I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.
I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
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…
I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11 mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian Chronicles" appears to be referencing "The Martian" instead.
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
I think some of the book associations are wrong. It shows "the martian chronicles" for mentions of andy weir's "the martian".
Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read this year mentioned. Except "Mein Kampf" of course, interesting top mention there. perhaps lots of people are reading it to understand the past? I'll need to see if it's worth it, I always considered it the equivalent of drinking water from the river thames to understand victorian england better.
I tried to get into neuromancer but I’m not a fan of the nonstop dialogue. Just a personal reference but it feels more and more rare to get new science fiction books primarily driven by the narrator.
You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
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 now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.
Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John Green—"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this year.
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 seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements, so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
The US has shifted to becoming an authoritarian fascist state. It’s not surprising that people reference another prominent authoritarian fascist manifesto.
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?
I’d be curious about sentiment analysis applied to these. I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
> I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
You are quite correct! Crafting Interpreters actually has the highest average sentiment score across all books with more than 10 comments.
This is the average sentiment score of all three( range being -10 to 10) :
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
My favorite reads of 2025 came from an HN recommendation (the Steerswoman series). I don't see it on this site so maybe the comment I saw was too oblique of a reference
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.
Neat. I'm seeing a lot of overlap with books mentioned on r/reddit. I didn't realize, until know, how demographically similar hacker news and reddit are.
Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll through them all, but would be more curious to see books with 2 or more mentions.
It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
Affiliate marketing is such a mixed bag. I absolutely love it when people can monetize their writing by adding some affiliate links that are relevant to the audience - win/win for all sides. Yet it is as slimy as anything else when the sole purpose of creating content is to publish affiliate links.
My bad — probably should’ve added a disclaimer :)
For what it’s worth, I only added sponsored links to the top ~50 books out of ~10k total. Mostly just trying to cover the cost of a decent domain so I can keep the site running.
Eh, I've shared your views before. But Amazon affiliate link payouts are trash. The OP made it to the front page of HN, but I'd be surprised if he makes more than $100. It's possible, but probably highly unlikely. Let him them make some money, it's a cool project.
But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting emails).
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.
The context of these book titles appearing in comments might skew the results. Ulysses is high up on the list, but the source comments have a lot of people using it as an example of a lengthy, difficult book.
I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class, instead of something more obscure.
The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more popular (it is, after all, a popularity list).
Second is this:
> for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?
Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to the choir. What they are glorifying is how well the story depicted an issue.
>although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding there, if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.
Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.
There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
>It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here.
That's the thing, there is not specific book I could recommend that is most likely change your life for the better, for the same reason there is no single specific equation I can mention that will make someone good at math if they solve it. Some exercises are better, some are pointless, but it's the act of engaging that counts in the long term.
My comment about this list had no implication that the books at the top of the list were less valuable than other hidden works; they're just a sign of a path not travelled quite far, if that makes sense.
And leaving aside the usefulness of it all, pleasant experiences not all amount to entertaining. You'd probably agree that having sex with the love of your life and watching TV are not equivalent experiences, even if you come out of both with roughly the same level of self-improvement.
> if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.
Actually, I'm flipping the two: The potential value of a fiction book is a good story - social commentary is purely optional. Fiction that has commentary padded by a story are valued only by those who are sympathetic to the commentary. Whereas I can easily love a good story even if I disagree with the commentary.
> Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.
I don't think we're in disagreement. I'm merely saying that I've yet to see someone changed by a fiction book. If there was change, it was always "change in the same direction" (e.g. "a renewed appreciation of X").
I have seen plenty of folks changed by nonfiction, though.
Incidentally, most/all of what you wrote above can be done as effectively with nonfiction. Books like When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him are extremely powerful. As was Killers of the Flower Moon. I doubt any works of fiction dealing with the same topics would be more powerful. Both of these books could have been written (and read) as fiction, but knowing the events were true makes a huge difference in appreciation.
> There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
This seems like a false dichotomy. You can have nonfiction do this very effectively without simply "telling" you.
Behold a super-satured solution. A crystal touches it and where before was a liquid, now hard unyielding crystals spring forward, hard enough to scratch diamond. Some books are seed crystals, changing the shapeless into eternal forms.
All books can be seed crystals, provided they find an appropriate super saturated solution in their readers (that was my point, actually, as a counter argument to OP's "preaching to the choir". Although the super saturated solution is already there, it needs to seed crystal to (physically) transform).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.
I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
Accelerando is one of my favourite too! Thanks for sharing the reply, always love book recommendations
Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic level coincidence
It has wrong author.
The author and book cover it is showing is for a comic book adaptation by John Carnell.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41725880
Instead of showing the author and book cover for the original text book by Douglas Adams.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guid...
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…
Actually still 42. The guide to the “universe” is a different book.
The eternal fate of the Googlewhack.
the ultimate coincidence of life, the universe, and everything
I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11 mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian Chronicles" appears to be referencing "The Martian" instead.
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
Similarly, "The Book of Dragons" I'm guessing might be the so called "dragon book" about compiler design.
I think some of the book associations are wrong. It shows "the martian chronicles" for mentions of andy weir's "the martian".
Otherwise nice to see so many of the books i read this year mentioned. Except "Mein Kampf" of course, interesting top mention there. perhaps lots of people are reading it to understand the past? I'll need to see if it's worth it, I always considered it the equivalent of drinking water from the river thames to understand victorian england better.
Another mistake is to place "The Road"(Cormac McCarthy) under "On the Road"(Jack Kerouac).
I tried to get into neuromancer but I’m not a fan of the nonstop dialogue. Just a personal reference but it feels more and more rare to get new science fiction books primarily driven by the narrator.
You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
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 now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
> Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already
Oh thanks for the warning. I was avoiding him based on a hunch. Now I know I was right.
If anyone else is weird like me and likes books to not read like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse.
Best HN post of the year. I just surfaced after hours exploring.
Have you seen https://hackernewsbooks.com ?
Mind Games at number 2? I got that book years ago and was so disappointed I still think about it sometimes.
You just bumped it up by mentioning it ;)
Picked up my two mentions of the Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila. Going to be looking to see if any of the other doctors have been mentioned.
Some more errors:
Revelations of divine love, recorded by Julian, anchoress at Norwich, A.D. 1373 wasn't really mentioned ever. Those mentions are of the book of Revelations in the Bible.
Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem, not a specific modern version by Seamus Heaney.
> Beowulf mentions are all referencing the Old English epic poem
Knowing the HN crowd, it can also be a reference to beowulf clusters as well.
The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit is listed instead of "the Dragon book"
I thought this was "the Dragon Book" Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
by Aho, Lam, and Sethi
https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools...
Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John Green—"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this year.
Has a lot in common with NPR's top 100 sci-fi and fantasy list from 2011 [0]. Cool to see how the classics stay relevant.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-...
There's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts Programming Rust as the same book.
If you are the creator of this site can you grab one of the covers for hypermedia systems off the website?
https://hypermedia.systems
thank you for making this!
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
>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.
Maybe there's a german-language subset of comment threads where they discuss their struggles against the C++ standard.
It seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements, so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
Good catch, I didn’t read through the comments where it’s mentioned.
This comment is a helpful way to understand Mein Kampf and whether it means its readers are Nazis.
I'm really trying so hard to understand how did you come up with this correlation.
The US has shifted to becoming an authoritarian fascist state. It’s not surprising that people reference another prominent authoritarian fascist manifesto.
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?
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.
The top 3 programming books mentioned this year were
1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs 2. Clean Code 3. Crafting Interpreters
Also, it’s quite fascinating how often fiction books were recommended! I wouldn’t’ve expected that on HN.
The world would be a better place if _Philosophy of Software Design_ would replace all mentions of the second book.
https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code
I’d be curious about sentiment analysis applied to these. I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
> I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
You are quite correct! Crafting Interpreters actually has the highest average sentiment score across all books with more than 10 comments. This is the average sentiment score of all three( range being -10 to 10) :
Crafting Interpreters(7.8) > SICP(4.3) > Clean Code(-3.2)
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.
Harry Potter apparently either the best book to read or the one with the most for engineers to learn from, I have to conclude.
I think it has to do with the author generating controversy on this website for news discussion.
My favorite reads of 2025 came from an HN recommendation (the Steerswoman series). I don't see it on this site so maybe the comment I saw was too oblique of a reference
Not really, there are quite a few books "missing" that I definitely saw mentioned in discussions not so long ago.
Great books listed here! Added some to my TBR list. Thanks! I'm a little surprised the numbers aren't higher across the board.
extremely cool thanks.
See a few of my mentions on here, a few of them not [0]
Regardless, this is a real treat
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44977536
What is the cut off date?
It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
Just missed by a day I guess. Cutoff is 15th December.
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.
What are some books from other regions that you hope might get discussed here more?
Neat. I'm seeing a lot of overlap with books mentioned on r/reddit. I didn't realize, until know, how demographically similar hacker news and reddit are.
do you not read the comments?
Would be nice if you could filter out all the only 1 mention books, and then sort by least number of mentions. There seems to be a million 1 mention books, and I can't scroll through them all, but would be more curious to see books with 2 or more mentions.
It was kind of disappointing to see the highest mentioned books, since I've read most of them already (nothing new really popped out.)
Here, did it for you (.tsv): https://limewire.com/d/iZp6i#ZEhH4XXWBC
CSV export (just the book list) would be welcome.
Affiliate marketing is such a mixed bag. I absolutely love it when people can monetize their writing by adding some affiliate links that are relevant to the audience - win/win for all sides. Yet it is as slimy as anything else when the sole purpose of creating content is to publish affiliate links.
My bad — probably should’ve added a disclaimer :) For what it’s worth, I only added sponsored links to the top ~50 books out of ~10k total. Mostly just trying to cover the cost of a decent domain so I can keep the site running.
> "probably should’ve added a disclaimer"
It's a violation of the Amazon Associates program to not have one.
Eh, I've shared your views before. But Amazon affiliate link payouts are trash. The OP made it to the front page of HN, but I'd be surprised if he makes more than $100. It's possible, but probably highly unlikely. Let him them make some money, it's a cool project.
But, OP, if you're going to have this, disclaimers, and a privacy policy are really important (especially for collecting emails).
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.
The context of these book titles appearing in comments might skew the results. Ulysses is high up on the list, but the source comments have a lot of people using it as an example of a lengthy, difficult book.
I read a lot, but if I'm going to use a book to make a point or example in a comment, which will be read by someone I don't know, I'll reference a well-known book that most people have heard of, even if it was just from 9th grade English class, instead of something more obscure.
I think two factors are in play:
The first is that there is likely more diversity the deeper you go down the intellectual hole. You and I may read much more sophisticated books, but the books you read and the ones I read differ significantly. Thus, the list is biased towards the more popular (it is, after all, a popularity list).
Second is this:
> for engineers to be detached of liberal arts?
Most of us just haven't found value in the other types of books. It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here. For me (perhaps as an engineer), I like books to kind of get to the point. When it comes to fiction, I'm a very firm believer that, although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I've yet to find someone "changed" because of fiction. Those I know who claim to already had the sentiments before they read that piece of fiction, and the story was merely preaching to the choir. What they are glorifying is how well the story depicted an issue.
>although a given novel may give great commentary about a social/philosophical issue, its primary purpose is entertainment. If I wanted to understand the underlying social/philosophical issue, a more direct, nonfiction book will always do a better job.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding there, if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.
Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.
There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
>It would help if you gave some examples of books that should be here.
That's the thing, there is not specific book I could recommend that is most likely change your life for the better, for the same reason there is no single specific equation I can mention that will make someone good at math if they solve it. Some exercises are better, some are pointless, but it's the act of engaging that counts in the long term.
My comment about this list had no implication that the books at the top of the list were less valuable than other hidden works; they're just a sign of a path not travelled quite far, if that makes sense.
And leaving aside the usefulness of it all, pleasant experiences not all amount to entertaining. You'd probably agree that having sex with the love of your life and watching TV are not equivalent experiences, even if you come out of both with roughly the same level of self-improvement.
> if you think all the potential value of a fiction book is some commentary padded by a story.
Actually, I'm flipping the two: The potential value of a fiction book is a good story - social commentary is purely optional. Fiction that has commentary padded by a story are valued only by those who are sympathetic to the commentary. Whereas I can easily love a good story even if I disagree with the commentary.
> Good fiction usually exercises the mind in ways a non-fiction book never would. You experience life through someone else's eyes, you try to understand someone's mind by the actions they take and the words they say, you wonder in a meta-plane what the author is trying to show, you see language being used in non-common ways to provoke emotions or express ideas, you wonder how you would have acted in someone's shoes... Saying the author could get to the point quicker is like saying that lifting weights in the gym is done faster with a forklift, the process is the point rather than the extracted output.
I don't think we're in disagreement. I'm merely saying that I've yet to see someone changed by a fiction book. If there was change, it was always "change in the same direction" (e.g. "a renewed appreciation of X").
I have seen plenty of folks changed by nonfiction, though.
Incidentally, most/all of what you wrote above can be done as effectively with nonfiction. Books like When Broken Glass Floats by Chanrithy Him are extremely powerful. As was Killers of the Flower Moon. I doubt any works of fiction dealing with the same topics would be more powerful. Both of these books could have been written (and read) as fiction, but knowing the events were true makes a huge difference in appreciation.
> There is also a fundamental difference between being told 'pain is an unpleasant feeling that living beings take effort to avoid' and being punched in the face. Fiction gives you a fraction of the extra wisdom you get with the latter.
This seems like a false dichotomy. You can have nonfiction do this very effectively without simply "telling" you.
Behold a super-satured solution. A crystal touches it and where before was a liquid, now hard unyielding crystals spring forward, hard enough to scratch diamond. Some books are seed crystals, changing the shapeless into eternal forms.
Let me know when you find such a book ;-)
All books can be seed crystals, provided they find an appropriate super saturated solution in their readers (that was my point, actually, as a counter argument to OP's "preaching to the choir". Although the super saturated solution is already there, it needs to seed crystal to (physically) transform).
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.
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.
Why does this list sound like a 16 year olds "I am very Smart" list?
These are classics yes, but I was expecting something close to the forefront of the culture
The indexing must be flakey. I have mentioned various books multiple times with links to their respective Amazon pages. No mentions of them.
The 6 first books reflect the quality comments I often see here on HN.
The Holy Bible mentioned.
Love this. Is there a scrape-able list of these?
Thanks for the love.No need to scrape, just use this json containing all the data used in making the site :
https://storage.googleapis.com/globalhnbucket/normalized_boo...
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.
Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is absent. We cultists have fallen down on the job.
By searching in all categories, I can see it's mentioned once : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659243#42662874
For a cult, this is some remarkably low-effort proselytizing though :/
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.
great project! how did you do tokenization and alignment of the titles to their ISBN / Amazon ID
Thanks! I used OpenLibrary's API to get the book IDs, and then Gemini 3 to generate the Amazon links.
Embarrassing to see 0 works by Max Stirner in this work. HN is truly spooked.