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The problem with reading book lists like this is that nobody has time to read all the books. That's a ton of crap out there and I want HN to help me filter thro
by personjerry 5y ago
The problem with reading book lists like this is that nobody has time to read all the books. That's a ton of crap out there and I want HN to help me filter through them.
Thus the problem with existing solutions is NOT "limited recall" or "insufficient rules" or "no Amazon link".
And the problem with this "solution" is that there is no justification for why a book is great and applicable to my circumstances, and people have to trust your black box. Otherwise I'm likely to waste my time, just like reading books from any other crappy recommendation engine.
With a deep learning model reducing all the reviews to "book names" you've successfully removed the value of the book discussions themselves. Therefore, for me this engine and all similar engines are strictly worse than simply going through the actual big threads themselves, i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21900498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21900498
Edit: I've just seen the embedded comments by switching to a desktop browser. It's a nice addition. However, for me to make sure I'm not wasting my time going through arbitrary books and comments, I would need to know why a book is ranked highly compared to other books. And I want to be sure that ranking is tailored to me, at a very, very high accuracy.
- adewinter 5y ago> With a deep learning model reducing all the reviews to "book names" you've successfully removed the value of the book discussions themselves. It literally shows each comment in full that it extracted the book name from. It also includes a link to the comment in the original thread. What more could you possibly want?
- personjerry 5y agoOh, I was on mobile and could not see the comments section. It's interesting for sure. But what I want in particular is to learn why a book is ranked highly compared to other books. And I want to be sure that ranking is tailored to me, at a very, very high accuracy.
- lbriner 5y agoThey are ranked highly because of the number of times they are recomended in a comment.
- FredPret 5y agoThere's no way around the black box element of a book review, but Nassim Taleb suggests waiting a few decades and, if the book is still well known, then reading it.
- bachmeier 5y agoWow. What a helpful piece of advice (I guess he's smarter than the rest of us so it's hard to understand the genius of his strategy). Any mention of the cost of missing out on the content in the book for a few decades?
- dwighttk 5y agoJust read older books until there aren’t any and then move onto newer ones. There are too many that are a couple decades old for you to ever run out. Also occasionally break the rule for a book you want to read. It isn’t like that would kill you.
- lifekaizen 5y agoLove this question. I could imagine him suggesting reading academic papers for cutting edge things; like his 'barbell' excercise strategy of mostly walking with occasional HIITs.
- phgn 5y agoThe idea behind reading older books is that they're already proven to be useful - it's a filter for you to spend less time on useless information. It's generally called the "Lindy effect"
- dhosek 5y agoI guess it's ok to read The C Programming Language, then.
- FredPret 5y agoTechnical manuals are more like a journal in the sense that you have to read all the new ones if you want to keep up. Novels, philosophies, and histories are works that can stand the test of time if they’re good enough
- tracyhenry 5y ago> I want HN to help me filter through them. The comments panel show the actual recommendations. And the books are ranked by number of recommendations. Is this not enough?