Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

<- Back

Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

seinvak

Comments (193)

yboris
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).
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.
timerol
I was surprised to see "An Abundance of Katherines", given that it's not John Green's newest or most highly regarded work. I looked into the comments to see why it was being discussed, but it seems to be a classification error - all of the comments are discussing "Abundance", the political nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. That one makes more sense on the list, given that it was released this March
GenerocUsername
Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic level coincidence
thefringthing
If you had asked me to list ten books that would be mentioned frequently on HackerNews, I think I'd have gotten at least eight of the top ten here.
furyofantares
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.
omoikane
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.
JDye
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 copy of Volume 2 on the other hand is not of the same quality, both in content and physical properties.
notepad0x90
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.
bdunks
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.
watersb
I would love more people to know about science fiction strangecore author qntm:https://qntm.org/SelfThere Is No Antimemetics Division freaked me the hell out. Recommended.
atlasunshrugged
Probably most surprising here was how many mentions Twilight got! Not the book I expected to see mentioned often on this forum
objectdynamics
Oddly (well to me at least) "Compilers: Principles, techniques and tools" is categorised as literature.
Dowwie
There's a really long tail in this list. What diamonds are there in the single-mention rough?
DiskoHexyl
On the one hand it is indeed mostly a high school reading list, all very mainstream and relatively popular fiction/sci-fi with a sprinkle of tech literature.Is that really such a bad thing? Most adults barely read at all, or, at the very best, consume a current random best-seller here and there. I'd say that anything from a high school reading list is an upgrade, especially since most of this stuff is lost on the kids anyway.It's all good literature and a nice entry point for someone new to the hobby. Expecting more from a top-50 of a tech forum is a bit surprising
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?
endlessvoid94
Have you seen https://hackernewsbooks.com ?
dewey
It looks like it's not handling comments correctly and counts books mentioned in ">".
Insanity
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.
mcc1ane
Mentions of “Genesis” are attributed to “Armageddon's Children (Genesis of Shannara)” by Terry Brooks.
thoughtpeddler
Is anyone else surprised that Gödel, Escher, Bach is as low on the list as it is? My experience on HN would have me believe it would be in the top 10 for sure. I wonder if it’s a string-matching issue.
JDEW
Nice! The entry for Abundance [0] is listed as another book (An Abundance of Katherines [1])[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444106-abundance [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215526423-an-abundance-o...
emodendroket
Harry Potter apparently either the best book to read or the one with the most for engineers to learn from, I have to conclude.
dgeiser13
The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit is listed instead of "the Dragon book"
defrost
Good work, thanks for this.It would be useful to be able to get an URL for each scrapped book so that users could link to, say, the entry for A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics.The TeXbook by Donald Knuth has been mapped to A Texbook of Engineering Mathematics by N.P. Bali from this source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399031#45400264
muzani
Searching Mein Kampf adds some decent data on what to filter out, or tag differently. A lot of it comes up in discussions on banned books etc.https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...Also, some of it is just Godwin's Law.
Cloudly
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
libraryofbabel
Good to see Designing Data-Intensive Applications on there, but it should be higher — certainly above the thoroughly middling Clean Code at least! DDIA is still the first book I tell every junior to read after they’ve got a couple years experience under their belt. Can’t wait for the 2nd edition!
4ggr0
i mentioned 5 books in a comment[0], only 3 where registered by this tool. Wonder why :D[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965191
ilteris
I bet it's the same books every year
hermitcrab
Given the current political climate, I'm surprised Kafka didn't make the list.
card_zero
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.
cwnyth
There's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts Programming Rust as the same book.
coopykins
Surprised to see a lot of mentions to Children of Time, a book I picked picked up on a whim in a local Bookshop (something I probably hanger done in 5 years)
timonoko
I finally managed to read Player of Games. @grok explained the structure of the book and made list of personae worth remembering.Playboy is forced to take part in war of the worlds. 50 pages of societé, parties and games are necessary to describe this character.
