Show HN: Books Paul Graham recommended on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Books Paul Graham recommended on Twitter

readthistwice.com

192 pointsvhpoet76 comments

First, thanks for doing this - it's a useful list of books.

Second: I don't think we should "idolize" Paul Graham. He's certainly an intelligent and cultured man, but there's no reason to think that his book suggestions are either amazing or current.

I think a more diverse and organized review system can be a much better to discover great books, e.g. https://www.goodreads.com/.

This list includes the Goodreads score of the books he mentions.

Yup, if you click on the score it takes you to the Goodreads page.

Thank you! The idea is not to "idolize" people, it's more of a new way to discover books. I know PG, I know his mentality and it's super useful when he recommends a book giving you context on why he recommends it. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm gonna read it, but I'll have a better idea on what the book has to offer vs checking goodreads reviews from strangers.

Thanks for this, great list and PGs context is great to have next to the recommendations. The PG glamour shot may have been what made it come off like you were idolizing him

sure but I always love seeing people's book lists :)

I think you're right, but it does seem interesting to see what kind of recommendations he makes. I don't read as much as I wish I did, I find it easier to read websites than books, must be something about the format. I've been trying to use my Kindle more, but maybe it's the fact I always get 'boring' books.

There is a lot of "idolization" in the this industry. Those who have accomplished much are sought out for their opinions on all types of subjects, 1) because they are influential, and 2) there is some belief that the methods which led to their success in one field are applicable in the other fields they ruminate about.

I have no doubt Paul Graham has (or had) an anonymous account here. I'd love to see the responses to his comments there. I expect to see a bit of downvoting and people dismissing his (anonymous) ideas.

PS: The website design is excellent!

> I have no doubt Paul Graham has (or had) an anonymous account here.

That's him - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

This is his official account. There is a persistent rumour that he had another, pseudonymous one.

Nice try, Paul

“Ok Paul” might become a meme

> Second: I don't think we should "idolize" Paul Graham. He's certainly an intelligent and cultured man, but there's no reason to think that his book suggestions are either amazing or current.

He's one of the best identifiers of and advisors of startups in this generation. If you are interested in startups, the subject of this site, it's hard to think of many people whose suggestions there's more of a reason to follow.

The average of everyone's recommendations will get you average results. Some people want to beat the averages.

How about an HN-user focused recommendation aggregator?

Results uncertain, but definitely would have missed out on Dropbox.

While HN gives poor career advice, the books recommendations around here have been top notch.

Obviously YC is about startups, but startups aren't exactly the subject of HN. Only a small minority of posts here are actually about them.

But PG has to be one of the most articulate & forthcoming guys out there in the tech world / I love him.

I’m not a parent, but I even sent my sister (non-tech person) his parenting advice someone on here had crowd-sourced.

The guy is an aficionado of what he likes & you can usually tell his insight comes from a HQ place of value. Maybe more than any other individual does his insight tend to blow my mind.

Awesome!! Thank you for this list - the link has been added to my iPhone homepage / amazing

There are plenty of other great recommendations on the website by other people if you'd like to idolize someone else.

Personally, I find Goodreads and general Amazon reviews to not be very helpful. The book A Perfect Mess has terrible reviews, and as a book it's poorly written. But it was definitely worth reading, and I wouldn't have found it if Marc Andreessen hadn't recommended it. A lot of books are simply too tough for the average person to read. I wouldn't recommend most people read Bill Gates' reading list, but people in the top 10% should.

I'd rather not idolize anybody. Then again, I don't think spending a few minutes looking through someone's book recommendations is equivalent to idolizing them.

PG wrote very very good books and essays.

But the current PG (esp on twitter) seems to be so far away from this level of quality that I see where you're coming from.

I'll see your PG list, and raise you the latest fogus best things and stuff (of 2019) list.[1]

1: http://blog.fogus.me/2019/12/30/the-best-things-and-stuff-of...

Love the business idea. In theory, all the book scraping is automated through Twitter api and then compiled through Amazon API. The page basically self-assembles using Nextjs template and API data call. You get paid via referral purchases. It's genius.

