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Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

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Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#191

Post by Aachen »

JDye wrote: post #126

Surprised TCP/IP Illustrated (Volume 1) has only been mentioned 6 times. It's been so helpful for me, so many times. Perhaps it's because most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job, but it's such a fundamental technology I would have thought learning about it in depth would be suggested far more frequently. Also, a proper first edition copy is really high quality with lovely thick paper. My…

> most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job

yeah, I'd just look up the specific thing I want to know online

Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#192

Post by vips7L »

bdunks wrote: post #54

It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented. 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…

I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.

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”.

Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#193

Post by [deleted] »

torben-friis wrote: post #25

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.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#195

Post by torben-friis »

globular-toast wrote: post #162
torben-friis wrote: post #25

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.

It seems quite obvious to me why it looks like this, and other people have explained it. All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece. If someone hasn't read something you read in high school, it's still better than they read it now.

>All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece.

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.

Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#196

Post by yoan9224 »

This is a clever aggregation project, but I think the methodology might miss some important signal-to-noise distinctions. A book mentioned once in passing ("oh yeah, like in [book]") carries very different weight than a book recommended explicitly ("you should read [book] if you want to understand X"). Are you parsing comment sentiment or just doing keyword extraction?

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.

Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#198

Post by skeledrew »

yoan9224 wrote: post #196

This is a clever aggregation project, but I think the methodology might miss some important signal-to-noise distinctions. A book mentioned once in passing ("oh yeah, like in [book]") carries very different weight than a book recommended explicitly ("you should read [book] if you want to understand X"). Are you parsing comment sentiment or just doing keyword extraction? The real value would be in clustering books by t…

It's already pretty useful with the number of mentions available. Higher a number, the more that generally find a work of interest. Unless there are members who just love to spam the names of particular books. My main gripe is that this isn't a repo/gist, as a site this specialized is more likely to disappear into the wind at any time. Also the Amazon buy links; would prefer a link to Wikipedia, or even Goodreads.

Re: Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

#200

Post by ajcp »

ruraljuror wrote: post #109
ajcp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon by Cixin Liu.

Woah, what an unexpected surprise!

I highly recommend the book; it definitely completes the series well.
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