All books recommended on Ask HN
After reading this Ask HN post [1] (and buying too many books), I found myself going through old posts about book recommendations. I wanted to find all books recommended in those posts and save the top ones for future book shopping sprees. This has been done before [2, 3], but I wanted to get books that were recommended, not just mentioned. I used the Algolia API [4] to get all Ask HN posts about books, reviewed them and filtered out ones that were too specific e.g best books to learn math. The comments were then sent to the Open AI API [5] to extract books that are recommended. I then…
All books recommended on Ask HN launched on October 18, 2024 with 14 votes, #979 of 5,185 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
In plain words
All Books Recommended on Ask HN aggregates book recommendations from Hacker News discussion threads. The tool uses the Algolia API to identify Ask HN posts about books, then applies AI to extract which titles were actually recommended rather than merely mentioned. It filters out overly specific posts and consolidates recommendations that refer to the same book under different names or spellings. Users can browse suggestions organized by original posts and view statistics about which recommenders appear most frequently. The result is a curated database designed to help readers discover books that have been genuinely endorsed by the Hacker News community.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
After reading this Ask HN post [1] (and buying too many books), I found myself going through old posts about book recommendations. I wanted to find all books recommended in those posts and save the top ones for future book shopping sprees. This has been done before [2, 3], but I wanted to get books that were…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
- MBMeta book recommendations from Ask HN threads2020 · mapfilterfold.com · ▲273
40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning2021 · hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app · ▲1,359Thinking, Fast and Slow - with 523 comments from the Hacker News community
- ISI scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation modelNov 2025 · book.sv · ▲606
Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
- TBTop books mentioned in comments on Hacker News2016 · hackernewsbooks.com · ▲463
- ABAll books mentioned on the recent Ask HN best books thread2024 · hnbestbooks.pages.dev · ▲9
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.
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