Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

abyjames.com

71–80 of 128 posts

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#72

Is there a way that the PageRank algorithm could be applied here?

I'm gonna use a different hack: PeopleRank. Example: If Paul Graham recommends a person, then I'll add all their recommendations. It is 1 or 0 : )

You get one of those two scores for scalability.

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#73
I'm not exactly sure how it'd be implemented with the current design, but I'd think it'd be useful to have a query in the URL so you could link http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations?query=Books to just show books, rather than pointing someone to http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations and asking them to type in "Books".

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#75
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this. Thanks for sharing. I hope you will consider one thing, and please don’t mistake it for political correctness. The phrase “from good people” is distasteful and I think we’re all better off not implying such a thing as “bad people”. If the intent is to define a division, it’s important to be specific lest we undermine our egalitarian goals. I know you don’t mean it to be exclusionary, and probably instead…

I agree. I settled on the word good because I wasn't able to find a good word (no pun intended).

I'd use great. Good people is usually used to mean decent people, whereas great people is used to mean impressive people, which may or may not be moral, as in great man theory of history.

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#77
post #56

One tiny suggestion (well, medium-sized :) Often, these recommendations come with a reason why this is a good book. You might want to include them, if possible.

It is (but I see it is not obvious). Click on the person's name. I changed the header name from person to source. Does that make it obvious?

Somewhat more. Maybe change it to "Source article" so people know there's actual text behind that?

Clicking on a name, I'd expect either a bio, or a list of things they recommended. It didn't occur to me it might be the original recommendation. (But then, it might just be lack of coffee :)

Either way, thank you for building this and collecting the data!

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#78

A few ideas: - Link the name to a list with all the recommendations by that person, use the date for a link to the place where the recommendation was made (using the date for a permalink is convention). - Link tags. - Show everyone who recommended something and sort by how many people recommended it. (For instance The Pragmatic Programmer is recommended by Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood.) - Use Amazon Affi…

Thanks for the feedback. I'm building one useful feature a time. No to amazon affiliates.

> No to amazon affiliates.

Thanks you! This shows character and actual, proper altruistic intentions.

Before reading this, I was not even going to click the link.

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#79
post #30

I always find that recommendation websites suffer in the long-term because the incentive to just keep adding more stuff (to keep the site not seem stagnant, thus make people come back) is greater than the incentive to strictly filter only super high quality things. How is this site going to tackle that problem?

I dont use any single recommendation source anymore for this reason. Its always a combination od youtube, amazon recommendations and reviews, reddit, and stackexchange sites.

Re: Show HN: Find recommendations from good people

#80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm building one useful feature a time. No to amazon affiliates.

> No to amazon affiliates. Thanks you! This shows character and actual, proper altruistic intentions. Before reading this, I was not even going to click the link.

Personally, I prefer not to use any project that has no way to make money. Life is expensive and time consuming. Projects require at least a little time and money. If that isn't reimbursed in any way, the rest of life will nearly always take precedent at some point. Affiliate links seem like a good way to solve this. I don't see where the conflict of interest lies.
Post reply on HN