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HackerBooks turns 16,543 Hacker News book recommendations into a daily shelf

Hacker News user roansh submitted the site on November 1st; it lists Snow Crash with 1,004 recommenders and reshuffles its catalog daily.

By RuntimeWire Staff · Published Nov 1st, 2026, 10:25am CT

Primary source: Hacker News

Why it matters

HackerBooks tests whether years of Hacker News comments can serve as a durable book recommendation engine, using recommender counts and a daily reshuffled shelf to turn a scattered community canon into a browsable catalog.

Rows of books line wooden shelves beside a sunlit aisle; one spine reads “Snow Crash.”

Hacker News user roansh has put HackerBooks online as a book catalog built from titles recommended in Hacker News comments, one day after Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube made the same argument for videos. Karpathy published HackerTube on October 31st, 2026, describing 6,454 YouTube videos drawn from Hacker News comments posted from 2007 to 2026. HackerBooks applies that curation source to a different backlog: years of Hacker News discussions about programming books, science fiction, startups, history, and self-improvement.…

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