111–120 of 217 posts
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
Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN. 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…
I wouldn’t think clean code is on-brand at all. Maybe mentioning it for what not to do? Just search it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clean+code All (justifiably) against clean code methodology.
No offense intended towards anyone, but it usually strikes me how basic/surface level literature references are here. For a crowd pretty much defined by intellectual curiosity, it's mostly highschool reads, very mainstream scifi/fantasy and corporate self help. 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.
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.
The fact that Mein Kampf was mentioned so often in 2025 is saying something about the political climate lol.. Nice website though, I like it.
I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just mentioned in the context of banned book threads
Doing my part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just mentioned in the context of banned book threads
>I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times 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.
It only takes one leadership failure to turn it into shackles.
So I'm guessing we passed HN through an LLM, looking for book mentions. 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?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Also, some of it is just Godwin's Law.
* 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 ;)
[1] System Programming in Linux: