Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
- ID
- 41787
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 01 Nov 2026, 11:58 PM
- Fetched
- 02 Nov 2026, 2:40 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://hackerbooks.org/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 02 Nov 2026, 2:40 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
HackerBooks (hackerbooks.org) is a Show HN project that indexes books mentioned in Hacker News comments and exposes them through search by book or author, plus views for Home, Top all-time, Most recommended, Rising, and For You, with keyboard shortcuts (/, j/k, Enter, Esc, g h, g t, g m, g r, g f). The page notes Open Library is used only as a fallback metadata source, and that one asset is served no-cors while a crossorigin variant handles CORS fetches. The launch thread drew 286 points and 90 comments.
Why it matters
It is a working example of turning a public comment corpus into a browsable directory with almost no backend dependency — Open Library appears only as a fallback, so the ranking logic over free-text HN comments is doing the real work. If you want practitioner-sourced reading lists rather than publisher blurbs, the 'Most recommended' and 'Rising' views are the parts worth trying; the post gives no corpus size, so treat coverage as unverified until you search a few titles you know have been discussed.
Discussion angle
How would you actually compute 'Most recommended' from unstructured HN comments without it collapsing into whoever posted loudest — and what breaks first: deduplication of book editions, or ranking signal?