I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
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 would still add:
Snow crash Rainbow's end
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...
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
While on the general topic, also check out the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson:
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.
A well behaved reference implementation would not be of help.
yeah, I'd just look up the specific thing I want to know online
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.
I had a look at the book a few years ago. After a few pages (somewhere in the middle of the book), you can see the writing style (not very good, overexcited, and that would appeal to people who look for it), but it would take longer to get a grasp on the content.
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.
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.
I like hard SciFi with no aliens and plausible rules.
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”.
I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.
There Is No Antimemetics Division freaked me the hell out. Recommended.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe mentioning it for what not to do?
Just search it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clean+code
All (justifiably) against clean code methodology.
Seeing 1984, Dune, Foundation as the top fiction is about as on-brand and unsurprising as it gets. I don't I could pick more expected fiction except for some popular cyberpunk and something from LOTR.
Throw in a hitchhikers guide, zen motorcycle and something from Feynman and you've covered all the bases.
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
Nice website though, I like it.
Doing my part.
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.
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.
graemep
on 4/15/2025
Mein Kampf IS a rant.
I recommend people read it so you can understand how people like that think.by Aho, Lam, and Sethi
https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools...
The "modernized" version leaves out some fundamental parsing material.
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
- _Ashley's Book of Knots_ --- everyone should be aware of knots and now at least the basics interesting, _The Klutz Book of Knots_ was also mentioned once
- James Clavell _Noble House_ --- part of his "Asian Saga", not sure if it has aged well --- if a person could read only one of these, I'd recommend _King Rat_, based on his experience in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.
- Hesse _Steppenwolf_ --- that Hesse is no longer read saddens me deeply, and not just because this makes _The Glass Bead Game_ less likely --- his thoughts on the difficulties of interpersonal relationships resonate even now
- Knuth _Literate Programming_ --- I _really_ wish this style f programming would gain traction and that there would be more instances of taking famous programs and re-writing as a Literate Program, e.g., http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
- Knuth _Digital Typography_ (and not just because I have a reward check)
- Knuth _Mathematical Writing_ --- if you do any work in math, you probably already have a copy --- if you don't, you probably need one
- Dewdney _The Planiverse_ --- response to the classic _Flatland_, this has a real charm and despite the dated computer technology, has held up well
- Walter jon Williams _Hardwired_ --- an amazing cyberpunk novel, part of which was published in _Omni_
- Steven Brust's _Jhereg_ --- one of my favourite fantasy novels, which I've been reading since picking it up in a Waldenbooks when I was in high school, waiting for the last two books, and esp. glad of these since they made the "Paarfi Romances" exist --- anyone who enjoys Alexandre Dumas and fantasy should read _The Phoenix Guards_
- C.J. Cherryh's _Regenesis_ --- her entire Alliance--Union series is amazing and books are so varied pretty much everyone will find something which appeals
- Trevanian _The Eiger Sanction_ and _Shibumi_ --- not sure if this and _Shibumi_ have aged well or no, but the latter was a big part of my childhood
- Ben Franklin's Autobiography --- read presidential biographies to my kind in chronological order as a trial and regret not continuing with the actual project: biographies of important persons in chronological order
- Sanora Babb's _Whose Names Are Unknown_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197158.Whose_Names_Are_... (ob. discl., that was my mention)
Other books which only I mentioned:
- Hal Clement _Space Lash_ now available in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph... --- I recommend folks read it in reverse chronological order, starting at the back, then working to the front and bailing when things get too quaint/old-school/golden-age.
- H. Beam Piper "Omnilingual" --- this should be a part of the middle school canon, lightly updated version at: http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html
- _Foxfire_ --- a classic series what predated the "Maker" movement
- Tolkien's _The Fall of Arthur_
- Knuth _TeX: The Program_
Books which were sufficiently striking that I have made a note of them to get to read (hopefully this will work out better than _The Black Swan_ which I found annoying)
- _Visual Thinking in Mathematics_
- _Hardcore VisualBASIC_ --- still a bit bummed that I managed to miss this and MacBasic....
- _Phoebe and her Unicorn_ --- getting this for my daughter
- _Harmony with Lego(R) Bricks_ --- book on music improvisation
- Ornamental Origami
Note that a number of books weren't actually mentioned, e.g., Isaac Asimov's _Book of Facts_
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Also, some of it is just Godwin's Law.
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.
Knowing the HN crowd, it can also be a reference to beowulf clusters as well.
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.
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)
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444106-abundance [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215526423-an-abundance-o...
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.
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.
These are classics yes, but I was expecting something close to the forefront of the culture
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One or two might be worthwhile but most would be mainstream and pedestrian.
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.
[1] System Programming in Linux:
Playboy is forced to take part in war of the worlds. 50 pages of societé, parties and games are necessary to describe this character.
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?
It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
thank you for making this!
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.
* 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 ;)
HN today is equivalent to Reddit 5 years ago: not as great as it was when smaller 10 years ago, but still better than Reddit today.
I almost wonder if that particular number was hardcoded for humour!
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.
See a few of my mentions on here, a few of them not [0]
Regardless, this is a real treat
It's a violation of the Amazon Associates program to not have one.
But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting emails).
https://storage.googleapis.com/globalhnbucket/normalized_boo...
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.
Edit:the French edition of the Vorkosigan Saga has denfitively the wrong author https://hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app/
It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
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
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.
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.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-...