Show HN: YaHNd – HN Books: The Best Books of Hacker News (opens in new tab)

(yahnd.com)

55 pointsyaj545y ago17 comments

17 comments

16 comments · 6 top-level

systemvoltage5y ago· 4 in thread

Kudos! Loads superfast and well designed. I am curious about how to build a site like this? Could you shed some light on the stack used (frontend/backend)? I couldn't find anything immediately in the HTML like bundle.js or something similar.

yaj54OP5y ago

Sure - Heroku and Cloudflare for hosts. I have a lightweight JS server that handles ingestion of HN data and parses book references into a Postgres db. Site is built with Python using Starlette. There is quite a bit of caching with Redis and Cloudflare. There are a couple scheduled processes for ranking and digests. Spacy and vaderSentiment Python packages are used for text processing. There is no/minimal JS on the site except for hCaptcha. It's gone through a few iterations - the first version was just a one-off static site generation.

foolinaround5y ago

> I have a lightweight JS server that handles ingestion of HN data and parses book references into a Postgres db.

Do you parse every comment, and then look for book names?

yaj54OP5y ago

Yes

1 more reply

not_knuth5y ago

In case you were not aware, you can figure out the stack of a site pretty well using something like: https://builtwith.com/

Cenk5y ago· 3 in thread

I wish you linked out to other retailers as well, besides Amazon. Perhaps something like boook.link would be useful.

yaj54OP5y ago

Yep - I'd for sure like to add other retailers - both for links out and for grepping for book references. Thanks for that resource - it looks helpful.

toomuchtodo5y ago

Consider linking to books at https://openlibrary.org (an Internet Archive project). If they’ve scanned the book, you can usually check it out with your Internet Archive account immediately.

asicsp5y ago

There are plenty of self-published books on https://leanpub.com/ and https://gumroad.com/

Rendello5y ago· 2 in thread

When I was looking to fill my bookshelf with technical books last month, I stumbled upon https://hackernewsbooks.com, it helped me find a lot of good programming literature.

The websites and Twitter feeds seem similar (and both seem great), was there any specific reason why you created an alternative?

yaj54OP5y ago

Fun and learning. And I do think my ranking algorithm generates different results.

bwb5y ago

This is awesome btw :), I just bought (https://hackernewsbooks.com) and I am going to fix the current bug which is breaking the frontpage. I love seeing this as I think the more sites around books the better. Hit me up if you want to stay in touch as I am playing with some different ideas around this too and I'd love to stay in touch :). (bwbbwb@gmail.com)

edmundsauto5y ago· 1 in thread

This is great, really really like the sticky feature of weekly/monthly/yearly digests.

I get most of my book recs from HN comments. Usually they are non-technical, anything from Michael Mauboussin to the Secret Life of Groceries. I would appreciate a simple "coreHN / not-coreHN" switch. (CoreHN would be books about startups, technologies, etc. I prefer the diverse topics, which are often buried in HN).

Also curious - are you parsing comments to identify books, or just submissions?

yaj54OP5y ago

Yep - parsing comments and submissions.

I like the coreHN / non-coreHN idea. The search page [0] has links to categories that can allow you to dig into the different categories of book recs a bit but you still need to parse out which categories are core vs non-core.

[0] https://yahnd.com/books/search/

jmeister5y ago

I’m surprised SICP isn’t on the list.

superasn5y ago

Very nice. How do i sort the results by number of comments, date, etc?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

17 comments

16 comments · 6 top-level

systemvoltage5y ago· 4 in thread

yaj54OP5y ago

foolinaround5y ago

> I have a lightweight JS server that handles ingestion of HN data and parses book references into a Postgres db.

Do you parse every comment, and then look for book names?

yaj54OP5y ago

Yes

1 more reply

not_knuth5y ago

In case you were not aware, you can figure out the stack of a site pretty well using something like: https://builtwith.com/

Cenk5y ago· 3 in thread

I wish you linked out to other retailers as well, besides Amazon. Perhaps something like boook.link would be useful.

yaj54OP5y ago

Yep - I'd for sure like to add other retailers - both for links out and for grepping for book references. Thanks for that resource - it looks helpful.

toomuchtodo5y ago

Consider linking to books at https://openlibrary.org (an Internet Archive project). If they’ve scanned the book, you can usually check it out with your Internet Archive account immediately.

asicsp5y ago

There are plenty of self-published books on https://leanpub.com/ and https://gumroad.com/

Rendello5y ago· 2 in thread

When I was looking to fill my bookshelf with technical books last month, I stumbled upon https://hackernewsbooks.com, it helped me find a lot of good programming literature.

The websites and Twitter feeds seem similar (and both seem great), was there any specific reason why you created an alternative?

yaj54OP5y ago

Fun and learning. And I do think my ranking algorithm generates different results.

bwb5y ago

edmundsauto5y ago· 1 in thread

This is great, really really like the sticky feature of weekly/monthly/yearly digests.

Also curious - are you parsing comments to identify books, or just submissions?

yaj54OP5y ago

Yep - parsing comments and submissions.

[0] https://yahnd.com/books/search/

jmeister5y ago

I’m surprised SICP isn’t on the list.

superasn5y ago

Very nice. How do i sort the results by number of comments, date, etc?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse