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Comment by ntoshev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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