5 ms·

Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

273 points by odie88 6y ago

odie88 6y ago
MapFilterFold is a side project I’ve been kicking the can on for a while, it started out as a monstrous spreadsheet I maintained for a few months in 2018. The site uses Amazon affiliate links. There have been a few similar projects [1] [2] which create lists from links to Amazon and other stores. MFF differs by only using data from Ask HN threads about books and using book titles (or acronyms like GEB or SCIP) since most comments on those threads don’t include links. More about the data can be found on the About page. This is also my first Elixir + Phoenix project, which was a joy to use once I got moving. [1] https://hackernewsbooks.com/ https://hackernewsbooks.com/ [2] https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/
- Insanity 6y ago
  This is really cool, thanks for this! A lot of the books I read came from HN recommendations so this is pretty useful to me :)
- btrettel 6y ago
  Can you change the page titles to be more descriptive? I've bookmarked a few of these pages but had to manually change the titles to have the book title in them.
  - odie88 6y ago
    Hey! Sorry about that. I pushed out a quick update for individual book pages to be titled {MapFilterFold - Book: [bookTitle]} Hopefully that makes most of the bookmarking easier. I'll work on a solution for other pages later today!
disposedtrolley 6y ago
This is fantastic! I've often come across book recommendations in HN comments and then struggled to remember where it was posted when it came time to purchase a book on topic X. This also seems useful at aggregating different perspectives on the same book depending on the context of the thread it was mentioned in.
downshun 6y ago
This is great, too bad it's not getting enough attention. HN has changed in some respects.
ponitozhekoni 6y ago
Awesome. Thank you.
julvo 6y ago
This is a great resource, thank you! Tangentially related, it would be interesting to require book recommendations to always come with anti-recommendations, i.e. which books not to read. Often, I feel like there's a bias towards recommending books, after oneself committed to reading them. If I were asked to list the top 50% of books I've read (without counting), I'd probably list more than 50% of books I read.
- BubbaHool 6y ago
  Damn, thats a good idea. Would like to see a list with commentary of books you shouldnt read.
micael_dias 6y ago
Looks good on mobile but on first load you need to unzoom for the content to fit.
- odie88 6y ago
  Thanks! I removed the viewport tag. That should get it loading in an un-zoomed state.
eatonphil 6y ago
On my wishlist is a book site that will also give you top positive and negative reviews for each book from high quality sources like Boston Review or The Atlantic. I like to pair reading a book with what's happened since or other ideas at the time. I don't always remember to do this though so that's why getting these review recommendations from GoodReads (for example) would be ideal. For example, parts of Thinking Fast and Slow have widely been discredited and the author has walked back claims. But you wouldn't know that from the book or its popularity.
- hikarudo 6y ago
  I've often wished for the same thing. I want to know what's wrong about the book before investing time in it.
- joshvm 6y ago
  After the Why We Sleep fiasco I'd quite like a site which peer reviews all the references in a book (could be crowd sourced wiki-style) individually. And then the book, or each chapter, gets a rating for factual correctness.
  - eatonphil 6y ago
    That is a good point. Also reminds me I'd like a site that lists all the references in a book so I can more easily search them on the computer and not necessarily need to even own the book.
    - cloverich 6y ago
      That's a good thought. The next step is going in reverse, selecting the best referenced material and auto generating a quality non-fiction book from it. That's my dream.
    - joshvm 6y ago
      This is how conventional journal publishing works, so I don't see why this couldn't be implemented for books which provide a bibliography.
Dockson 6y ago
This is really cool! Is there any particular sorting on pages like https://mapfilterfold.com/articles/early_founders https://mapfilterfold.com/articles/early_founders or is it just whatever order you put them there?
- odie88 6y ago
  Hi, thanks! Frankly the articles (the three panels/links at the top of the home page) need more attention, but I wanted to have the feeling of "done" so I pushed the site out as-is. On those pages, books aren't ranked in any particular order, other than trying to pull attention to some slightly buried books that I do personally recommend. I'd love to hear, are there any books you'd add to those pages? The "Oddities and fun" page is simply a collection of books from my notes that stuck out as interesting while I manually approved all parsed comments and book mentions.
awb 6y ago
Interesting that https://mapfilterfold.com/ https://mapfilterfold.com/ and https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news look to be attempting the same goal but with different results. Curious what's different under the hood.
ipnon 6y ago
