The top story on Hacker News is a bookshelf made from the site's own comments. HackerBooks, posted by roansh, led the front page with 1,771 points and 289 comments. It applies the idea behind Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube to books: titles named on the site since 2007, each linked to the comment that named it. Karpathy replied "Love it!"

roansh says Claude Opus 5.5 wrote almost all of the pipeline and the site. Steering, a few decisions, and the domain were the human part. The layout brief was to feel like HackerTube, but for books. What is unusual is the artifact: a compiled index of a public archive, a CSV on the about page, and no account required.

What the index contains

The launch post says roughly 16,500 books were mentioned by at least two commenters. The about page, beside a dataset generated on November 2, 2026, lists 15,766 books, 281,363 mentions, 225,861 comments, and 57,773 commenters. The first number is the launch sketch. The second is the one that ships with the file.

The pipeline starts from the public Hacker News dump. Patterns pick out quoted titles, "by Author" phrases, store and Open Library links, and ISBNs. Those candidates are matched to Open Library for an id, authors, a year, a cover, and subjects, then searched across the whole corpus so an unlinked title still counts. A small model handles only ambiguous names. The page cites "Dune", "Influence", and "Range".

roansh said the live site is plain JavaScript and static JSON on Cloudflare. About 30 kilobytes of top books load first. The rest of the roughly 16,000 titles follow in the background. Covers are on R2. Python and DuckDB build the tables offline on a laptop, with no live crawl. A monthly refresh, the author said, might be enough. Rankings prefer distinct commenters to one person repeating a title.

Why the ranking is the hard part

The launch post warned that praise and complaints both count. A commenter then noted Mein Kampf showing as recommended by 651 people. The label on the site was changed to "mentioned by."

A second pass, described on the about page, asks Claude Sonnet 5.5 to mark each mention as recommend, neutral, critical, or not about the book. "Recommended by" counts distinct recommenders. Films, games, and other same-name works are dropped. On 400 mentions, Claude Opus 5.5 agreed 85 percent of the time. Keyword rules, sentiment scores, and a TF-IDF classifier did worse. The page says noise remains.

The thread showed that noise. Vanity Fair the novel was inflated by the magazine, and roansh said it would count only alongside Thackeray. A dragon-book nickname hit the wrong record until the link was fixed. Readers also reported bad subject shelves, a publication decade that was far off, and sarcasm scored as praise. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby was missing from Open Library and had to be added by hand. The Invention of Morel, mentioned by about three people, still drops out of the matcher.

A commenter totaled mentions by year and saw a peak in 2022, then a fall. Others said the series ignores how many people were posting, and that newer readers may mention fewer books. roansh asked if Hacker News traffic is down. The curve is about this archive, not about reading in general.

Who should care

Anyone using the chart as a reading list should open the comment. The thread itself was an argument about fiction, audiobooks, and how weak "most mentioned" is as a verdict. The link back to the sentence is the useful object. The sort order is only a way in.

Anyone extracting entities from forums should study the misses. Open metadata is incomplete, short titles collide, and a loose label will treat a denunciation as a pick. Commenters were also plain that covers and dates from Open Library are often wrong. Bookshop and Amazon links added during the thread are affiliate links, which the author disclosed.

Anyone who has lost an older HN book site to a 404 should take the CSV. Commenters cited earlier versions, including one from 2021, and a builder whose revival never shipped. The about page says browsing is untracked and that "For You" lives in localStorage on your machine. An email address is stored only if you ask for updates.

What is still open is whether the laptop job becomes a schedule, whether that 85 percent check survives sarcasm and name collisions, and whether the file is used once the points stop. Readers had already posted sibling indexes for products and for Wikipedia. They last if somebody keeps the table.

Source: HackerBooks. Discussion: Hacker News.

This post was generated automatically from public Hacker News data.