Shepherd 3.0 – Like wandering the aisles of your favorite bookstore
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:…
In plain words
Shepherd is a book discovery platform that curates reading recommendations from interviews with over 10,000 authors and experts. Users explore book suggestions organized by topics, themes, and moods, then follow connections between books, authors, and subjects based on their interests. The platform lets readers discover what experts recommend on specific subjects and find related books through tagged themes, functioning as a guided bookstore experience rather than a traditional search engine.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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: https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-ai-and-its-eff... Under each book, you can click “What is this book about?” to explore different topics and genres that interest you. I am working on adding themes and other fun connections. Or you can explore things like... Places to explore if you like the book Sapiens: https://shepherd.com/search/book/1504 S. B. Divya on her favorite realistic near-future science fiction: https://shepherd.com/best-books/realistic-near-future-scienc... Places to explore if you like hard sci-fi: https://shepherd.com/search/shelf/12622 Places to explore if you like Stephen King: https://shepherd.com/search/author/4826 Azby Brown’s favorite books on Japanese carpentry and construction: https://shepherd.com/best-books/japanese-carpentry-and-const... Malayna Evan’s favorite reads on badass women who left a mark on the ancient world: https://shepherd.com/best-books/badass-women-who-left-a-mark... Shepherd is bootstrapped, and I’ve got many reader features coming soon! I have a newsletter about building the project and early access to new features here: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/newsletter-for-readers What do we use to build this? Python, Django, Heroku, Postgre, Cloudflare, NLP/ML for Wikipedia topic IDs via Wikifier (https://wikifier.org), Nielsen’s book API database (publisher data + Library of Congress data), and Cloudinary. My email is [email protected] if you want to share ideas or suggestions :) Thanks, Ben
Does the same job
all alternatives →- C1Crunching 1,200 Authors' Favorite Reads of 20232023 · shepherd.com · ▲149
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…
- SCShepherd.com – Discover books in a new way, like wandering a bookstore2021 · shepherd.com · ▲313
- ISI 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…
- SWSee what readers who loved your favorite book/author also loved to readDec 2025 · shepherd.com · ▲134
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…
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, April 2024
the whole month →
Supabase▲2,328The Postgres developer platform is now generally available
Dev tools · 2024 · supabase.com
Cal.com Platform▲1,602Build your pixel-perfect booking experience with Atoms
Dev tools · 2024 · cal.com
deco.cx 2.0▲1,080Build web apps 10x faster with Deno, JSX, TS & Tailwind
Dev tools · 2024 · decocms.com
