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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

#33

Post by emodendroket »

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.

There is some real stuff in there if you scroll through but I don’t disagree with your point. But it is easier to perform/identify oneself with intellectual curiosity than to truly be intellectually curious.

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

#35

Post by DashAnimal »

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.

I think it's more about how using "most" as a measurement, no matter who the audience is that you pool from, is not a good way of producing a valuable list. In the end, having someone learned and well read produce a hand-written list with deeper cuts brings more value.

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

#38

Post by yoan9224 »

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 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?

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