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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

#42

Post by jama211 »

duckerduck wrote: post #40
GenerocUsername wrote: post #14

Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic level coincidence

Now its 43 :'(

List was to a time point, and list says 42. All good! You could even say after waiting the right amount of time, 42 was the answer this computer program generated…

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

#43

Post by jeffbee »

Insanity wrote: post #5

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.

Maybe there's a german-language subset of comment threads where they discuss their struggles against the C++ standard.

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

#44

Post by seinvak »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #19

Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments. 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28596207

> Would love to learn more about how this is built. I remember a similar project from 4 years ago[0] that used a classic BERT model for NER on HN comments

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.

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

#45

Post by xp84 »

samx18 wrote: post #34

Kind of surprising that HN still is quite limited to the US-West, expected a little more diversity with the readers and discussions out there

It’s mostly an English language site and there are a lot of English speakers in “the West” - I would expect that if there’s a China equivalent there aren’t that many Americans having discussions there.

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

#46

Post by stego-tech »

Lovely site. Got curious about one of my own biases (that the perceived libertarian slant of HN would be similarly in favor of Ayn Rand), and clicked through the usual suspects to see the context they were discussed in.

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.

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

#50

Post by card_zero »

Cloudly wrote: post #13

The recent novel Abundance seems to be agressibley grouped with the John Green novel An Abundance of Katherines - which I think is a humorous retelling of 2025 but also maybe needs some matching work

An Abundance of Katherines has only been mentioned on HN three times, and none of those are listed among the 19 claimed mentions.
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