
Show HN: The Hawaii Project – A personalized book discovery system - viking2917
http://www.thehawaiiproject.com
======
christudor
As usual with this kind of thing, I've spent about five minutes looking round
the site just to get a general feel of the thing. Here are my first
impressions:

1\. This is a great idea. I'm /always/ looking for book recommendations and I
find that Goodreads doesn't do the job for me.

2\. Thank you for giving me a 'Not yet, I just want to look around' button.
This turned a potentially irritating moment to a moment of 'Huh... that's a
nice touch'.

3\. I'm afraid I say that I think the design is horrible. Not necessarily
layout, but more the CSS, e.g. the background colour, the style of the
buttons, etc.

4\. I think there's too much stuff in the navbar at the top. This includes a
few things that I don't really know what to do with. It's all a bit cluttered,
and that makes me a bit anxious. Couldn't this be stripped down a bit?

5\. The menu is absolutely full of options, some of which seem a bit
repetitive. I've got 'Edit my authors', 'Edit my channels', 'Personalise',
etc. Isn't there a way all this kind of stuff can be put in one place?

6\. When I click 'Edit authors', I'm not really sure why I have to do this on
a separate page (or indeed why I'm telling you about /authors/ I like). Can't
I just tell you which books I like?

7\. I don't really know what 'My Articles' is. I wouldn't mind something that
/only/ dealt with books.

8\. Loading times are a /bit/ on the slow side, especially on the
'Recommendations' page.

Conclusion: Interesting idea, so I've signed up. For me, the biggest thing
that needs to improve is the general look of the site (not necessarily layout,
but the CSS), followed by the fact that everything feels a bit cluttered.

This is all just my opinion, though...!

~~~
wink
ACK on 2) - I was about to close it again when I saw the button to look
around.

I only did a few searches and sadly only found one of the books I recently
read/started (and the only "well-known" one) - the one I didn't like that
much.

~~~
viking2917
which books are we missing? want to take a look....thx.

~~~
wink
For example 'Spin' by Robert Charles Wilson and some other SciFi titles (not
many I checked)

~~~
viking2917
Thanks for passing that along. Spin is actually in the system
([http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Spin--by--Robert-
Charle...](http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Spin--by--Robert-Charles-
Wilson--51483)) but I think my keyword search ranking approach isn't picking
it up in the keyword search box...something to improve.

------
magic_beans
Is there an advantage here over Goodreads?

The design could use quite a bit of help, but otherwise this could be
something I could use.

How are the recommendations generated?

~~~
viking2917
Goodreads tends to be more of a socially-driven environment, I find that my
friends don't read what I read.

The Hawaii Project is constantly scanning what the blogosphere is writing
about in terms of books, and then matching that to your tastes and interests
(topics, authors, website sources), so the recommendations always stay fresh
and timely - vs Goodreads, which tends to be pretty static (if you like X
you'll like Y). I may not care about all the books that say, the New York
Times Book Review writes about, but if I'm into historical fiction and they
review a book of that sort, I'll get a recommendation for it.

THP also has an index of articles from the web about particular books, and the
ability to quickly browse what sites are writing about - kind of like a books-
oriented news reader

It also generates a weekly mail with books that match your interests and
authors that are being written about, so you don't have to go looking for them
or miss a book from your favorite author.

And yes, my design skills need help :)

~~~
calbear81
Would it be fair to say it's sort of like a Hype Machine but for books?

I'm also always interested in hearing about books that authors I like are
reading or maybe books that they've been influenced by.

Regarding the design, there is definitely a lot of gradients and drop shadows
happening which makes the page feel "heavy" and not relaxing like I think
Hawaii brings to mind. I'm not sure if it's that but something is making the
large grid layouts to load slowly on both my desktop and laptop.

~~~
viking2917
Very much so, like Hype Machine (which I love), with the caveat that THP is
personalized, whereas Hype Machine is more one-size-fits-all in terms of the
music it recommends, it doesn't really know whether I like EDM or Jazz and act
accordingly.

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jordanlev
FYI, I browse with cookies and localStorage disabled... your site doesn't come
up at all for me. I understand that as a logged-in user I'd need to have
cookies enabled, but for just browsing around the site it seems weird that it
wouldn't show me any content at all.

~~~
viking2917
Let me investigate. Neither of those should be required but perhaps
something's busted. Browser you're using?

~~~
jordanlev
Current version of Chrome on Mac OSX El Capitan.

I'm not using an ad blocker or anything, just have "Block sites from setting
any data" checked in Settings > Show Advanced Settings > Privacy > Content
Settings > Cookies.

Thanks.

~~~
viking2917
Thanks. I can reproduce when I set "block sites from setting any data", caused
by a 3rd party tool I use. I will have to figure some way to fix it. Thanks
for reporting. In the meantime if you want to explore you'll have to turn that
setting off... :(

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felipebueno
It's not working for me. Firefox 42/ OS X El Capitan

[http://i.imgur.com/6vlsFMY.png](http://i.imgur.com/6vlsFMY.png)

~~~
viking2917
Thanks. Looks like jquery's not loading. either it's because of load, or
perhaps you have javascript blocked? (more likely somehow load related. I'll
take a look)

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billybilly1920
they don't have "The New Turing Omnibus" service fail.

~~~
viking2917
Thanks for looking. Because I get book recommendations from the blogosphere,
older books don't get found as quickly unless someone is writing about
them.... I added in Omnibus - here: [http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-
New-Turing-Omnibus-...](http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-New-Turing-
Omnibus-Sixty-Six-Excursions-in-Computer-Science--by--A.-K.-Dewdney--186413).
Thanks!

~~~
billybilly1920
thanks, and it led me to find Turtle Geometry which looks like it could be an
interesting book.