therobots927
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.
rienbdj
Any info on how this site was implemented?
joshdavham
The top 3 programming books mentioned this year were1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs 2. Clean Code 3. Crafting InterpretersAlso, it’s quite fascinating how often fiction books were recommended! I wouldn’t’ve expected that on HN.
teleforce
Very strange, System Programming in Linux book was mentioned many times in HN before but apparently not in the list, but maybe just not this year [1].[1] System Programming in Linux:https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux
crobertsbmw
In safari, if I have content blockers enabled (which I have on by default for privacy and whatnot) then the site doesn’t show me anything. I’m guessing these are all ad links or something?
faizmokh
I love it.Jut to note there seems to be a bug with the comment section. When I selected the Rust book and then selected others, the first comment from Rust book is shown in other books as well.
odie5533
Great books listed here! Added some to my TBR list. Thanks! I'm a little surprised the numbers aren't higher across the board.
specproc
So I'm guessing we passed HN through an LLM, looking for book mentions.A number of posts here flagging disambiguation issues, I've run into this a lot.I've been dealing with the problem using cosine distance between embeddings, but find it tricky to verify at scale.Anyone else struggling with this?
tramtrist
hmm. I made a post about "Imagining All the People. Poetry Inspired by Beatles Lyrics" but it didn't make the list. I'm guessing it's because there were no comments? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296428 https://www.thebeatleworksltd.com/
amarant
Pleased to see that the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was mentioned exactly 42 times!I almost wonder if that particular number was hardcoded for humour!
throw-12-16
Seems like a great training set for a hn astroturf bot.
ajju
This is god's* work OP! Thank you!* Or gods' work if you are polytheistic, or $god's work with "god" as a variable for all other belief systems on the Unix shell ;)
Freak_NL
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.
ironmagma
Were there any books that mentioned Hacker News?
recursivedoubts
If you are the creator of this site can you grab one of the covers for hypermedia systems off the website?https://hypermedia.systemsthank you for making this!
Rebelgecko
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
stevenfoster
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.
babblingfish
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.
novoreorx
Such a great collection! I wonder how it was achieved, definitely not by LLM, was it?
krick
CSV export (just the book list) would be welcome.
samx18
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
kaizenb
This is just great! Thanks for building.
frm88
You missed some of mine, for example Theatre of the God's is not on your list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718536Edit:the French edition of the Vorkosigan Saga has denfitively the wrong author https://hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app/
anon
undefined
jackconsidine
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
bookofjoe
Best HN post of the year. I just surfaced after hours exploring.
kace91
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.
codingdave
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.
mkbkn
Can you also make it for 2024 and previous years?
blintz
I tend to avoid sci-fi that hits too close to home (don't love any of the AI/internet/crypto classics, same reason I can't bear to watch Silicon Valley), so I was a little bored by the top of the the list.But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation, Children Of Time, Dune.Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get too bored by descriptions of rock.
analogpixel
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.)
barddoo
The Holy Bible mentioned.
Brajeshwar
There was another one, HackerNews Readings, but seems to be not updated.https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/
brcmthrowaway
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
lo_zamoyski
The indexing must be flakey. I have mentioned various books multiple times with links to their respective Amazon pages. No mentions of them.
wellpast
Love this. Is there a scrape-able list of these?
begueradj
The 6 first books reflect the quality comments I often see here on HN.
hubraumhugo
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
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.
WarOnPrivacy
Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is absent. We cultists have fallen down on the job.
why-o-why
i soooo live in a reality bubble: harry potter and the bible were 1 & 2? i don't associate with anyone that reads either. bubble on!
tonymet
great project! how did you do tokenization and alignment of the titles to their ISBN / Amazon ID
Der_Einzige
Embarrassing to see 0 works by Max Stirner in this work. HN is truly spooked.
TZubiri
This is great!I think some books might have a boost if we add their informal names, namely:- Dragon book- Wizard book- ummm, I'm sure there's more
anon
undefined
Cheetah26
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-...