Curious: where do you get high-resolution book images. I wanted to add those to my own book list (https://kirillzubovsky.com/bookshelf) and haven't found a source with high res.

In reality tho, there's a lot of manual work involved haha. Thank you! I get the images from Amazon api https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/.

Oh interesting, I'll take a second look. Whatever Amazon API I checked was only returning pixelated thumbs. Good luck with the product. Next up is "How I made a million bucks reselling books" blog post ;)

hahah thank you! definitely check out their API, it's a bit messy, but works.

Crazy idea, but it might work. Sometimes podcast guests recommend good books, and I happen to have hundreds of transcripts stored to some of the best podcasts (https://smashnotes.com). I don't expose full transcripts to public, as I've learned that almost no one actually reads them, but I could scan for book recommendations and send them your way.

That'd be super cool, sending you an email.

Btw, I tried the API and it works! There's a small caveat, for anyone who might trying it too.

If you have an active Affiliates account with Amazon, and you qualify for the API access, it won't be enabled even when you get your key-pair. The API will throw a generic error "Too many requests."

You have to go to >Contact Us< section of the affiliate program and ask them to enable your access.

Note Library Genesis http://libgen.is/ provides equal access opportunities for those unable to purchase or afford books, and can provide an unrestricted preview function for those considering purchasing.

This is great! I love the fact that it includes people like John Piper and Timothy Keller, but was disappointed I couldn't find more via the 'Pastor' tag. Is that a future feature?

Edit: This comment addressed the site as a whole (though I like seeing PGs recommendations as well).

Thank you! Yea, we'll add the tag as soon as we have more of them. Do you have any people in mind? Give me their twitter usernames and I'll take a look.

I would be curious to see:

- RubinReport - ProfJohnLennox - TonyReinke - RickWarren - MattChandler74 - RFupdates

Thank you! added them to our watchlist. They'll appear on the website as soon as we find book recommendations from them.

I think I'm missing something - I don't see any John Piper or Timothy Keller books in Paul Graham's list. As a fan of Desiring God (Piper), I'd love to hear PG's take on it. But I don't see it (or any of his other books) there.

He means the website also has John Pipers and Timothy Kellers recommendations (they only recommend one book each tho). https://www.readthistwice.com/person/john-piper and https://www.readthistwice.com/person/timothy-keller.

Ah, I misunderstood. Thank you.

Correct. Sorry for the confusion!

I'm just always curious when I see it - is the monetization of the links something done as an afterthought, to get some cash from a project you were working on anyway? Or was it the other way around, looking for some side income and then came up with the project?

It was both. Started as a side toy to solve my own need, but the monetization potential got me to spend so much time building it.

how much money do you make as an amazon affiliate? i heard they can be pretty nasty about randomly taking you down for no reason

You get very little from book sales, but they also pay you for any other items the user checks out during the same session.

To sidestep the ridiculous criticisms here about idolizing pg, you could reposition this ever so slightly as "A booklist paired with Paul Graham's tweeted opinions of them." Maybe find a more succinct way to say that, without the word recommend.

Books recommended by him seems a little strong. People pay attention to what he says because of his accomplishments. But a lot of these tweets are fairly conversational and are not really in the format of "You should totally go read this book right now because I said so."

Paul does not appear to be the author of this list. He likely had zero say in how it was titled.

It doesn't much matter. Any time any of PG's writing, recommendations or accomplishments come up here, someone jumps in with the same generic warning against idolizing PG and derails the entire thread.

Not only do I disagree with the idea that there's something wrong with taking opinions from very successful people, it leads to an incredibly boring discussion.

I'm suggesting that language concerning how it is framed can help move that out of the way.

It's a thing I've thought a lot about. There's no perfect solutions, but that doesn't mean nothing at all can be done to mitigate such things.

If I agreed with the premise that his recommendations have no value, I'd probably look for framing solutions, too.

Since I do value the recommendations of some people over a simple aggregated popularity score, I'm more interested in how to effectively communicate how unhelpful derailing every PG-related thread is.

