Top 30 books ranked by total number of links 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 30 Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments

The chart above shows the 30 most often linked products in Hacker News comments, which all happen to be books. Topics range from software development, design, business, economy, psychology to politics with the most often linked book, The Rent Is Too Damn High, being about high rents in the US and its implications on the American society.

Programming and technology seem to be the most dominant topics, but discussions in the Hacker News community are more diverse than the name suggests, which won't surprise its participants.

Methodology

This visualization is based on a dataset of 8,399,417 comments posted on Hacker News from October 2006 to October 2015. I ran a query on the Google BigQuery table to search for comments that contain links to www.amazon.* resulting in a dataset of 15,583 records.

I then extracted links to Amazon product, product review and product offer pages based on the existence of an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) in the URL. Overall I found 10,729 different ASINs and ranked them by the number of links containing them.

Caveats

Amazon is often the goto website for referring books, but many books have dedicated homepages as well as pages pages on their publisher's website. Moreover, many freely available books are referred frequently in comments, but are not considered in this ranking.

The counts are raw unweighted link counts, so a link in a comment with many upvotes counts the same as a link without upvotes. Also linking a book is not necessarily an endorsement to go buy and read it.

Conclusion

Despite the mentioned restrictions, I think this list contains books that are well worth reading, if you want to learn something about the respective topic. Several of them, such as JavaScript: The Good Parts, Don't Make Me Think or Code Complete be considered classics in their fields.

Moreover, I think this small sample gives a fairly good impression about the main topics that drive the Hacker News community.

What books get recommended is just one of many questions that you can dig into by exploring Hacker News comments. In a similar manner you could look at the most often linked GitHub projects or StackOverflow questions and answers.

Apart from what gets referred to outside of Hacker News you can also explore internal aspects such as user interactions via comment replies, text analysis or topic detection. There is a lot to discover in this data.

Update

I created a new and improved ranking based on unique users linking to Amazon in Hacker News comments. Moreover, there is a sortable and searchable table listing all Amazon products linked by at least 6 unique users in Hacker News comments for reference.

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.