
Show HN: A browser extension that adds Hacker News comments to Goodreads - spookyuser
https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads
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spookyuser
Hi everyone, I've been working on this extension for more than the one weekend
I promised myself, and hope there are some people that find it useful :)

I've personally been using this in my browser while I've been building it and
have definitely enjoyed having it around.

One of my favorite things about HN are the book recommendations you can find
from other users, especially in those long "Ask HN: What are you reading"
threads. I've found some of my favorite books by going through those kinds of
threads. At the same time, while I am a Goodreads user, I almost never look at
the user reviews at the bottom of Goodreads because I find they do such a bad
job at selling me on why I should read a certain book. Often, they're just
beat by beat summaries of what occurs in a book and don't say anything about
why you might _want_ to read it. Whereas, I think the opposite is true on HN.
When people recommend books here it's, in my experience, brief and much more
meaningful, and seeing a single person on HN saying: "this is my favorite book
ever" \+ child comments that say the same thing, makes me much more interested
in reading a book than almost anything else could. So, I wanted to bring that
experience to Goodreads and that is why I decided to build this.

It's far from perfect, and will display comments that aren't relevant just as
soon as it will not display enough comments. However, after quite a bit of
tweaking, I think the extension is at the point where it's pretty useful -
even with these issues.

I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have. Thanks!

~~~
iforgotpassagai
Can you do "most popular books by HN users" or "most popular books by keyword"
with a subset of this code?

Maybe hn.algolia would break on too many queries, though...

~~~
spookyuser
I think it's certainly possible. In fact, I think it might already exist, is
[https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-
news](https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news) kind of what
you're talking about?

