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Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

mapfilterfold.com

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Re: Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

#2
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/

[2] https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/

Re: Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

#3
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.

Re: Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

#6
post #2

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…

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 :)

Re: Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

#7
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.

Re: Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads

#10
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.

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