Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025
55 comments
·December 21, 2025GenerocUsername
Hitchhikers guide to the universe having 42 mentions is a cosmic level coincidence
duckerduck
Now its 43 :'(
georgefrowny
The eternal fate of the Googlewhack.
jama211
List was to a time point, and list says 42. All good! You could even say after waiting the right amount of time, 42 was the answer this computer program generated…
kaangiray26
the ultimate coincidence of life, the universe, and everything
omoikane
I see that there is "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury (33 mentions), and "The Martian" by Andy Weir listed much later (11 mentions), but most of mentions for "The Martian Chronicles" appears to be referencing "The Martian" instead.
Also, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (20 mentions) and "GEB" (7 mentions) are listed as separate books, but they are the same book.
furyofantares
You should scrape 2024 also and then 2025 should be sorted by the delta. Otherwise it doesn't have that much to do with 2025 and is largely just books commonly mentioned on HN.
It's possible this idea isn't straightforward due to more or fewer total mentions but I think you could get there.
yoan9224
Love this. The top programming books being SICP, Clean Code, and Crafting Interpreters feels very on-brand for HN.
Surprised by how much fiction shows up though. I'd assumed HN skewed heavily technical but seeing 1984, Dune, and Foundation in the top mentions suggests the community has broader reading habits than stereotypes suggest.
One bug: looks like "The Martian" by Andy Weir is getting grouped with "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury. Might want to add some disambiguation logic for common title collisions.
How are you doing the extraction? LLM-based NER or something more traditional like regex + entity matching?
jasonjmcghee
I wouldn’t think clean code is on-brand at all.
Maybe mentioning it for what not to do?
Just search it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clean+code
All (justifiably) against clean code methodology.
dgeiser13
The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit is listed instead of "the Dragon book"
thcipriani
Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John Green—"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this year.
cwnyth
There's a mistake with The Rust Programming Language. It counts Programming Rust as the same book.
Insanity
The fact that Mein Kampf was mentioned so often in 2025 is saying something about the political climate lol..
Nice website though, I like it.
an0malous
I think 1984 is more of a sign of the times, and not just mentioned in the context of banned book threads
jeffbee
Maybe there's a german-language subset of comment threads where they discuss their struggles against the C++ standard.
mitthrowaway2
It seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements, so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
Insanity
Good catch, I didn’t read through the comments where it’s mentioned.
tonymet
This comment is a helpful way to understand Mein Kampf and whether it means its readers are Nazis.
graemep
on 4/15/2025
Mein Kampf IS a rant.
I recommend people read it so you can understand how people like that think.joshdavham
The top 3 programming books mentioned this year were
1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs 2. Clean Code 3. Crafting Interpreters
Also, it’s quite fascinating how often fiction books were recommended! I wouldn’t’ve expected that on HN.
mirashii
I’d be curious about sentiment analysis applied to these. I expect two of the listed to have very positive sentiment, and one generally negative in 2025.
Cloudly
The recent novel Abundance seems to be agressibley grouped with the John Green novel An Abundance of Katherines - which I think is a humorous retelling of 2025 but also maybe needs some matching work
card_zero
An Abundance of Katherines has only been mentioned on HN three times, and none of those are listed among the 19 claimed mentions.
Freak_NL
What is the cut off date?
It seems to miss the mentions of the late John Varley's books in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991 six days ago.
seinvak
Just missed by a day I guess. Cutoff is 15th December.
WarOnPrivacy
Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz is absent. We cultists have fallen down on the job.
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.