

Show HN: I want to give people surprisingly awesome book recommendations - grokcode
http://authoralcove.com/

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DoubleCluster
Why do I need to sign up? The "You are just a few clicks away from..." shows
me that you don't have my best interests in mind. Please let me pick three
books, provide a recommendation and then offer me to create an account.

Now I'm going to close my browser, get some sleep and completely forget about
your supposedly awesome book recommendations.

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grokcode
Thanks, this is an interesting idea. I actually need more than 3 books to
generate useful recommendations...more like 20 ratings. The other problem is
that this is still beta stage and the algorithm to create your book list is
very computionally intensive. It takes _days_ not seconds to compute
everybody's recommendations. The choice is between good recommendations
delivered after waiting, or not that great recommendations delivered
instantly.

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aasarava
I'd like to see projects like this work, particularly because I haven't always
been pleased with the recommendations from Goodreads.

That said, your site's going to need more information about why it's any
better before I sign up for an account. What genres do you cover? How wide is
your database of books? Is it possible to offer a trial w/o an account? E.g.,
enter some books and get recommendations -- and then ask if I want to create
an account w/ these settings so I can continue to get more recommendations?

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jlees
I really like the idea of a more content-based approach to book discovery. It
feels like a complex problem to me, since there are so many dimensions one
could pivot on; and how to find them in the first place? As an example, I
dislike first-person books even if they might seem like really good fits for
the kinds of topics I read. There's also a clustering issue around "well, I
like sappy space opera when I'm on vacation but more cerebral fantasy epics on
the train". But good luck with solving that.

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rastasheep
Where we can see how's your service different from other recommendation
services (there are a lot of it nowadays) and why it's better ?

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lox
I got a CSRF verification failure on signup.

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grokcode
Thanks lox. That problem should be fixed now.

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bmallerd
It's not. I'm getting it too.