Would it be possible to create a similar list for the opposite purpose: Read these books to free yourself from the conventional Hacker News wisdom?
madhadron 6y ago
It says something about the disparity of intellectual depth in the community that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged shows up next to books actually worth reading like SICP, GTD, or Cialdini's Influence.
- in9 6y ago
  I think you can strike lines between technical and fictional books. In doing so, I would expect a difference in quality since the avg HN lurker is a technical person.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Pretty much this. The average HN lurker will be reasonably sophisticated when it comes to technical subjects, but they are incredibly naive when it comes to all of those humanities subjects they skipped in university. When it comes to politics, economics, philosophy and other such subjects the average HN response vacillates between the extremes of either outright dismissal or arrogant pronouncements that are such a caricature of the Dunning-Kruger effect that you initially assume it to be satire.
    - pinkfoot 6y ago
      > …incredibly naive [about] those humanities subjects they skipped in university. Yip, but not nearly a naive as the humanity students are about technical subjects. If we are going to fix anything, we need to force our arty friends to finish with some understanding of how the world works. And by "how the world works" I mean the things that would remain unchanged even if every human vanished. Like, to be topical, exponential growth.
lbrito 6y ago
Nice! How is the site itself built? Is it a static page or do you have some sort of backend? I did something very similar for a local podcast that gives book/movie/music/etc recommendations a while ago: https://enpassant.tk/ https://enpassant.tk/ . It is statically-built with Ruby.
- odie88 6y ago
  Hi lbrito! The site is a Phoenix app (Elixir's popular web framework) with PostgreSQL. The pages are just Phoenix templates and I let Cowboy, the default HTTP server for Phoenix, serve the app directly... so it's not sitting behind NGINX or any similar web server that's frequently used as a reverse proxy. I used Bulma as for the CSS, just to try something I haven't used before. The only line of JS is in the dropdown menu's onChange tag, to submit the "form" when you select a book category. I like the UI on En Passant! Really clean - great use of icons so I know what the media type is at a glance as I scroll.
7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG 6y ago
This is very nice, thank you! A goodreads url in each book would be great
myu701 6y ago
This looks great. I like how it is setup and I find the value it offers to be swell. I will however complain that I shouldn't have to recaptcha myself if I took the time to enter my email address, find the email, and click confirm for it. What benefit is there to recaptcha-ing that? My complaint is in hopes that they will remove that recaptcha for other users who happen to like their privacy and don't let their browser sell everything to mailchimp. Edit: I will correct myself in that it looks like they may not have a choice according to https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/
- odie88 6y ago
  Hey myu701. Thanks for the link. I unticked the setting mentioned a bit lower on that page[0] to disable reCaptcha. It's not clear to me if that changes it for their landing page. Testing an email alias of mine in incognito mode _looks_ like it's gone for me. Thanks again for bringing this up. [0] https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/#Enable_reCAPTCHA https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/...
  - myu701 6y ago
    Hey there. Thanks for trying it. I will try a personal email rather than my work email and see if I get the same result on the same machine. Edit: It no longer recaptchas me, thanks!
- ProZsolt 6y ago
  This is exactly what a robot would say. Clicking on the confirmation is only proves that you own that email. I could easily automate all of the steps that you said except captcha.
  - myu701 6y ago
    Ok...lets say I am a robot for hypothetical reasons. So now a robot is on a mailing list. Why is that a bad thing? You may only want human eyeballs I suppose if you were somehow making a profit off knowing your audience was all humans a la broadcast radio advertising rates based on estimated audience size, but OP is using amazon affiliate links, not ads, so that argument is out of scope?
jonfw 6y ago
What an excellent UI. It's hard to make something relying on scraped data so nice and easy to use, this nails it! Have a few books on the way now :)
secfirstmd 6y ago
Thanks this is awesome!
geospeck 6y ago
I am trying to build something similar and I was wondering if there are any legal issues with showing content from the source website into mine, in your case for example the content is the user's comments. In this page https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ under the Intellectual Property Rights is written: Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally upload to the Site. I really wonder if I need to ask for permission from each website about showing some text from their website into mine?

