one who posts a recommendation on a public forum has any expectations of ownership or attribution, unless they are quoted word-by-word but this is just aggregating the titles.
If you don't want to support them then don't click on the link or extract the raw link from the source? The person who made this is under no obligation to make it easy for you to use his thing for free.
The website looks like a clever way to generate a lot of clicks to Amazon using his affiliate link.