About
HackerBooks is in beta. We made the choice to follow Paul Graham's advice and ship a "quantum of utility", on which we will iterate. Our goal in the end is to make it easier for "hacker-minded" people to find interesting books to read.
We warmly welcome your feedback and suggestions! Please read the FAQ before posting!
FAQ
- How does the search currently works?
- Is there some advanced search available?
- Where does the content come from?
- Do you earn money if someone buys books through HackerBooks.com?
- Who made this site?
- How did this site start?
How does the search currently works?
Currently, the search (and sort) takes the following points into account:
- book title
- number of quotes on the book
- book description (to a lesser extent)
If you feel one search is not returning what you would expect, please get in touch and tell us!
Is there some advanced search available?
You can tweak your search by adding the following filters to your query string:
- sort:added will show you the latest books added to hackerbooks
- has:kindle will filter out books that don't have a kindle edition
- site:hackernews will keep only books quoted on HackerNews
- same goes for site:stackoverflow
More filtering/sorting is planned, including publication date, who quoted the book etc.
Where does the content come from ?
This site is heavily relying upon content provided by the users of those sites. Here are the corresponding policies. If you feel that at some point these policies are not respected, please contact us so we have the opportunity to address the issue.
StackOverflow
The StackOverflow data dump is available under a license that enables us to remix the data, provided we give proper attribution as described in this blog post.
We did a good faith effort to attribute the content to their users, and will continue to do so while adding new features (please get in touch if you think we made a mistake anywhere).
HackerNews
This project started after Paul Graham gave us his agreement to crawl HackerNews, while respecting rate limits to stay a good citizen. HackerNews doesn't come with a specific license; we just made the site based on this agreement.
To release the site faster and avoid polling HackerNews when not necessary, we also used the database dump that was available temporarily at http://api.ihackernews.com .
In case you're a HackerNews user who would not want to be quoted on the site, please get in touch!
Do you earn money if someone buys books through HackerBooks.com ?
If you follow a link to Amazon and buy the book in the 24 hours that follow, we will earn a commission (usually between 4% and 7%), as members of the Amazon affiliate program. If you really want to be sure your purchase will help the site, please go back through HackerBooks.com before doing the purchase. Thank you!
Who made this site?
We're a wife and husband (although with a different family name). We run a consultancy named LoGeek, and happen to make our own projects, too.
Thibaut Barrère
Role on this project: hungry data munger.
Which means: ruby 1.9.2, ETL (extract-transform-load), vagrant, chef, mongodb, resque, redis, sunspot/solr, rails 3, cucumber, rspec, seo etc.
Cécile Musset
Role on this project: kick-ass product owner and priority manager + design.
Which means: "can we delay this feature and ship earlier ?" and "it's good enough!"
How did this site start ?
I (Thibaut) am a member of both HackerNews and StackOverflow. I'm quite often looking for interesting books to read, and noticed that on both sites people I appreciate are mentioning books from time to time. So I teamed with my wife Cécile to build an app that allows me (and you) to explore these books.