273 points by odie88 6y ago

MapFilterFold is a side project I’ve been kicking the can on for a while, it started out as a monstrous spreadsheet I maintained for a few months in 2018. The site uses Amazon affiliate links. There have been a few similar projects [1] [2] which create lists from links to Amazon and other stores. MFF differs by only using data from Ask HN threads about books and using book titles (or acronyms like GEB or SCIP) since most comments on those threads don’t include links. More about the data can be found on the About page. This is also my first Elixir + Phoenix project, which was a joy to use once I got moving. [1] https://hackernewsbooks.com/ https://hackernewsbooks.com/ [2] https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/

Insanity 6y ago
This is really cool, thanks for this! A lot of the books I read came from HN recommendations so this is pretty useful to me :)
btrettel 6y ago
Can you change the page titles to be more descriptive? I've bookmarked a few of these pages but had to manually change the titles to have the book title in them.
- odie88 6y ago
  Hey! Sorry about that. I pushed out a quick update for individual book pages to be titled {MapFilterFold - Book: [bookTitle]} Hopefully that makes most of the bookmarking easier. I'll work on a solution for other pages later today!

disposedtrolley 6y ago

This is fantastic! I've often come across book recommendations in HN comments and then struggled to remember where it was posted when it came time to purchase a book on topic X. This also seems useful at aggregating different perspectives on the same book depending on the context of the thread it was mentioned in.

downshun 6y ago

This is great, too bad it's not getting enough attention. HN has changed in some respects.

ponitozhekoni 6y ago

Awesome. Thank you.

julvo 6y ago

This is a great resource, thank you! Tangentially related, it would be interesting to require book recommendations to always come with anti-recommendations, i.e. which books not to read. Often, I feel like there's a bias towards recommending books, after oneself committed to reading them. If I were asked to list the top 50% of books I've read (without counting), I'd probably list more than 50% of books I read.

BubbaHool 6y ago
Damn, thats a good idea. Would like to see a list with commentary of books you shouldnt read.

micael_dias 6y ago

Looks good on mobile but on first load you need to unzoom for the content to fit.

odie88 6y ago
Thanks! I removed the viewport tag. That should get it loading in an un-zoomed state.

eatonphil 6y ago

On my wishlist is a book site that will also give you top positive and negative reviews for each book from high quality sources like Boston Review or The Atlantic. I like to pair reading a book with what's happened since or other ideas at the time. I don't always remember to do this though so that's why getting these review recommendations from GoodReads (for example) would be ideal. For example, parts of Thinking Fast and Slow have widely been discredited and the author has walked back claims. But you wouldn't know that from the book or its popularity.

hikarudo 6y ago
I've often wished for the same thing. I want to know what's wrong about the book before investing time in it.
joshvm 6y ago
After the Why We Sleep fiasco I'd quite like a site which peer reviews all the references in a book (could be crowd sourced wiki-style) individually. And then the book, or each chapter, gets a rating for factual correctness.
- eatonphil 6y ago
  That is a good point. Also reminds me I'd like a site that lists all the references in a book so I can more easily search them on the computer and not necessarily need to even own the book.
  - cloverich 6y ago
    That's a good thought. The next step is going in reverse, selecting the best referenced material and auto generating a quality non-fiction book from it. That's my dream.
  - joshvm 6y ago
    This is how conventional journal publishing works, so I don't see why this couldn't be implemented for books which provide a bibliography.

Dockson 6y ago

This is really cool! Is there any particular sorting on pages like https://mapfilterfold.com/articles/early_founders https://mapfilterfold.com/articles/early_founders or is it just whatever order you put them there?

odie88 6y ago
Hi, thanks! Frankly the articles (the three panels/links at the top of the home page) need more attention, but I wanted to have the feeling of "done" so I pushed the site out as-is. On those pages, books aren't ranked in any particular order, other than trying to pull attention to some slightly buried books that I do personally recommend. I'd love to hear, are there any books you'd add to those pages? The "Oddities and fun" page is simply a collection of books from my notes that stuck out as interesting while I manually approved all parsed comments and book mentions.

awb 6y ago

Interesting that https://mapfilterfold.com/ https://mapfilterfold.com/ and https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news look to be attempting the same goal but with different results. Curious what's different under the hood.

