#show-hn

After seeing Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube, the developer known on Hacker News as roansh built the same idea for books, again largely with Claude Opus 5.5. In the Show HN post, roansh says Claude wrote almost all of it, data pipeline included, while they steered, made decisions and bought the domain. The site lists books that at least two different commenters brought up between 2007 and now; its footer counts 15,704 books and 284,808 mentions. It sorts them into topics from fiction and history to programming and Lisp, with top-recommended, most-mentioned, rising and "For You" views, and each book links back to the comments that mentioned it. The data can be downloaded from the About page.

The author notes the ranking counts mentions, so praising a book and trashing it both count.

Developer Peter Cai's Permit Pending is a browser city simulation 'in the spirit of the classics' with one twist: you are an elected mayor, not a god. Every apartment block, bus lane and factory goes through hearings, reviews, objections, lawsuits and appeals; residents have ages, incomes and homes; a seven-seat council votes; and you face reelection every four years. It is free, needs no account, saves locally and works offline after the first visit. Scenarios range from a 200-person hamlet to 'The Unaffordable Metropolis'.

The Show HN thread turned into a debate about housing and permitting itself: whether a century of keeping every neighbor happy produced today's shortages, whether unregulated building just creates other problems, and how books like Abundance frame it. Players also flagged story text that doesn't match their town, and the author replied with fixes.