Accelerando is one of my favourite too! Thanks for sharing the reply, always love book recommendations

Not long ago I came across this book in an HN thread about AI and the future. The moment I saw the title, I knew I had to read it. Crypto, AI, collective intelligence — it hits all the right notes for me.

If you want some other portrayals of the Singularity, see The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and Friendship is Optimal (and also Caelum Est Conterrens)

Amazon lists it as book 3 of 3 in a series - do you need to have read the first two?

Just reread Accelerando ... Still awesome.

I really appreciate Cory Doctorow's work on digital rights, enshittification and other topics, but I couldn't make it more than half way through 'Rapture of the nerds'. Just too strange, I couldn't connect to it. It is very original though. Some people will probably love it.

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 :'(

So does Project Hail Mary...I sense a Easter Egg by the Author...

the ultimate coincidence of life, the universe, and everything

Similarly, "The Book of Dragons" I'm guessing might be the so called "dragon book" about compiler design.

> I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir […]

While on the general topic, also check out the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

I once had to write an IPv6 stack intending to cache poison internet targets (alias resolution). I just referred to the RFC.

A well behaved reference implementation would not be of help.

> most people haven't had writing a TCP stack as part of their day job

yeah, I'd just look up the specific thing I want to know online

Yesterday I finished a long listen of the audio book "The Raise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer (on audible, 60 hours). He frequently quotes "Mein Kampf". I am not sure one can stomach the whole thing but it's interesting to read quotes of it in context.

Another mistake is to place "The Road"(Cormac McCarthy) under "On the Road"(Jack Kerouac).

I think "Mein Kampf" is the equivalent of celebrity gossip: you are very superficially interested because why not. The depth of the book is similar to the depth of this gossip's interest.

I had a look at the book a few years ago. After a few pages (somewhere in the middle of the book), you can see the writing style (not very good, overexcited, and that would appeal to people who look for it), but it would take longer to get a grasp on the content.

> 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.

FWIW there are actually 4 books in the Three-Body Problem "trilogy". The Redemption of Time was written by a fan who felt the series didn't provide closure and was recognized as canon by Cixin Liu.

I finished foundation this year too. I really didn’t like how he ended it. Fun fact I learned from reading Foundation’s Edge is that he didn’t want to write Edge or Foundation and Earth.

Gnome Press owned the original series and he didn’t get any royalties for them. In 1961, his current publisher Doubleday acquired them and for 20 years he told them no to writing more Foundation books. In 1981 Doubleday said they would pay him 10 times his normal rate and that is when he wrote Foundation’s Edge.

This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.

Funny coincidence, these are the exact sci-fi books I read this and previous year, in the exact order I read them (I read some non-sci-fi books in between to not get overwhelmed). I finished Project Hail Mary literally one hour ago. All the books were great, but Remembrance of Earth's Past series was literally life-changing, truly a masterpiece.

I'm guessing you plan to read Dune next? ;) I plan to start with it during Christmas break.

Asimov was a brilliant mind, but I'm not sure the Foundation series holds up very well since chaos theory become established (it is 40+ years since I read the books though, so I could be remembering wrongly).

100% the most original and truly scary hard SciFi from the last year.

fantastic story thru and thru, thumbs up!!!

It's already pretty useful with the number of mentions available. Higher a number, the more that generally find a work of interest. Unless there are members who just love to spam the names of particular books. My main gripe is that this isn't a repo/gist, as a site this specialized is more likely to disappear into the wind at any time. Also the Amazon buy links; would prefer a link to Wikipedia, or even Goodreads.

I was recently reading through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, and she has so many great quotes that are directly relevant to this situation.

Here's a shorter one:

> “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.”

And a longer one:

> “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

Engaging with fantasy and scifi helps us understand ourselves and the world around us. It helps find what truly moves and inspires us. It teaches us to dream of a different, better world.

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.

> 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.

Seeing 1984, Dune, Foundation as the top fiction is about as on-brand and unsurprising as it gets. I don't I could pick more expected fiction except for some popular cyberpunk and something from LOTR.

Throw in a hitchhikers guide, zen motorcycle and something from Feynman and you've covered all the bases.

Mind Games at number 2? I got that book years ago and was so disappointed I still think about it sometimes.

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

I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just mentioned in the context of banned book threads

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.

This comment is a helpful way to understand Mein Kampf and whether it means its readers are Nazis.

   graemep
  on 4/15/2025
   
  Mein Kampf IS a rant.
  I recommend people read it so you can understand how people like that think.

I'm really trying so hard to understand how did you come up with this correlation.

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.

There's EY's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which might generate cross-interest in Harry Potter for those who wouldn't have read it otherwise.

I think it has to do with the author generating controversy on this website for news discussion.

Books which I have read and would recommend include:

- _Ashley's Book of Knots_ --- everyone should be aware of knots and now at least the basics interesting, _The Klutz Book of Knots_ was also mentioned once

- James Clavell _Noble House_ --- part of his "Asian Saga", not sure if it has aged well --- if a person could read only one of these, I'd recommend _King Rat_, based on his experience in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.

