Every book Hacker News keeps recommending, ranked, with links back to the comments that raised them.
What the article says
- A searchable catalogue of thousands of books that at least two different HN commenters have mentioned since 2007.
- Books are ranked by how many different people brought them up, and each one links back to the original comments.
- Covers and details come from Open Library, and the full dataset can be downloaded from the about page.
- The author says Claude wrote almost all of it, and that mentions are counted whether praise or criticism.
What HN is saying
- Lots of praise for how fast the site loads, with people guessing a local search index is the secret. thread ↗
- Several people point out that similar sites have appeared before and then quietly died, and one says this kind of project tends to fade once it leaves the front page. thread ↗
- Users found gaps and wrong categories, and the author fixed some live, though rare long-tail titles are hard to catch without adding noise. thread ↗
- One commenter wanted the least mentioned books instead of the most, and was pointed to the downloadable data as the answer. thread ↗
- A side thread asks why projects borrow famous names like Karpathy's, with replies saying a familiar reference helps people understand it quickly. thread ↗
A farmer shook out an old sack of mystery seeds and got a tall, seven-eared, rainbow-coloured wheat.
What the article says
- Claudio Grossi found a sack of unlabelled seeds in his attic and tossed them onto a manure pile. One plant grew twice as tall as normal wheat, with seven ears per stalk and kernels in several colours.
- He linked it to Joseph's dream in Genesis, called it the miracle grain, and baked with it. The dough barely rose, but the bread tasted nutty and sweet.
- A baker friend fixed the rising problem with smaller batches, taller baskets and less kneading.
- Tests at a local university found it was a heritage wheat with less gluten and more minerals. It copes with drought without fertiliser or weedkiller.
- The pitch is crop variety. Relying on a few modern wheats leaves farmers exposed when the weather turns.
What HN is saying
- A grain nerd points out the article never says which wheat this is. The species name covers both ancient emmer and modern pasta wheat, so the real identity is left vague. thread ↗
- One commenter says the story is less of a discovery than it sounds, since this wheat is already widely grown. It is better read as a reminder of how much variety still exists. thread ↗
- A sharp correction: the article says an amino acid is something children need to grow, which sounds like bad science reporting. Others reply that it can matter for sick or premature babies. thread ↗
- Plenty of people share their own old-grain finds, from Swiss ancient spelt and Danish seed revivals to family fruit and vegetable strains in rural Portugal. thread ↗
- The gluten hope gets pushed back. This wheat only has less gluten, not none, and most people who feel gluten sensitive probably are not. thread ↗
A critical Linux kernel bug lets strangers run code as root, and Ubuntu still has no fix.
What the article says
- A flaw in how Linux handles the start of an IPv4 TCP connection lets a remote stranger crash a machine or take it over, with no login needed.
- The upstream fix is tiny and shipped in mid October, but most servers run a distribution's kernel, and Ubuntu still has no patch.
- Anthropic says its Claude model wrote a working root exploit for servers with a multipath TCP listener. Go programs open those by default.
- Turning off multipath TCP does not fix the bug. Until you can patch, drop TCP packets that carry IPv4 options, then reboot into a fixed kernel.
What HN is saying
- Many say the real attack surface is wider than multipath TCP. Any IPv4 packet with options can set up the bug, so blocking those packets is the practical stopgap, ideally early with XDP. thread ↗
- People are annoyed that Ubuntu and Red Hat lag behind. Debian shipped weeks ago, and Ubuntu kernels sit in a testing channel. Others say long term support kernels are a myth. thread ↗
- Home routers and gadgets are the worry. Even cheap routers often have several processor cores, and their old kernels will likely never be patched. thread ↗
- The usual Rust versus C argument shows up. One side says safe languages would have prevented it, another says fast Rust still needs unsafe code and has its own bugs. thread ↗
- A newcomer asks how a use after free becomes a working exploit. The answer is to get the freed memory reused for something else, then abuse the confusion. thread ↗
- Some are suspicious of the page itself, calling it AI generated and pointing to the official NIST entry instead. thread ↗
Norway's answer to a presidential insult is a tour of its gorgeous designer public toilets.
What the article says
- Norway's Scenic Routes are dotted with public toilets designed by well-known architecture firms, and the page presents them as tourist attractions in their own right.
- They sit in dramatic places, from above the Arctic circle to fjord shores and remote mountain plateaus, and many are only reachable in summer.
- One had to be reinforced with steel against harsh weather, and it now looks a bit like a Viking helmet.
- More are coming, including a forest-inspired design shaped like an upside-down tree trunk.
- The tone is cheeky throughout, and it ends with a plea to flush and keep the places clean.
What HN is saying
- Several commenters explain the joke: it is a deadpan reply to Trump calling Norway a "shithouse country" after he missed out on the Peace Prize. Some readers admit they didn't get the reference until someone spelled it out. thread ↗
- The biggest argument is about money. Some say it's just oil wealth, others say Norway chose to share it, and one points out it avoided the usual resource-curse trap. thread ↗
- People swap toilet stories from elsewhere: Japan's plentiful and clean public loos, Roman communal ones, and a grim Oakland playground bathroom. thread ↗
- One commenter finds it striking that these beautiful buildings cost about the same as an ordinary public restroom in San Francisco. thread ↗
- A practical gripe: the website's video backgrounds make it awkward to scroll, especially on phones. thread ↗
A researcher says Claude now blocks anything near model training, and half the thread has similar complaints.
What the article says
- A researcher in Hong Kong says he never copied Claude's outputs to train a rival. The training data came from a strong open-source model.
- Claude only helped him submit jobs and analyse results, yet he was still tagged for "training a competitor".
- Now anything involving fine-tuning or training bigger models gets him blocked, downgraded to an older model, or cut off mid-session.
- He calls it hypocritical, since Anthropic built its own models on the world's data.
- This is just a single post on X, so the details come from his own account.
What HN is saying
- Many users report the same pattern: Claude refuses harmless work like logging into a test account, touching their own servers, or even copying code between services. thread ↗
- Several people say they have moved to Codex, open models, or Chinese models, and urge everyone to keep a swappable backup so no single vendor can lock them in. thread ↗
- A sceptic says this was not a ban at all, just a safety filter interrupting one session. Starting a fresh session with different wording usually works. thread ↗
- Others note that the poster is in Hong Kong, where Claude is blocked, so using a VPN may have raised the alarm. One reply says the same thing happens in the US and EU. thread ↗
- One user says Claude happily builds him a custom training setup, which shows how unpredictable the filters are. thread ↗