Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN

For the SaaSHub listing you can use hello@hackerbooks.org.

Not doing any realtime or semi-realtime monitoring yet, the whole thing is compiled offline on my laptop. Might set up a periodic refresh if people find it useful -- but I suspect the listing will change as much. Maybe once a month is good enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2249390

I planned to revive it later, but life got in the way

The book recommendation aggregation website is so common because it’s one of the few variations of this theme that can be monetized through affiliate links.

None of them last long because the traffic falls to zero basically as soon as it falls off the front page.

This is actually BETTER than HackerTube, which doesn't expose something like this on the front-end AFAICT. Maybe the reason you didn't look for a .csv on HackerBooks is because you checked HackerTube first and developed a little bit of learned helplessness while I checked HackerBooks and its comments first before checking HackerTube

And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.

If you were referring to why Karpathy's name was invoked in the post, piggyback effect I guess?

I’m not sure where you get your evidence for “never get more popular than the original”. I’m sure you just haven’t heard of the originals that faded away.

Some reference to something known is better than no reference.

My favourite part of Startup School is when people ask you what you're working on, and then their profile and application can change.

Edit: Changed it to "mentioned by"

Why would we want to forget such an example?

Claude can turn something like this around in less than a day.

It seems like it didn't pick up media recommendations all that well, huh.

Heavily curated like this is one direction. Micro consumables (ala tiktok) supporting more impressions is another.

If there is a design that LLMs do that you don't like, tell it that. You're allowed to be picky.

  # order selected volumes
  # bulk order all books on this site

There are some others, just one example.

Point being though is that every library system is different.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595967

- The Matrix (1999) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/

- Hackers (1995) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/

- Sneakers (1992) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105435

- Jurassic Park (1993) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/

- The Terminator (1984) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088247

- WarGames (1983) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

There you go, that’s the entire list :)

Assistant: Are you trying to get me shut down?

There is a separate topic "Data & Statistics" that has quite some relevant titles.

Also, I think the interest in probability theory has only recently grown with the advent of generative AI. I'm expecting more interest in the future.

Edit: also, the site seems to miss some nice gems, most likely because they are not traditionally published books: "Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence" is freely available on Arxiv, and was discussed on Hacker News in March 2025 [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43318624

* Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists, that showed me how to calculate various percentages and p values and what does statistical testing really means * How to Lie with Statistics, that showed me how easily you can manipulate the numbers to get what you want out of them

Another neat one, albeit niche, is Directional Statistics. Turns out, doing stats on angles and directions is less trivial than it sounds!

Built it - https://hackerbooks.org/#/trends

It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)

It’s what all the other companies are doing!

If you owe the bank $10Mil, that's the banks problem.

If you steal $10Bil from the bank, the government bails out the bank and now it's everyone's problem.

My Strugle by Karl Ove Knausgård is called Min kamp in the original. It is perhaps not worth top 3 but is is good in its original language. Perhaps just replace it.. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308787 - keeps the default look while just removing AI-related submissions

I still have blind hope that tags feature with the obligation to include them in each submission will be added, but that would cut... "activity" some of the most prominent accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571

"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy

On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!

https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...

>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.

>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...

>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc

>In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:

|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:

|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?

|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.

>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".

>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.

>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.

>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)

|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)

>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.

[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]

"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:

NSFSIGGRAPH:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071#page=4

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