A new way to read books, magnifying in and out
After watching The Odyssey, I thought it would be cool to check out some scenes from the source in detail, but I don't have time to read the whole book. So I came up with a sort of zoom/microscope, that allows to see the whole book at a glance and then zoom in (by pinching) on the part I'm interested in. I can do so down to the actual source text and get the authentic feel the author intended, at the same time I better understand where am I in the text and also the character and places are clickable so I can quickly orient myself on the context. Moreover each character has relationships…
A new way to read books, magnifying in and out launched on August 19, 2026 with 7 votes, #1,411 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Descend from the whole poem to a single verse — Homer
In the maker’s words, at launch
After watching The Odyssey, I thought it would be cool to check out some scenes from the source in detail, but I don't have time to read the whole book. So I came up with a sort of zoom/microscope, that allows to see the whole book at a glance and then zoom in (by pinching) on the part I'm interested in. I can…
Does a similar job
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I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · ▲285Hey 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…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
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