You may be putting out the fire with gasoline.

Some problems don't benefit from direct argument. There are better ways to address it.

Hi, this is really well presented. Congratulations. I'm working on something kinda similar myself. It seems to be a popular niche.

I am also looking at monetising via affiliates - is it a viable approach? Would you say that you could replace your full time job (if you have one)?

Congratulations again.

Hey, thank you! Not to discourage you or anything but monetizing with affiliate book sales is a loong long way to replace a full time job. This post got to the HN front page (first time for me) and I'd be happy to make $15-30 today.. and this is the best day with thousands of visits. I started and continue working on this because it's a passion. I love books and I love seeing people buy books because of something I made. Good luck!

Once your site gets traction it should be easy to get sponsored listings which should add at least $2K to $4K per month depending on who is interested. Also not sure if you're already doing it but try to build an email list. That's where the real money is imo.

What do you mean by "that's where the real money is"? I'm already building an email list, but not sure how exactly you propose monetizing it.

The thing about your email list is that you people who are voluntary subscribing to you have started to trust you a little and you know what they like.

Now it's time to give them more value in terms of content, bonuses and other things which they are looking for to create loyality. After that you promote an existing product as affiliate (in your case it could be blinkist like site) or better create a product that is aligned with the interests of your list.

Sorry I'm on a mobile so it's hard typing but here is a case study for you(1). There was another one from nomadlist you should lookup too.

Good luck with your endeavours

(1) https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/work/ideas/product-launch-...

Thanks for your help! Reading the article now.

Thanks for doing this!, though this idea has been done often. I still think there's plenty of room for improvement, there was an app called ParrotRead that did something like this very well but they ended the project for unclear reasons.

Thank you for the list. Can you walk us over how you did this? Maybe a post that goes into how this was done on 20.2k tweets, etc. Does that include replies as well? Does it include screen-shots of a book passage without a title?

It's actually a pretty boring technology. The script looks for some keywords in the tweet (replies included), and then we manually go over the potential book recommendation tweets. It does not include screenshots. I removed "every" from the title here, since I can't be 100% sure this includes absolutely every recommendation.

Thanks for the work. Boring grunt work yields great results sometimes.

I wish there was a small version without descriptions. I want to see as many books as possible on my screen.

You can actually change the layout so you only see the titles and the covers. The button to change the layout is right above the list (note to self: make that more visible).

Very interesting. Seems like a more sophisticated version of https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/

Quite an impressive list. Wonder whether he has read these all and not sure what is meant by monetisation. Just a book list?

This site is a great idea. Would be really useful for people working with those who don't usually read.

This is so clean - good job - thank you. You should do this for other people. Not many, just good ones, like Paul.

Thank you! The website actually includes 1300+ people. Whose recommendations are you interested in?

What!? Dope :)

I miss browsing the new books shelf at our library (closed to in person access by covid).

The worst part for me was identifying a book on a topic that seemed interesting, and wanting to see the neighboring books on the same/similar topics were. It's been a key part of how I uncover branching topics. Or just books with titles/keywords that I don't know to search for.

Luckily, they reopened for browsing recently.

Incredible product. Love using it :)

Thank you so much!

Great site. How did you make this?

Thank you! It's built on React/Node.

that's a great reading list, thank you for doing this.

Thank you!

The guy is a living legend, not sure why he hasn't yet received a Turing award for creating Arc

Slightly off topic but I couldn't help but notice this scam on Amazon for the book Paul Graham recommends about Microsoft, "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire".

https://imgur.com/dGiXl21.png

"Woe to you when men bless you!" (Luke 6:26)

The fact that everyone speaks well of Dr. Graham means he's on an extremely wrong path. Everyone spoke well of Fred Rogers (Hollywood made a biopic celebrating him) and he was proven to be beyond evil. He encouraged unspeakably shameful afflictions and never sought to heal sinners of their brokenness: instead he denied they were broken.

That is an unusual chain of thought. And there are plenty of speak poorly of Dr. Graham.

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