10 ms·
Show HN: Find recommendations from good people
- ai_ia 8y agoNice, here goes my weekend.
- gits1225 8y agoI recommend Norvig's recommendations : )
- louisswiss 8y agoNice! I have a request though - could you make it more obvious that clicking on the name of the recommender takes you to their review/the context of why they recommended the item? That wasn't obvious to me at all, but it's often really useful to understand why the person recommended the item in the first place, and what you should expect to get out of it... Thanks!
- gits1225 8y agoThanks for the feedback. I'll see how I can make it obvious.
- gits1225 8y agoI made it obvious. Let me know if this is clear: http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/ http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/.
- louisswiss 8y agoThanks! Much better, but you might want to display it a bit differently to avoid having the word `source` repeated constantly... My suggestion would be to replace `source` (apart from the title) with some kind of icon for example. Good luck!
- gits1225 8y agoHmm. Yea. Thanks for the feedback.
- kamek 8y agoLove the site. I see the "Recommendation" header center-aligned, while all other headers are left-aligned. It looks odd to me, was this intentional?
- gits1225 8y agoIt is. Left aligning that header makes it look weirder. This looks better (IMO).
- stcredzero 8y agoIs there a way that the PageRank algorithm could be applied here?
- gits1225 8y agoI'm gonna use a different hack: PeopleRank. Example: If Paul Graham recommends a person, then I'll add all their recommendations. It is 1 or 0 : )
- stcredzero 8y agoYou get one of those two scores for scalability.
- groby_b 8y agoOne tiny suggestion (well, medium-sized :) Often, these recommendations come with a reason why this is a good book. You might want to include them, if possible.
- gits1225 8y agoIt is (but I see it is not obvious). Click on the person's name. I changed the header name from person to source. Does that make it obvious?
- groby_b 8y agoSomewhat more. Maybe change it to "Source article" so people know there's actual text behind that? Clicking on a name, I'd expect either a bio, or a list of things they recommended. It didn't occur to me it might be the original recommendation. (But then, it might just be lack of coffee :) Either way, thank you for building this and collecting the data!
- Semaphor 8y agoMight I suggest not using the urls for search? Searching for "Software" gives you a ton of Joel Spolsky recommendations because of his website URL ;)
- gits1225 8y agoYea. This is a wart. I'll be fixing it.
- nyokodo 8y agoOne suggestion: - Order by column (especially by date for tech).
- gits1225 8y agoThanks for the feedback. It is on my to build list. Bumped it up : )
- davebryand 8y agoLove this idea. I've thought about doing something similar, but as a graph, so we could see books that many people have recommended in common.
- gits1225 8y agoI'm working on it. Would love to get feedback once I build the feature. I checked your profile but couldn't find an email to contact you.
- davebryand 8y agoAwesome, thanks! dave@davebryand.com
- gits1225 8y agoEmail saved. Thanks. Hack: You can search for a book (The Mythical Man-Month) and see who all recommended it.
- ethor 8y agoGreat idea! How do you collect data?
- gits1225 8y agoThis data is from my bookmarks.
- mrfusion 8y agoReally cool. How long did this take to build?
- gits1225 8y ago1 night to build. 1 week to curate content.
- chrxr 8y agoGreat idea. Could you make the links to Amazon referrals so you can make some cash at the same time? https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/202102380 https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/2021023...
- gits1225 8y agoI appreciate the tip and I did consider it, but chose not to.
- CaptSpify 8y agoI greatly appreciate this attitude, and now I want to donate. Do you have a donation option?
- gits1225 8y agoI take tips to good recommendations at aj@abyjames.com : )
- wanderr 8y agoIn that case maybe make them smile.amazon.com links so some proceeds go to charity?
- gits1225 8y agoThat is a lovely idea. Let me sit on the suggestion.
- sampl 8y agoI tried this for http://wanderkind.org/ http://wanderkind.org/ and IMO it ended up being more than helpful. Affiliation only seems worth it if you have a lot of traffic. Even then, maybe not--unless you're making serious money, I'd rather build genuine trust.
- gits1225 8y ago
- lo2y 8y agoGreat. I've been working on something similar but in Arabic. Thank you for this list.
- forapurpose 8y agoI truly hope it works out well for you. My personal response: * I don't know what is meant by "good" people; I'd choose a different term. * My impression is recommendations from "famous" people, which don't interest me personally. Famous people aren't necessarily smart and unless a topic is in their specific domain, they have no more to contribute that the average person. (Personally, I find the idolization of famous people as 'smarter than thou' to be disturbing and unhealthy; they are no better than gits1225 and I'd like to see their recommendations too.) * I would be very interested in seriously thought out recommendations by experts in their domains. For example, for a desk chair, I'd be interested in an anonymous chair designer's recommendation. For a history book, I'd be interested in an historian's recommendation. I'm not any more interested in a famous coder's recommendation for a chair or a history book than I am in any other coder's recommendation. (To be fair, some of the famous people are experts making recommendations in their domains.)
- gits1225 8y agoAll valid points which I too am pondering on but don't have clear answers. I checked your profile but couldn't find an email to contact you. I'd love to discuss details once I have written down my thoughts.
- samirm 8y agonot enough fiction recommendations :)
- gits1225 8y agoHaha. True. That should change once I add recommendations from people from different backgrounds. Maria Popova is not going to recommend The Mythical Man-Month : )
- sampl 8y agoLove this, cheers! For some reason, the design of this is very sweetly nostalgic to me--reminds me of the web from 10y ago (in a good way!). Web fonts and accessibility concerns with small font size have made good ol 13px Helvetica with blue links on white bg rare.
