Top 29 books ranked by unique users linking to Amazon in Hacker News comments

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Amazon product links were extracted and counted from 8.3M comments posted on Hacker News from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015. Data: Hacker News API via Google BigQuery published by Felipe Hoffa @felipehoffa • Author: Ramiro Gómez - ramiro.org

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Number of links: - search results on HN - Results may differ because of links posted after Oct 2015 and additional fields being searched. Book description

Top Books on Amazon Based on Number of HN Users Linking them in Comments

In my last post I ranked books based on the total number of links in Hacker News comments. In the ensuing discussion on HN SloopJon recommended to discount repeated links by the same commenter.

I thought this was a good idea and created this improved ranking, which is based on the number of unique users linking to Amazon book pages in Hacker News comments. In addition only comments that have a ranking between 0 and 9 are taken into account, i. e. comments that have a maximum of 9 comments with the same parent above them, see Felipe Hoffa's explanation of comment ranking.

Moreover, I took only ASINs into account that consist of 10 digits, since ASINs may be different across Amazon marketplaces, except for books, where the ASIN corresponds to the ISBN, see Wikipedia.

The previous #1, The Rent Is Too Damn High, actually has an ASIN that is not an ISBN, but would not be in the above ranking anyway because the 53 links came from only 10 different users, compare the Hacker News products table. Looking at the Amazon reviews, it seems to be a quite polarizing book with about 30% liking it a lot and 60% not at all and not much in between. The new #1, Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition, was on the 2nd place before.

Another book that disappeared from the ranking is Darwin's Theorem. It turns out that all 19 links came from the book author. Ironically, all of the links posted in the considered time frame are broken now, since the ASIN of the book changed at some point.

Obviously, the counts changed and also some positions within the ranking, but most of the books appear in both top lists. This list contains 29 books rather than 30, because I made the cut at a position where the counts changed, ranks 30-34 all have 11 links from unique users.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the previous post, despite the improvements this ranking approach still has limitations. A book like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs does not make the top list, although it is referred to quite frequently on Hacker News, often just by the acronym SICP. Detecting book titles or even nicknames in texts is certainly an interesting challenge. Nonetheless, a simpler approach like this one can and hopefully does provide some value as well.

Credits

The Hacker News data was obtained from the official Hacker News API with the help of Jenny Tong and the Firebase team and published on Google BigQuery by Felipe Hoffa. The data was processed with Python and various libraries and the visualization created with D3.js.