ipnon 6y ago

Would it be possible to create a similar list for the opposite purpose: Read these books to free yourself from the conventional Hacker News wisdom?

madhadron 6y ago

It says something about the disparity of intellectual depth in the community that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged shows up next to books actually worth reading like SICP, GTD, or Cialdini's Influence.

in9 6y ago
I think you can strike lines between technical and fictional books. In doing so, I would expect a difference in quality since the avg HN lurker is a technical person.
- evgen 6y ago
  Pretty much this. The average HN lurker will be reasonably sophisticated when it comes to technical subjects, but they are incredibly naive when it comes to all of those humanities subjects they skipped in university. When it comes to politics, economics, philosophy and other such subjects the average HN response vacillates between the extremes of either outright dismissal or arrogant pronouncements that are such a caricature of the Dunning-Kruger effect that you initially assume it to be satire.
  - pinkfoot 6y ago
    > …incredibly naive [about] those humanities subjects they skipped in university. Yip, but not nearly a naive as the humanity students are about technical subjects. If we are going to fix anything, we need to force our arty friends to finish with some understanding of how the world works. And by "how the world works" I mean the things that would remain unchanged even if every human vanished. Like, to be topical, exponential growth.

lbrito 6y ago

Nice! How is the site itself built? Is it a static page or do you have some sort of backend? I did something very similar for a local podcast that gives book/movie/music/etc recommendations a while ago: https://enpassant.tk/ https://enpassant.tk/ . It is statically-built with Ruby.

odie88 6y ago
Hi lbrito! The site is a Phoenix app (Elixir's popular web framework) with PostgreSQL. The pages are just Phoenix templates and I let Cowboy, the default HTTP server for Phoenix, serve the app directly... so it's not sitting behind NGINX or any similar web server that's frequently used as a reverse proxy. I used Bulma as for the CSS, just to try something I haven't used before. The only line of JS is in the dropdown menu's onChange tag, to submit the "form" when you select a book category. I like the UI on En Passant! Really clean - great use of icons so I know what the media type is at a glance as I scroll.

7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG 6y ago

This is very nice, thank you! A goodreads url in each book would be great

myu701 6y ago

This looks great. I like how it is setup and I find the value it offers to be swell. I will however complain that I shouldn't have to recaptcha myself if I took the time to enter my email address, find the email, and click confirm for it. What benefit is there to recaptcha-ing that? My complaint is in hopes that they will remove that recaptcha for other users who happen to like their privacy and don't let their browser sell everything to mailchimp. Edit: I will correct myself in that it looks like they may not have a choice according to https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/ https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/

odie88 6y ago
Hey myu701. Thanks for the link. I unticked the setting mentioned a bit lower on that page[0] to disable reCaptcha. It's not clear to me if that changes it for their landing page. Testing an email alias of mine in incognito mode _looks_ like it's gone for me. Thanks again for bringing this up. [0] https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/#Enable_reCAPTCHA https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-forms/...
- myu701 6y ago
  Hey there. Thanks for trying it. I will try a personal email rather than my work email and see if I get the same result on the same machine. Edit: It no longer recaptchas me, thanks!
ProZsolt 6y ago
This is exactly what a robot would say. Clicking on the confirmation is only proves that you own that email. I could easily automate all of the steps that you said except captcha.
- myu701 6y ago
  Ok...lets say I am a robot for hypothetical reasons. So now a robot is on a mailing list. Why is that a bad thing? You may only want human eyeballs I suppose if you were somehow making a profit off knowing your audience was all humans a la broadcast radio advertising rates based on estimated audience size, but OP is using amazon affiliate links, not ads, so that argument is out of scope?

jonfw 6y ago

What an excellent UI. It's hard to make something relying on scraped data so nice and easy to use, this nails it! Have a few books on the way now :)

secfirstmd 6y ago

Thanks this is awesome!

geospeck 6y ago

I am trying to build something similar and I was wondering if there are any legal issues with showing content from the source website into mine, in your case for example the content is the user's comments. In this page https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ under the Intellectual Property Rights is written: Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally upload to the Site. I really wonder if I need to ask for permission from each website about showing some text from their website into mine?