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Products that do what Hacker News clone for books does

I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…

  1. 1HF

    I've been working on and off on a Chrome Extension for Hacker News, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include: - Improved readability - Quick inline replies from comments page - Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames - Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user - Endless scrolling - Collapsible comment threads - Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer Forks, improvements and comments…

    2012 · chrome.google.com

  2. 2HC

    2011 · hackerbooks.com

  3. 3

    Lessons learned from reddit, hipmunk & YC - in book form!

    2014

  4. 4

    Books recommendations from 15 millions Hacker News comments

    2017

  5. 5IB

    Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…

    Jun 2026 · epub.mirror.forum

  6. 6AD

    Over the past couple of years, I've been very impressed by Kale Davis's Hacker Newsletter and Peter Cooper's entire newsletter empire. They're clearly meeting people's need to stay caught up on industry news without spending their entire lives watching HN and Twitter. Their success has inspired me to try something similar. So I've just begun publishing a JS newsletter called "A Drip of JavaScript." Rather than focus on the latest JS news (which JavaScript Weekly already does rather well), each issue is just a short article about some aspect of programming in JavaScript. The newsletter is…

    2013

  7. 7WL

    I just sent out my 100th issue of Hacker Newsletter and announced my newest newsletter: Wayback Letter - http://www.waybackletter.com/ In either a daily or weekly version, you'll get links to great HN articles from the past five years. A great way to see how HN has grown and changed, plus see what was going on at different times. Lastly, there are a ton of great reads to learn from that I never saw the first go around. Would love to get feedback and my goal is to expand this past HN in the future.

    2012

  8. 8YH
  9. 9AN

    Hi guys, yesterday I launched a new book notification service called 'Any new books?': http://anynewbooks.com The idea is that you enter your email, subscribe to a few categories of your interest, and then you'll receive one weekly email per category with a list of new interesting books that were just released. The first day was pretty good I think, with many people signing up. Among these, I've already spotted a few key players in our industry (which I take to be a positive sign, of course) and the feedback I've been receiving by email has been very positive so far. I'm posting this here…

    2010

  10. 10HN

    I put this together since I find myself switching away from the terminal to see if anything new popped up in HN. There might be similar ones out there, didn't bother looking. It was a quick experiment, which might end up with a few more features.

    2011 · github.com

  11. 11AB

    I spent a lot of time going through the recent thread: Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756432) so I made this website to browse through it later and get the books I want from Amazon. It gets the comments using the HN API, uses the Open AI API to extract book names, and then the Amazon API to find the book on Amazon.

    2024 · hnbestbooks.pages.dev

  12. 12SL

    So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)

    2011

  13. 13HN

    Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…

    2011

  14. 145A

    Hey everyone! I wanted to share a project that I've been working on the last few days that I finally finished last night: https://50books.org This is a simple site designed to track your reading list into 2015. My personal goal is to read 50 books this year, and I wanted to hold myself accountable. Major sites like Goodreads are great, but were too much of a social network for my personal taste; on the other hand, using a text file (which was my 2014 solution) was too difficult to track and share. I built https://50books.org using Sinatra, sqlite3 (via datamapper), and…

    2015

  15. 15HN
  16. 16AH

    So this question https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35198563 prompted me to revisit the framework demo'ed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35033368 Just like reddit lets you go to what might be a 404 page /r/anything-you-want and you can then create that subreddit, I added this feature to remoterenters so you can make /rr/anything-you-want and be the mod of that sub. To get the ball rolling with some content I made these two AI based subs: https://remoterenters.com/rr/amazing-ai-understanding/…

    2023

  17. 17RA

    A Hacker News client with a clean, mobile friendly UI. Features : - bookmark stories. follow discussions / read them later at your convenience. - quickly search for articles using keywords. No more scrolling through the website. - easily managable nested comments. I love the current Hacker News experience and I don't believe my client is in any way a substitute to the original website. Built it over a few days for fun and found myself coming back to it once in a while for some of the features. Wanted to share this with the community. Let me know what you folks think :)

    2022 · read-hn.herokuapp.com

  18. 18BM

    Hey HN crowd! Two days ago I realized I'm almost unable to read a book or a long article without getting distracted by Twitter/HN/Reddit/Work. The situation is so terrible, I'm even getting afraid of big articles, and my ReadItLater list is getting pretty long (shameful I know) ... and I'm pretty sure most of you are in this situation :) Being used to TL;DRs on long reddit posts, I thought it would be great to have these for everything, so I quickly hacked this website: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/ Here is an example of TL;DR: http://www.too-long-didnt-read.com/5tropy I would love to…

    2011

  19. 19AA

    The previous submission [1] didn't catch on, so re-trying with a less substantive title! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41680056

    2024 · authorlens.com

  20. 20BT

    Hi guys. I’m looking for some feedback from the great HN community. I just soft launched the beta version of my humble bookshelf application, bookqueue. I've been working on it as a pet project since 2007. The idea is having a place to track all books you have been reading and having some nice stats around it, with less focus in the social aspects. My own queue can be found here: http://bookqueue.net/caffo You can also create your own at http://bookqueue.net/ Thanks!

    2011

  21. 21HN

    Based on your feedback (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8874801) we've released a new version of the Hacker News Search. It's accessible through the search box in the footer of Hacker News. We hope you'll enjoy the new minimal design and the additional features. Feel free to give us your dream list of improvements :) ChangeLog: 2015-01-19 - Custom date range picker - Responsive design - New "comments[<>=]X" syntax to filter by number of comments - If the story doesn't have any URL, the link goes to the HN discussion - Here and there cosmetics improvements (less padding,…

    2015 · hn.algolia.com

  22. 22DR

    This isn't your fancy new javascript gizmo, but funny guy with a funny story to promote his toddler app. I'm sure you'll agree. Humor me. 1st let me tell you how I came upon hacker news, and why I read it everyday.&#60;p&#62;I'm not a programmer, and only half-decent designer. I'm much more of a 'project manager' type of person. I wrote a blog post 2 years ago on how to do a fancy trick with css3 with box shadows. It was clever, and has been expanded and implemented all over the web. One day (while sitting in church) my phone kept buzzing every couple of seconds with comments on that blog…

    2012

  23. 23HC

    I built HackerBuddy.com with the idea of helping the Hacker News community get one-on-one help with fellow hackers that know their stuff. It matches up people that are good at a particular skill (Ruby on Rails, Python, beta-testing, general startup advice etc) with people that need that specialist help. All it does is swap your email address so that hackers can give fellow hackers one-on-one advice. I built the site as a way to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm still a bit green when it comes to coding so there's a very good chance that the server will fall over. Any feedback you guys have would be…

    2011

  24. 24BH

    tl;dr: Go to kindlehnbeta.pythonanywhere.com on your Kindle’s browser. I wrote a wrapper over hackernews that allows me to browse it on my Kindle. Simply visit kindlehnbeta.pythonanywhere.com on your Kindle’s browser. You’ll be able to view top stories, the comments within them and even the article content that the stories link to. The articles are parsed by a library that makes its best attempt to extract the main content. I only own a Kindle Oasis (10th Generation) and thus have only tested this on it. I’d imagine it looks fine on other Kindles, but you’ll have to tell me. Link to…

    2022 · kindlehnbeta.pythonanywhere.com

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