nowfound

Life & fun · September 29, 2022

A tool to find books outside gender echo chambers

Hi HN. I made this mostly for my own curiosity. Many of us end up reading books by or about people of specific genders. So it's interesting to find books that are outside that echo chamber but still mostly _inside_ the topical or affinity area we are most engaged in. Doing this, it helps us to each expand our reading while elevating underrepresented authors, topics and character-types in the books we read. For myself, I found it most interesting to find more female writers in the topic area of economics and technology, where I've experienced a high concentration of male writers. From the…

A tool to find books outside gender echo chambers launched on September 29, 2022 with 5 votes, #1,231 of 3,464 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.

What it does

Explore new books and expand your reading across genders

📚 TL;DR: This tool lets you input up to five of your favourite books and receive an estimate of the gender bias you are likely exposed to. It'll then give you book recommendations that invert that bias, in order to expand your reading! Try it out by entering one of your favourites in the input above. We are, each of us, caught within an echo chamber that unconsciously influences our understandings and beliefs. A couple of years ago I released "Break The Bubble" , a tool which saught to give book recommendations outside of your echo chamber. This newer tool, however, is specifically about gender bias . Imagine sitting in a library of limited size, tailored perfectly to your tastes. If we…from abooklikefoo.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN. I made this mostly for my own curiosity. Many of us end up reading books by or about people of specific genders. So it's interesting to find books that are outside that echo chamber but still mostly _inside_ the topical or affinity area we are most engaged in. Doing this, it helps us to each expand our reading…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber2020 · abooklikefoo.com · ▲344

    Find new books that break you out of your echo chamber!

  • A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads2022 · booqsi.com · ▲478

    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…

  • IS
    I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation modelNov 2025 · book.sv · ▲606

    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…

  • I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · ▲285

    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…

  • MB
    Meta book recommendations from Ask HN threads2020 · mapfilterfold.com · ▲273
  • Reader - Uniting Writers and Readers2023 · ▲96

    The complete blogging ecosystem for readers and writers

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, September 2022

the whole month →
  • IM

    Life & fun · 2022 · dogbunnypuzzle.com

  • A couple of years ago, I had an interesting idea. What if there was a marketplace where all the underlying tech was open-source? The order management system, the storefront, customer support, etc. The marketplace would simply connect to the seller’s infra instead of locking them in. If, for some reason, the seller is removed from the marketplace, their software stays with them and they can continue accepting orders directly. This model can be used to disrupt any marketplace from AirBNB to UberEats: building tech for home renters and restaurants and later, leveraging that to build a competing…

    Dev tools · 2022 · openship.org

  • Polywork▲1,214

    Discover opportunities to collaborate

    Life & fun · 2022

  • xTiles▲1,036

    Organize your ideas & projects visually

    Work · 2022 · xtiles.app

  • Arcade 2.0▲1,026

    The easiest way to showcase your product

    Life & fun · 2022 · arcade.software

  • Maven▲978

    100+ live courses taught by experts, education reimagined

    Life & fun · 2022 · maven.com