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Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books w
by padolsey 6y ago
Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by people who've also read the books entered?
- jsmith99 6y agoLoved it, but I felt a large proportion of the 'bubble breakers for software engineers' are actually referenced quite often on hacker news. Not 'Taking charge of your fertility' though.
- searchableguy 6y agoWhich two books did you add? I got that recommendation too.
- padolsey 6y agoYeh -- I do agree, though I suppose that shows that the HN demographic is broader than the stereotype of software. The fertility one's quite fun.
- andrewem 6y ago“Taking charge of your fertility” is basically about how to gather and analyze data about your body’s functioning, in order to achieve a desired health outcome (specifically, pregnancy).
- neilshevlin 6y agoI fell in love with this straight away. I'd love to be able to add my whole library tho.
- k1e 6y agoThank you for this service. What database are you using when looking for intersections?
- padolsey 6y agoIt's a large graph database that I've prepared myself over two years, as a kind of part-time hobby. It's largely an automated scrape of metadata available on wikipedia, goodreads, ISBNdb etc. Intersections are sourced from public ratings and reviews across the web. E.g. these books are all liked by one person so are can be made to intersect in the db - https://radicalreads.com/noname-favorite-books/ https://radicalreads.com/noname-favorite-books/
- veddox 6y agoFantastic effort, thank you very much!
- BenderV 6y agoThat’s really great! Congrats. If you can do an Amazon/Audible integration, that would be awesome (and will let you build your recommendation system?). From experience, I like to read the most populars/iconics books outside my perspective/pov, even though, if I had to grade them, it wouldn't be 5/5. Maybe though, the most problematic of theses "ideological bubbles" is that people don't generally want to escape it.
- padolsey 6y agoThanks! - When you say 'Amazon integration' do you mean like an import of books read so far? I think that's a great idea. I've been exploring doing that with Goodreads. Re: escaping ideological bubbles, I do agree, though I think that curiosity and gentle exposure can expand peoples' bubbles in a small enough way that it doesn't evoke ideological dissonance (especially in the realm of politics. Maybe there's a way that I can make it a gentler exposure to new ideas.
- k1m 6y agoVery nice! Liked seeing Chomsky, Fromm, Tolle and Postman when I clicked the "software engineering" link. Will check out some of the other recommendations.
- jrimbault 6y agoAnecdote : I put in the three first books of the Stormlight Archive series and it showed me many fantasy books, comics & BD, and mangas, I already read (I'd say 60 to 70%). I don't know what it should output for things not inherently political.
- rossdavidh 6y agoI like the idea a lot, and the interface is very easy to use. However, I entered a Neil Gaiman Sandman book in my first four, and it showed me another Neil Gaiman book, which seems odd? But then again I didn't recognize it, so maybe the statistics really do point that way. But excluding books by the same authors you've entered might make sense.
- psychometry 6y agoI added a few of my favorite books (mostly 20th century lit) and depending on the set got mostly children's books or non-English books. Not terribly helpful.
- hh3k0 6y agoI added Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West -- not because I like them but rather because I was curious what would come up as result --, it showed me mostly religious books as suggestion (He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart) and The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan.
- felixarba 6y agoHad a similar experience, most of my recommendations are childrens books.
- xmsam 6y agoDitto here. Mostly children’s books.
- fbelzile 6y agoSeems like a cool idea! Did you think about referral sales (Amazon Associates) as a way to fund the project instead of Patreon? I have no affiliation or experience with either, just genuinely curious if you chose one over the other. Affiliate sales seems like a good fit for this kind of service.
- padolsey 6y agoI'm trying out Amazon affiliates yeh, tho no commissions as yet .. :/ I'm also exploring commercial licensing and API access possibilities.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoYes, we need more engines like yours. Instead, Amazon, Spotify, etc. simply steer me toward the more mainstream genre-media that I already know about. Oh you like Grandaddy? You'll like the Pixies. Oh you like the Pixies? You'll like Radiohead. Oh you like the Radiohead? You'll like Nirvana. Please, I want to go the opposite direction.
- fao_ 6y agoI listened to over 500 totally different genres on spotify lately, it's not difficult, it just means you have to do slightly more work than blindly listening to whatever spotify shoves you? The trick is to pick a specific genre of music -- soul, rock, whatever. Use spotify's playlists to get a rough idea of the genre and then use the radio feature to suggest more. There are good genre explorers, too -- i seem to remember one posted here that introduced me to tanci/pingtan, and managed to find some example works to listen to.
- mckirk 6y agoMaybe you're thinking of everynoise.com -- probably one of my favorite sites on the net.
- heavyset_go 6y agoLast.fm recommendations are great for this.
- iamacyborg 6y agoYeah, last.fm remains significantly better than Spotify for listening reccs. Better yearly stats too.
- spodek 6y agoI like it, even though it doesn't have my two books. How about a browser extension that tracks the articles, videos, discussion boards, HN threads, etc one reads and in real time suggests other anti-bubble ones? Not sure if your engine would support it, but I'd use it.
- vuciv1 6y agohi! What service did you use to search the books? where'd you get your data from? cool project!
- bshanks 6y agoNeat, thanks for making this! Another tool I would like: find books that I am unlikely to read, but, if I did read them, likely to rate highly.