padolsey

30 ms·

421.
by padolsey 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, I hadn't seen this project before. It's great!!
422.
by padolsey 6y ago
Heya I've been working on ensuring that the results reflect the age-range of the queries, so hopefully you'll now get slightly less children's books. In terms of your latter point, it may just be a kink in the dataset, shall
423.
by padolsey 6y ago
Heya, can you try refreshing? If it still fails would you mind pasting the URL here? The DB is struggling a bit under the strain but it should be back to normal now, fingers crossed.
424.
by padolsey 6y ago
Hi Sam. Thanks for pointing out this oddity. I've now implemented a "children's book" anchoring score which I can now promote or demote results based on. Please try your search again and see the difference. Here's t
425.
by padolsey 6y ago
It's something I'd really like to do yes, though was not sure where to source the synopsis from. I wasn't sure on the copyright ramifications of scraping from the likes of Amazon/Goodreads, and only very few books are li
426.
by padolsey 6y ago
Ah that may be related to an expired CSRF token. Could you try refreshing? Hope that works!
427.
by padolsey 6y ago
Glad it's brightened your day! Baldwin is wonderful to experience. Re: moving people from one chamber to another, one hopes that enough chamber-hopping might give people the broad perspective we hope for. Tribal ideology is always a tr
428.
by padolsey 6y ago
Indeed. It's a real struggle as the nature of how this operates on intersections ("people who like Foo also like Baz") mean that escaping a "bubble" really just means moving to its fringes. The more inward and conso
429.
by padolsey 6y ago
Unfortunately there will be some books missing, either because of lacking data on them or lacking intersections with other books, or because they're too new. There's also a difficulty in where to draw the line as every book added
430.
by padolsey 6y ago
Agreed I would like to somehow do that. At the moment it's a bit tricky as some books we might classify as for children are more broadly enjoyed (e.g. The Little Prince). One way, I suppose, would be to use a dozen very explicitly chil
431.
by padolsey 6y ago
Ah yes I'm working on a fix for this right now : )
432.
by padolsey 6y ago
Yeh -- 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.
433.
by padolsey 6y ago
It'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 pu
434.
by padolsey 6y ago
Thanks! - 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, thoug
435.
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 b
436.
Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber(abooklikefoo.com)
344 points by padolsey 6y ago|254 comments
437.
by padolsey 6y ago
So true. I joked with a friend that the best way of getting access to psychologists in the NHS is to have a TBI or stroke. When it's a "physiological" brain thing they are quick to react. It's a sad state of affairs.
438.
by padolsey 6y ago
Agreed! This'll be very insightful. I've always found the mainstream understanding of neurotransmission to be annoyingly one-dimensional. E.g. AFAIK dopamine is very ubiquitous within the brain, and has as much to do with reward a
439.
by padolsey 6y ago
> What to do? Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to society. Just as Khan Academy has revolutionis
440.
by padolsey 6y ago
Ahh, the site uses book images from Amazon's CDN so you may need to disable your ad blocker. I think that's what's happening.
441.
by padolsey 6y ago
Hi HN! This app is backed by a graph db containing around 7 million book ratings/affections and 150k book titles published prior to 2020. A query requires at least two books to run and will go about finding books for you based on the c
442.
Show HN: A book recommendation engine backed by 7 million book ratings(abooklikefoo.com)
30 points by padolsey 6y ago|8 comments
443.
by padolsey 7y ago
> This is a real hot take to be asserting as blithe fact. Without knowing what is truly born of human hands, what value can art have? Our heuristics of establishing 'real' art are easy to manipulate. If we are presented with a
444.
by padolsey 7y ago
> It wont understand what it is to be human and mortal, But it won't need to. All it will need to do is manifest the same end-product via whatever means, no matter how vacuous or computational that means may truly be. The suffering
445.
by padolsey 7y ago
> - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work? So much opportunity for confabulation here. It is
446.
by padolsey 7y ago
I guess this isn't so surprising considering the holism with which the brain conducts itself. I.e. no specific functions are entirely localized to specific areas (although some areas do tend towards specialization). All or many parts
447.
by padolsey 7y ago
> a rugged community of 2300 people I wouldn't characterize it like this. Longyearbyen has schools, churches, a post office, a local elected government. Kids play hockey near the streets over summer. Adults open museums, galleries
448.
by padolsey 7y ago
For better controlled research on the effects of green spaces have a look at Ming Kuo's work. E.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245234610_Aggressio...
449.
by padolsey 7y ago
IMHO the current state of affairs is actually the best possible scenario. - Experimental language proposals can be tested in the wild - Real non-ivory-tower feedback is raised to TC39 - Everything feeds into the canonical ES spec (~no splin
450.
by padolsey 7y ago
Quite useful in situations such as: > (str.match(regexWithGroup) || [, null])[1] I.e. if the regex matches, then give me the first group (1st index) otherwise give me null.

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