All books mentioned on the recent Ask HN best books thread

After reading this Ask HN post [1] (and buying too many books), I found myself going through old posts about book recommendations. I wanted to find all books recommended in those posts and save the top ones for future book shopping sprees. This has been done before [2, 3], but I wanted to get books that were recommended, not just mentioned. I used the Algolia API [4] to get all Ask HN posts about books, reviewed them and filtered out ones that were too specific e.g best books to learn math. The comments were then sent to the Open AI API [5] to extract books that are recommended. I then…

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…

Get the essentials of top books in under 3 minutes

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…

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