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Comment by nessence | Hacker News Reader

Is HN really the new place for book spamming aa links?

Which books don't matter. Half those are outdated or will be by the time they're read.

You know you should really take a look at who posted the article and who wrote the article, jacquesm and Daniel are some of our most respected and informational members that we have. Both have contributed volumes of information to this site without asking for anything in return. If there is anyone one this site that could be accused of having the passion for the subject matter of this site it would be Daniel.

As is said in the blog, this post comes up quite frequently so Daniel put it on his blog. Forgive a guy for trying to cover some cost, would you.

As well you don't lose anything by giving someone an affiliate sale, so unless your getting tricked into clicking someones links I think people can tend to make a bigger deal of it than is needed.

I upvoted you, but the general problem with these links is that they affect author motivation, whether or not they realize it. This is especially true for subjective listings such as this one, they are simply a brain dump of whatever the list author could think of. That's why you get SICP next to "Head first HTML", and that's why you don't get "Coders at work" at all, even though it's mentioned >800 times on this site, vs much less for other titles on the list.

This list was put together by googling "best books" on ycombinator and then picking each thread and listing the books from top to bottom.

HeadFirst appears because a commenter pointed out that it was a good book that you wouldn't think of, and this comment got several upvotes. From this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128713

There was no "thinking" that was involved in creating the list. It was a pure mechanical process. That's why there are two dupes and a lot of books that didn't make it.

I guess to be completely fair I should have written a program to scrape every book mention on HN and then cross-matched them to aggregate votes. But I was just trying to make a larger version of an HN comment in blog format, so I didn't take the time to write up a system. As it was, it took most of the day tracking down links, book references and such.

I can assure you that there was no finagling with the list or author's opinions that were inserted. I have "coders at work", and it's a great book. It would have made my list easily. There are a bunch of other books just like it. My list would have included more Java books, and books about tracking to-do items. But this wasn't my list. It was HN's.

Right but this is this person's list they may or may not have read "Coders at work" therefore they may not be able to recommend that works. A good book is an opinion and this post reflect his opinion and while the majority might hold the same opinion it is none the less an opinion of good. As for motivation I don't see it, he would make roughly the same amount for recommending a different book. Now if he is friends with any of the authors then that would be a different case entirely.

I up-voted you, because I though this post of yours offered an honest opinion of your view on the matter. You where down to 0 and I though your opinion was a valid viewpoint, I don't like to see opposing viewpoints suppressed just because they are not in agreement.

That's a much better way of looking at this post.

I suppose, I could've phrased the post: Is a link full of SEO spam, aa links, and ad networks a legit HN post?

I guess from the upvotes and comments, it is. I was strangely curious.

A buddy gave me a Firefox extension to auto-tag Amazon links with my referral: it appends this: ?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 .

Why? Because I write a book blog (The Story's Story: http://jseliger.com/ ) and usually include an Amazon link because a) the page is uniform, b) Amazon usually gives a concise, pretty decent description of the book and that description is always in the same place, and c) if you want to buy the damn thing, you're right there, which makes it easy.

So I don't think it a terrible conflict of interest to use Amazon referral links: I think of it as a convenience, and I make a little bit of money (enough for more books but not very much). I'm skeptical that it affects the books I write about, but if it does, readers are welcome to call me on BS. One has actually said the opposite: http://jseliger.com/2008/11/06/on-books-taste-and-distaste :

One thing I will say, as now a fairly regular reader of your blog, is that you don’t seem to read very much that you actually like. You seem, in some ways, doomed to be disappointed either by your tastes or the bar you’ve set up.

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