Show HN: YaHNd – HN Books: The Best Books of Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: YaHNd – HN Books: The Best Books of Hacker News

yahnd.com

55 pointsyaj5417 comments

When I was looking to fill my bookshelf with technical books last month, I stumbled upon https://hackernewsbooks.com, it helped me find a lot of good programming literature.

The websites and Twitter feeds seem similar (and both seem great), was there any specific reason why you created an alternative?

Fun and learning. And I do think my ranking algorithm generates different results.

This is awesome btw :), I just bought (https://hackernewsbooks.com) and I am going to fix the current bug which is breaking the frontpage. I love seeing this as I think the more sites around books the better. Hit me up if you want to stay in touch as I am playing with some different ideas around this too and I'd love to stay in touch :). (bwbbwb@gmail.com)

This is great, really really like the sticky feature of weekly/monthly/yearly digests.

I get most of my book recs from HN comments. Usually they are non-technical, anything from Michael Mauboussin to the Secret Life of Groceries. I would appreciate a simple "coreHN / not-coreHN" switch. (CoreHN would be books about startups, technologies, etc. I prefer the diverse topics, which are often buried in HN).

Also curious - are you parsing comments to identify books, or just submissions?

Yep - parsing comments and submissions.

I like the coreHN / non-coreHN idea. The search page [0] has links to categories that can allow you to dig into the different categories of book recs a bit but you still need to parse out which categories are core vs non-core.

[0] https://yahnd.com/books/search/

I wish you linked out to other retailers as well, besides Amazon. Perhaps something like boook.link would be useful.

Yep - I'd for sure like to add other retailers - both for links out and for grepping for book references. Thanks for that resource - it looks helpful.

Consider linking to books at https://openlibrary.org (an Internet Archive project). If they’ve scanned the book, you can usually check it out with your Internet Archive account immediately.

There are plenty of self-published books on https://leanpub.com/ and https://gumroad.com/

Kudos! Loads superfast and well designed. I am curious about how to build a site like this? Could you shed some light on the stack used (frontend/backend)? I couldn't find anything immediately in the HTML like bundle.js or something similar.

Sure - Heroku and Cloudflare for hosts. I have a lightweight JS server that handles ingestion of HN data and parses book references into a Postgres db. Site is built with Python using Starlette. There is quite a bit of caching with Redis and Cloudflare. There are a couple scheduled processes for ranking and digests. Spacy and vaderSentiment Python packages are used for text processing. There is no/minimal JS on the site except for hCaptcha. It's gone through a few iterations - the first version was just a one-off static site generation.

> I have a lightweight JS server that handles ingestion of HN data and parses book references into a Postgres db.

Do you parse every comment, and then look for book names?

Yes

First - thanks for building this!

I'm curious - how do you detect a book mention if, the first time it's mentioned, there's no link to Amazon? Do you use spaCy for NER and then use an API to check if the entity is a book name?

In case you were not aware, you can figure out the stack of a site pretty well using something like: https://builtwith.com/

I’m surprised SICP isn’t on the list.

Very nice. How do i sort the results by number of comments, date, etc?

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