I've bought lots of books through HN recommendations, more often than not they're great. I do always check a bit of the poster's submission/comment history though, because people definitely do try to pitch their eBook or SaaS here.
Thank you for this. For me, one of the best things about HN are the book and movie recommendations that occasionally appear in Comments. The likelihood I'll enjoy said titles is higher than that of recommendations from any other source, online or in print.
A lot of the books I've bought in recent years came from recommendations here. Usually they weren't even in recommendation threads, but just randomly coming up in comments.
Some are ones you see coming up a lot: The Mom Test, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Refactoring UI, Don't Make Me Think.
But then some were just way off my radar, like the writings of sociologist Edward T. Hall or Stephen Baxter's sci-fi.
I also bought a lifetime subscription for an app I found here, but mostly it was books.
What did you buy after reading a recommendation on HN?
I've pretty much taken to automatically buying any book anyone recommends on HN[1]. So far it's lead me to a few interesting books I wouldn't have read, for example The Overstory is the most recent one.
I have not had good experiences or high expectations for HN book recommendations at all. For nonfiction there are about 20 that come up reliably and a lot of them are quite great but it's still very r/books-ish and predictable. For fiction you are getting recommended dune and brandon sanderson, east of eden, maybe some philip k dick and that is that.
I actually find HN book recommendations useful for the opposite reason: the un-upvoted comments at the bottom that have book suggestions I've never heard of before. That is valuable, while this list of popular choices is mostly predictable.
If you dig into any "recommend me books" post, you'll find some truly great recommendations near the bottom.
Slightly off from post. The best book recommendation I got is from one of the following ways, dedicated recommendation service or app never worked for me:
- told by friend
- someone I admire read book and commented on it
- I'm working on some problem, during that exploration i came across books.
- random people mentioning book on platform like HN on a topic/post of my interest.
This is fantastic! I've often come across book recommendations in HN comments and then struggled to remember where it was posted when it came time to purchase a book on topic X.
This also seems useful at aggregating different perspectives on the same book depending on the context of the thread it was mentioned in.
Amazon reviews from people you know are better than you (many HN regulars, Peter Norvig etc) has worked for me.
For any given topic there are usually a few 'classics' amongst umpteen flim flam frothy books. At least for technical topics, you can just ask on HN (or email any HNer say tptacek for security related books, patio11 for SEO etc) and get some good recommendations.
I only read books where i have a recommendation. This can either from a conversation or just a mention in a Blog post or here on HN in a comment.
Its definitely not a 100% method but i feel like that the chance that the book is not well written is much lower when at least one person found it readable/enjoyable.
I have a Trello Site for that where i create a card for every book and write down or copy+paste the recomendation.
I also typically download the book from libgen first, take a quick look at it and then buy the book.
This is _not_ a site ad (I was trying to post a question):
Would book recommendations (even good ones) without any social/freebie/purchase fluff work, or it is just waste of CPU resources (not counting mental ticks required to make this really work)? Is anybody interested in smart book recommendations?
As a reader, I must say that at least in the books section the recommendations work. If I buy a book I like, I look for automated recommendations, because the chance I might like those books is rather high.
I think this is one of those ideas that's gets progressively less attractive as you get into details.
It takes a lot of time and thought to write a good book review, and you don't get anything out of it (unlike spending time to post a well-worded Ask HN, or spending almost no time to post a link to something interesting).
Most folks in a HN-like community don't have that time. If they even have time to read more than a few books a year... so they aren't going to spend hours perusing book review (which aren't actually of value themselves.. they just point to other things that will be valuable to buy then read...).
I've tried this for books and ended up not reading any books. Well articulated reviewers always seem to find pretty damn good reasons to dislike any book. Buying on recommendation has worked ok, I still end up buying a few that I can't get into, but at least I find some to read.
reply