- Hesse _Steppenwolf_ --- that Hesse is no longer read saddens me deeply, and not just because this makes _The Glass Bead Game_ less likely --- his thoughts on the difficulties of interpersonal relationships resonate even now

- Knuth _Literate Programming_ --- I _really_ wish this style f programming would gain traction and that there would be more instances of taking famous programs and re-writing as a Literate Program, e.g., http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

- Knuth _Digital Typography_ (and not just because I have a reward check)

- Knuth _Mathematical Writing_ --- if you do any work in math, you probably already have a copy --- if you don't, you probably need one

- Dewdney _The Planiverse_ --- response to the classic _Flatland_, this has a real charm and despite the dated computer technology, has held up well

- Walter jon Williams _Hardwired_ --- an amazing cyberpunk novel, part of which was published in _Omni_

- Steven Brust's _Jhereg_ --- one of my favourite fantasy novels, which I've been reading since picking it up in a Waldenbooks when I was in high school, waiting for the last two books, and esp. glad of these since they made the "Paarfi Romances" exist --- anyone who enjoys Alexandre Dumas and fantasy should read _The Phoenix Guards_

- C.J. Cherryh's _Regenesis_ --- her entire Alliance--Union series is amazing and books are so varied pretty much everyone will find something which appeals

- Trevanian _The Eiger Sanction_ and _Shibumi_ --- not sure if this and _Shibumi_ have aged well or no, but the latter was a big part of my childhood

- Ben Franklin's Autobiography --- read presidential biographies to my kind in chronological order as a trial and regret not continuing with the actual project: biographies of important persons in chronological order

- Sanora Babb's _Whose Names Are Unknown_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197158.Whose_Names_Are_... (ob. discl., that was my mention)

Other books which only I mentioned:

- Hal Clement _Space Lash_ now available in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/939760.Music_of_Many_Sph... --- I recommend folks read it in reverse chronological order, starting at the back, then working to the front and bailing when things get too quaint/old-school/golden-age.

- H. Beam Piper "Omnilingual" --- this should be a part of the middle school canon, lightly updated version at: http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html

- _Foxfire_ --- a classic series what predated the "Maker" movement

- Tolkien's _The Fall of Arthur_

- Knuth _TeX: The Program_

Books which were sufficiently striking that I have made a note of them to get to read (hopefully this will work out better than _The Black Swan_ which I found annoying)

- _Visual Thinking in Mathematics_

- _Hardcore VisualBASIC_ --- still a bit bummed that I managed to miss this and MacBasic....

- _Phoebe and her Unicorn_ --- getting this for my daughter

- _Harmony with Lego(R) Bricks_ --- book on music improvisation

- Ornamental Origami

Note that a number of books weren't actually mentioned, e.g., Isaac Asimov's _Book of Facts_

Godwin's law was made up as an example of dawkins meme, and now means more than its original.

> 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 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.

> 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.

You have a wayyy too skewed perception of the general tech person.

I normally get way better and varied recommendations from my philosophy friends, for example. Here it's generally just the usual mainstream sci-fi stuff about tech, space, ai/robots and such.

And forefront of culture is by definition going to be full of known stuff, else it wouldn't be culture-defining if almost nobody knows it.

What would you put in your top 5 "I'm very smart" 30+ yo book list?

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.

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.

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.

It seems quite obvious to me why it looks like this, and other people have explained it. All I'll say is if you meet someone who doesn't read, please please encourage them to try a "highschool read" or something "very mainstream" and don't put them off for life with some obscure liberal arts piece. If someone hasn't read something you read in high school, it's still better than they read it now.

Not surprising. It is just "herd mentality" and "parroting" which is the bane of all general Social Groups/Crowds. There are some well-known (generally not too taxing and not necessarily good) books which keep being amplified.

One or two might be worthwhile but most would be mainstream and pedestrian.

I don't think it's particularly American; people these days read at a lower level around the world. Language aside, most bookstores in Europe and the US have a fair bit in common.

Most people will barely read through a couple basics, so it can be a bit of a though sell to start recommending more niche stories. And part of the reason that some of these books are so successful is that they tend to have pretty widespread appeal, while more niche books will be more divisive and less likely to get recommended broadly.

If you're so well-read why don't you grace us with some of your non-mainstream S-tier recommendations?

From this list, one of the books that I recommend to everyone is Piranesi, which is fairly mainstream, and if they want to explore Russian magical realism then Vita Nostra. Unsong is another favorite. In general I love to explore magic systems that experiment with breaking a system, or stories that explore how different rules might interact within a system.

I think people sometimes underestimate the value of lighter more fun reads, like cultivation stories. The best western adaptation of this style of novel is probably the Cradle series, by Will Wight. Even though the stories tend to be fairly light, they're quite enjoyable for exploring new modes of thinking. For example, we can analyze the interactions of energy as an abstract / symbolic form, and how it influences human behavior; which is an abstract / symbolic application of the cultivation lens over reality. To give an easier to understand example: Feng Shui isn't real but it's true, in the sense that the way in which we organize furniture within a space determines how people navigate it and how they interact. And why might this be useful? Well, sometimes we fail to see the full picture when using a single lens, and different lens might let us see things in a new light.

I've read some terribly generic web novel slop and gotten fairly unique and interesting perspectives from them, but most people aren't good enough readers to enjoy bad books, so they can only read and enjoy good books.

Is it because it's not on Amazon?

Oh how I wish we could know what Iain M. Banks thinks of the LLM revolution...

That would be ruinous, it's probably just doing a simple full text search against a database of titles.

Just missed by a day I guess. Cutoff is 15th December.

Not really, there are quite a few books "missing" that I definitely saw mentioned in discussions not so long ago.

HN used to be a site for entrepreneurs to share ideas and work on things. Now the far left Reddit crowd has crashed it and anyone who has a successful business is just "lucky" and anyone who has earned wealth should have it stolen at gunpoint by the government to redistribute to those who don't produce anything.

do you not read the comments?

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?

[dead]

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).

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...

No design category though, broke my heart :(

Thanks! I used OpenLibrary's API to get the book IDs, and then Gemini 3 to generate the Amazon links.

Here, did it for you (.tsv): https://limewire.com/d/iZp6i#ZEhH4XXWBC

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 :/