Alternatives
Products that do what Shepherd 3.0 – Like wandering the aisles of your favorite bookstore does
Hi all, creator here :) - I launched Shepherd.com (https://shepherd.com/) 3 years ago on Hacker News and have added a ton since then! Here is the original Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660). I’ve interviewed 10,000+ authors & experts to get their 5 favorite reads around different topics, themes, and moods. And I’ve connected those so that you follow your curiosity around topics, authors, books, and more. Try Art Kleiner’s favorite reads on understanding AI and its effect on people:…
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Hi all, creator here :) I launched Shepherd.com on a Show HN in April 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871660), and it has come a long way. My goal with Shepherd is to create an experience that feels like wandering your local bookstore, along with little notes from authors & experts sharing why each book is one of their all-time favorites. For 2023, I surveyed 1,200+ authors to get their three favorite reads of the year. Then I crunched that data and broke it by genre, age range, and when it was published. Publisher data is a nightmare, so some of the genres are…
2023 · shepherd.com
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2021 · shepherd.com
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Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
Nov 2025 · book.sv
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Hi HN, Every year, we ask thousands of readers (and authors) to share their 3 favorite reads of the year. Now you can enter a book/author you love and see what books readers loved who also loved that book/author. Try it here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 This goes wide and doesn't try to limit itself to the genre, so you get some interesting results. What do you think? Background: I want better recommendations based on my reading history. I'm incredibly frustrated with what is out there. This system is based on 5,000 readers voting on their 3 favorite reads…
Dec 2025 · shepherd.com
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Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…
2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es
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Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting. So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph. We also felt like…
2022 · booqsi.com
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Hey HN, cofounder of Readwise here. We've been working on this cross-platform reader app for about 2 years, excited to finally share it in public beta. Probably the most notable thing that makes Reader unique is that it supports almost any content type you could want to save/read/highlight: * web pages * emails/newsletters * PDFs * ePubs * twitter threads * youtube videos (with transcripts) * RSS feeds With all of your knowledge content in one place, we built powerful reading and highlighting, as well as a bunch of novel triage/organization features, so you can actually…
2022 · readwise.io
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2016 · hackernewsbooks.com
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2020 · mapfilterfold.com
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So far I've used it to reference ideas from books I've read before. I've also used it to explore books I have not read before by asking the bot questions. Some people have told me they use it like a reading companion. They pause while reading the book if they have a question, and use Konjer to answer it.
2023 · konjer.xyz
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Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me
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We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…
2024 · hn.trieve.ai
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Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com
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I wrote an RSS reader called RSS Brain recently. The motivate is the current RSS readers either don't sort articles by priority, which makes it hard to read posts from HackerNews and Reddit, or sort it with some "smart" algorithm which I don't trust. I also like the Google News feature that can show related story from different source, but the sources are not configurable and the algorithm is not transparent either. So with RSS Brain, I implemented these features: * Recommend related articles from the feeds of your choice. It's backed by ElasticSearch and the algorithm is described on RSS…
2022 · rssbrain.com
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Would love any feedback
Sep 2025 · rhomeapp.com
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