Show HN: All books recommended on Ask HN

14 points

2 years ago

After reading this Ask HN post [1] (and buying too many books), I found myself going through old posts about book recommendations. I wanted to find all books recommended in those posts and save the top ones for future book shopping sprees.

This has been done before [2, 3], but I wanted to get books that were recommended, not just mentioned.

I used the Algolia API [4] to get all Ask HN posts about books, reviewed them and filtered out ones that were too specific e.g best books to learn math. The comments were then sent to the Open AI API [5] to extract books that are recommended.

I then grouped them, but books can be mentioned with different names (Godel, Gödel, GEB?), and GPT4 wasn't doing a good job finding similar titles in a long list (25k titles). So that part had to be done mostly manually.

Finally, I added a page to browse by posts, some stats (like users who recommended the most books), and highlighted mentioned books in the comments.

I hope you find a good book! Feedback is welcome :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756432 [2] https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app [3] https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ [4] https://hn.algolia.com/api [5] https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/introduction