I read the title as "I scraped 38 book reviews". Time to get reading glasses...
Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
111–120 of 275 posts
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#112I think this is cool and super fast -- kudos on whatever tech you needed to tackle to make it so. I don't see anyone saying safety or ethics, so I'll just put it out there that it has some safety and ethical considerations you should consider. Consider "inflammatory" books and how they could be used to harm a group of people. Although I recognize folks post this "publicly", I think the intersection feature provides m…
I don't want "safety" or "ethics" if the requirements for them are banning or hiding books based on somebody's ideology whether or not it agrees with mine.
I'm not asking him to hide the book recommendations, I'm talking about the "intersect" user feature not doxxing people reading them.
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#113You could color code results from the same author or from the same series as an already added book, since the user most likely already knows about them. Perhaps a toggle to filter these out altogether.
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#114Very fast. Thanks for building it.
Besides title, I'd like to provide suggestion on what type of books I am looking for.
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#115In some sense, it seems to work well , but the results are sort of nothing special and that's not what I'd personally hope for. I put in three books that are unrelated and got results that compare to a standard book store, either from the same series or other meme startup tech bro recommendations that I'd often literally see on the same shelf. I can't say it's not good, because obviously that's how people browse book…
I would agree the results are generally OK but do not feel magical in most cases (I think in some specific cases they do though). The results can be not great if you add books across many disciplines. For instance if you add "The Elements of Typographic Style" and "The Design of Everyday Things" ( https://book.sv/#671857,18518 ), you do get "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" but under its German name "Rastersysteme für…
Wow, quite impressive actually, some of those additional entries are quite good as well, with Ellen Lupton, Steve Krugman, Erik Spiekermann, and then also 1984 and Mark Manson for some reason. Would the latter few be because they're just super widely read/recommended/connected regardless of genre?
Great project anyway, thanks for sharing and responding to my stream of consciousness, I certainly didn't mean to be insulting and hope my tone didn't come across that way.
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#116This is really great - refreshing to have something that's instantly useful, with no need to signup/login. Really fast, immediately helpful - this is wonderful.
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#117Thank you very much, I have always wished for something like this to be part of Goodreads itself. The intersect function especially will help me find hidden gems that other likeminded people have found. I'm looking forward to find out what books I have missed all my life.
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#118Echoing what everyone else has said here - awesome site, love how fast it was. I did notice that when I put in a single book in a series (in my case Going Postal, Discworld #33) that tended to dominate the rest of the selection. That does make sense, but I don't want recommendations for a series I'm already well into. Also noticed that a few books (Spycraft by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, Tribalism is Dumb by An…
Yes I would say the handling of series is probably the biggest problem. Once my test metrics got to a point I was happy with and my quality spot checks passed (can I follow the models recommendations from one generic history book to Steven Runciman, also making sure popular books don't always dominate the results), I was ready to release because I had been working on this project for so long. The solution is probably…
Releasing is the right choice, well done with this it’s really cool.
I’ve only had a short play but a solution to this problem might be to show authors rather than books. Or select authors outside of the list the user has shared and then a top n (1,3,5) for each of those.
I feel like that’s how you’d recommend to someone else - type of book -> unknown author -> best matching few books from them.
After that the other side would be trying to find some diversity (if you think I’d like author X, personally you might suggest three different styles of book from them rather than three very similar books from them)
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#119Bless this man! I despise Goodreads but continue to use it, because there are no real alternatives. It feels like they outsourced the creation of that website to some cheap consulting agency in a low cost location and then left it at that. For example, Goodreads hasn't updated its outdated version of React in years.
For a while now I have really wanted good book recommendations matching my tastes. The LLMs suck at this (likely due to the mode collapse that Karpathy mentioned in his excellent podcast appearance on Dwarkesh) and Amazon is very good but only recommends based on the current book you're browsing.
I will try this out now! But could you increase the number of books fed to the recommender or maybe get the top-64 highest rated books instead of just the most or least recent 64?
Re: Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
#120Great work! Some five years ago I was day dreaming about recommendation engine for movies where you could say "hey Ciri, give me a good gangster flick", and it will come up with something that you haven't seen yet but you'd definitely love. To my amazement almost everyone, even true AI believers, thought it was impossible to achieve. :d But my question is - having such huge dataset, do we really need AI for it? SASRe…
> To my amazement almost everyone, even true AI believers, thought it was impossible to achieve.
I mean. Is it possible? Hey Zeroq give me a good gangster flick please?
How will you know what i have seen and what I haven’t yet? How will you know what movies I like? Are there even good gangster flicks i would enjoy and haven’t seen yet?
The way the problem is phrased it sounds like your dream recommender has two properties: “it doesn’t receive any other information than what is in the prompt” and “it always recommends a movie you haven’t seen and will enjoy”. Those together are what makes your dream recommendation engine impossible. If you relax those then of course it is possible. That’s just a recommendation engine.