Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Affiliate links, legality, and transparency

  • Some commenters are fine with affiliate links when they support a genuine project, but object when content exists mainly to drive referrals.
  • Several point out that undisclosed Amazon affiliate links violate both Amazon’s program rules and consumer-protection law (e.g., FTC guidance).
  • The author acknowledges the omission and says only the top ~50 of ~10k books use affiliate links, mainly to cover hosting; others stress adding clear disclosures and a privacy policy.

Implementation details & data quality

  • The site uses OpenLibrary’s API for book IDs and an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Flash) with a structured prompt to extract titles, authors, and sentiment from HN comments.
  • Commenters note how much easier this is than earlier BERT/NER projects that required hand-labeling thousands of examples.
  • Many classification errors are reported: conflating “The Martian” with “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Road” with “On the Road,” “Dragon Book,” “TeXbook,” “Genesis,” Rust titles, Beowulf, Bible/ Revelation variants, GEB vs “GEB,” etc.
  • Some books mentioned by users don’t appear at all, suggesting missed matches or index flakiness; others note quoted text (>) is being treated as new mentions.

Book trends, sentiment, and tastes

  • Top programming books (SICP, Clean Code, Crafting Interpreters) are unsurprising, but sentiment analysis shows Clean Code is now discussed mostly negatively, while Crafting Interpreters scores very highly.
  • Fiction’s prominence (1984, Dune, Foundation, Children of Time, etc.) surprises some who assumed HN to be narrowly technical.
  • There’s debate over the list being “basic” or high‑school level vs. a reasonable reflection of popularity and shared references.
  • A long subthread debates whether fiction meaningfully changes people or mainly reflects preexisting views, with counterarguments emphasizing fiction’s role in exercising empathy and cognition.

Cultural and political readings of the data

  • Frequent mentions of Mein Kampf and 1984 spark discussion about authoritarianism, banned books, and surveillance; others note many mentions are in meta‑discussions rather than endorsements.
  • Some argue there are no truly “banned” books in the U.S., only funding choices in public institutions; others cite concrete banned titles and challenge that claim.

Reception and feature requests

  • Overall response is very positive: people discover new titles, appreciate seeing their own recommendations appear, and call it one of the best posts of the year.
  • Requested features include per‑book permalinks, CSV/TSV or scrape‑friendly exports, filters for minimum mention counts, year‑over‑year comparisons (deltas), better disambiguation, design/other-category views, and extending the analysis to previous years.