Mention Counters Reward Controversy Over Quality in HN Book Rankings

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A developer describes HackerBooks, a project that crawls two decades of Hacker News comments to build a crowd-ranked list of books. The author argues the scoring flaw is that each mention adds equally, so books that commenters consistently criticize can rank above quietly respected classics. The approach uses the Algolia-powered HN search API with a timestamp cursor to page through comments reliably. Candidate titles are pulled from comment text using regex patterns, then normalized and confirmed against the free Open Library catalog. Matching to a stable work identifier keeps editions and subtitle variants from splitting a book's score.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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