- gits1225 8y agoThe design is deliberate. I love the old web too : )
- voicedYoda 8y agoThis is a great start! How do you account for duplicates? i.e. Seveneves The idea (posted elsewhere in this forum) of linking them to smile.amazon.com might be a great suggestion.
- gits1225 8y agoThat is a feature (in my book). Search for The Mythical Man-Month tells me that the book is recommended by Marc Benioff, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. That is valuable information for me and tells me that I should read the book as soon as possible : ) I agree on smile.amazon.com.
- loco5niner 8y ago> That is a feature Agreed
- tw1010 8y agoI always find that recommendation websites suffer in the long-term because the incentive to just keep adding more stuff (to keep the site not seem stagnant, thus make people come back) is greater than the incentive to strictly filter only super high quality things. How is this site going to tackle that problem?
- gits1225 8y agoUncompromising focus on people. I don't mind if the site is stagnant.
- eganist 8y agoPlan on taking investors? Because that last sentence might make it a challenge, much as I agree with it.
- pandler 8y agoWhat could investment do for a site like this?
- eganist 8y agoIts a good question. Scale, curation, combating spammed submissions to AJ, etc. might be the biggest things if the site gains momentum, but if the site remains a hobby project indefinitely (which I think is totally fine regardless of popularity), then it's absolutely not needed.
- gits1225 8y agoDoing the right thing makes good money.
- loco5niner 8y agoBrings to mind "The fisherman and the businessman" http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the-businessman/ http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/09/04/the-fisherman-and-the-...
- kikowi 8y agoI miss filter by category (I have tons of books on TODO list already and I wanted to quickly check everything beside books).
- gits1225 8y agoYou can search in tags (example: Philosophy, Book), but it doesn't do what you are looking for. Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into it.
- fermienrico 8y agoAlso put a drop down menu because I don’t know if my query in the search box is going to exist.
- amadeuspagel 8y agoA few ideas: - Link the name to a list with all the recommendations by that person, use the date for a link to the place where the recommendation was made (using the date for a permalink is convention). - Link tags. - Show everyone who recommended something and sort by how many people recommended it. (For instance The Pragmatic Programmer is recommended by Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood.) - Use Amazon Affiliate links to make money.
- gits1225 8y agoThanks for the feedback. I'm building one useful feature a time. No to amazon affiliates.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gt_ 8y agoI like this. Thanks for sharing. I hope you will consider one thing, and please don’t mistake it for political correctness. The phrase “from good people” is distasteful and I think we’re all better off not implying such a thing as “bad people”. If the intent is to define a division, it’s important to be specific lest we undermine our egalitarian goals. I know you don’t mean it to be exclusionary, and probably instead aim to evoke positive feelings. But, for me it does the opposite. People accustomed to being excluded are likely to read “from good people” and wonder if that includes them or not.
- gits1225 8y agoI agree. I settled on the word good because I wasn't able to find a good word (no pun intended).
- amadeuspagel 8y agoI'd use great. Good people is usually used to mean decent people, whereas great people is used to mean impressive people, which may or may not be moral, as in great man theory of history.
- midnightmonster 8y agoI suggest adding zebra striping to the list. It's hard to follow some of the short titles over to the names.
- gits1225 8y agoI see. Hmm. Thanks for the feedback.
- aaavl2821 8y agoreally cool, i especially like the product (ie non-book) recommendations. having a curated list of products isnt something i'd seen before, while there are plenty of reading lists. your book list is really great but for me i was most pleasantly surprised seeing the non-books
- gits1225 8y agoGlad you found it useful : )
- gits1225 8y agoThanks for checking my project. Glad HNers loved it. I had a great day. Thanks to Alexander and Michiel for pointing me to Knuth's and Keith's recommendations. I'm signing off for today. I'll reply to new comments (if any) tomorrow. Have a great day : )
- JCharante 8y agoI'm not exactly sure how it'd be implemented with the current design, but I'd think it'd be useful to have a query in the URL so you could link http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations?query=Books http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations?query=Books to just show books, rather than pointing someone to http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations and asking them to type in "Books".
- gits1225 8y agoYea. I built the basic idea. I'll be building features one by one. Thanks for the feedback.
- jasonb05 8y agoThanks, very useful!
- gits1225 8y agoYou are welcome : )
- dclowd9901 8y agoReady Player One is on this list so it is immediately excused from validity.
- bhelkey 8y agoWhen I searched for 'Software', all of Joel Spolsky's recommendations showed up because the word 'Software' is in his source URL.
- gits1225 8y agoYea. This is a wart. I'll be fixing it.
- Jugurtha 8y ago- Someone compiled a list called "Andreessen's Favorite Books": https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mmEKySwi0iYjWx_DoigL4y7_NflsT0bB0ZnibBFqSVs/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mmEKySwi0iYjWx_DoigL... - I compiled a list (see comment on video) from a trailer video for John Doerr's "Measure What Matters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U
- gits1225 8y agoI was going to add Andreessen's recommendations this week. This helps! Thanks for pulling the book recommendations. I'll add 'em this week as well.
- mrleinad 8y agoFirst thought was to search for Billy G, but it seems you haven't included him yet.
- gits1225 8y agoThese recommendations are from people I follow, and I'll be gradually adding people one recommendation a time. I couldn't find relevant information on Google for Billy G. Do you mind sharing his profile?
- eric24234 8y agoThanks so much for implementing this idea. Very nice idea. Whenever i want to watch a movie its hard to find whats best with imdb or google search because its so generalized. But if a movie is liked by John Carmack, Michael Nielsen, Steve Yegee or Elon Musk then the chance of me liking is really great.
- mikestaub 8y agoThis is a great idea. I recommend using ArangoDB ( graph database ) to store the data. You can then support interesting features very easily.