
Show HN: Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads - odie88
https://mapfilterfold.com/
======
odie88
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/)

~~~
btrettel
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
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!

------
eatonphil
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.

~~~
joshvm
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.

~~~
vardhanw
Would you minding pointing to what the fiasco was about. I read the book based
on all round positive reviews and recommendations.

~~~
burkaman
[https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/](https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/)

~~~
odie88
There have been a few discussions about it on HN as well, where Alexey Guyzey,
author of the criticism linked, joins in on the conversation:

(4 months ago)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850)

(1 month ago)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958)

------
awb
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.

------
julvo
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.

------
disposedtrolley
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.

------
jonfw
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 :)

------
lbrito
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
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.

------
geospeck
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?

------
Dockson
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
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.

------
myu701
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
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/...](https://mailchimp.com/help/about-recaptcha-for-signup-
forms/#Enable_reCAPTCHA)

~~~
myu701
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!

------
ipnon
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?

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

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

------
7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG
This is very nice, thank you! A goodreads url in each book would be great

------
secfirstmd
Thanks this is awesome!

------
ponitozhekoni
Awesome. Thank you.

------
madhadron
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
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
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
> …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.

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

