I really hate to be a naysayer, but this seems doomed to failure.
For a start, people don't want to be challenged. I'd love to know how much of the bubbling is self imposed. E.g. Ignoring everything else until Google, etc, gets the hint.
That and the fact that everyone seems to feel time poor. Sorting through what's valuable and what's not is a burden. I've tried handling the firehose new Hacker News, or even worse the RSS feeds for all the sites that typically posted. Doesn't last long.
Having said that there was an interesting paper on using Machine Learning to summarise the other day. I wonder if that could help with the snippets problem.
I feel bubbled by accident and I am actively trying to get out of it. That doesn't mean I would read anything, it just means I want more options presented to me through various avenues than currently are. But perhaps that's the issue.
As the internet and it's use has trended away from user driven discovery and toward curated feed driven discovery, it's become harder to pull yourself away from the feed of just-okay content and the content is in a very narrow band of safe vs interesting. It's also almost never productive, just mildly interesting.
My mind is bored and I know that's not from lack of available subjects. It's just that the pipes and feeds I set up have become stale. I don't believe more pipes are the answer, I believe a shift in paradigm is needed for me. Cut the pipes and retreat back to a curiosity driven discovery approach. HN doesn't know what I'm curious about at any given moment, nor can it know what discoveries would drive my development and progress forward, so it doesn't suffice.
I slowly let feeds and aggregators replace my curiosity and now I am out of practice. I'm not saying I need to replace HN and others, but certainly to be mindful that I shouldn't forget to find things for myself and limit how much of my mindshare I give to the aggregators.
To be cheesy, it seems I have the world of knowledge at my fingertips, but my hands lay still while content streams to my screen. I do not fetch knowledge to be used, I am fed knowledge to placate myself.
All this is grand exaggeration and I am much more functional than that makes it sound, but it's a real problem and I think many others are in the same boat.
Regarding value: this is a complex subject. Within bubbles, I think value outside bubbles is often unfairly minimized. See American politics, for example. Most Democrats think ALL Republicans are stupid science-hating climate-change deniers, while most Republicans think ALL Democrats are history-deaf socialists. Neither mindset is true, but you'd never know it if you remain trapped in the other bubble.
But on a personal level, everyone's different. I have an internal alarm that goes off when I feel like I've been thinking a certain way for too long.
Haha yeah, will need to speed that up somehow. Most quotes I've seen on the web are more like vague aphorisms instead of insightful ideas.
I personally prefer (and think people will benefit much more) from the latter.
FEEDBACK EDIT: unless, I dunno, am I wrong? Would you rather see a random book cover with the generic Amazon/Goodreads description? You'd get much more variety that way.
Maybe the best strategy is to show the generic description when it's a book you haven't personally written the description for. That way you can concentrate on the books you love or find most interesting, while still providing a huge variety to your users.
Yeah I'll look into doing that. This is my ~4th attempt (after countless iterations) of book-related projects and I have yet to find a reliable API for useful book data.
Personally I'd rather see a well curated and thought out list than random books. If I want random books. If I want a random book I can just walk blindly into a library.
Apart from the curated excerpt, which is an excellent idea, a summary (e.g. the stuff on the back cover or on the Amazon page for the book) would be useful to give people an idea of what the book is about.
- After being burned on numerous projects/ventures (one of which actually used the very database this extension now uses!), I'm not thinking of profitability and scalability right now. Best case scenario: this earns $1-2k dollars a month in donations/grants from individuals, foundations, etc. to hire a part-time contractor to get contributions from a variety of professionals, academics, etc...and maybe another part-time contractor to promote the extension to schools and libraries.
- Google Books search usually works well.
- Anything goes. I don't underestimate a layman's ability to understand (or at least somehow benefit) from highly technical work [1]. Obviously, I don't want technical snippets to be over-represented, but I keep track of snippets by subject, time period, and other metrics. I'll open up access to these metrics when it makes sense to do so.
Has anyone actually read Gödel, Escher, Bach, or is it just one of those "popular books people pretend to have read after reading the first chapter"? It looks intriguing, but at the same time very heavy.
I personally found it 'heavy'. There's a lot to think about and take in. As it's not like reading typical technical books or papers. There's a great charm/fun and cleverness once things fall into place.
There's an excellent MIT course for it. All the Lectures on Youtube as well.
Yes, I've read it twice, it's fun, actually not very heavy at all. Yes parts of it you may not fully understand (I remember being lost once or twice), but he gives a nice gloss if you don't understand all the technical details and it covers a lot of ground. It's more a layperson's overview of lots of subjects than a serious academic work, but is all the more powerful for that.
My favourite bits were a dialogue on the six part ricercar and a piece of music that can shake the player to pieces, it's full of playful but profound little ideas, definitely worth reading.
It's one of the best books I've ever read. I wouldn't call it heavy, it's just very long and very dense, but I found it pretty captivating and easy to read.
Well it is literally a heavy book, but I take heavy to mean difficult to read and understand. GEB for me was easy to read and hard to put down, but there are a ton of ideas and layers packed in to every chapter.
I read it, and I feel it's one of the best non-fiction books I've read. I think the math can be tricky and there are parts I had trouble understanding, but I think the book was amazing and that Hofstadter was onto something really important about the nature of recursivity and the role it might play in thinking.
Not heavy, exactly, though I guess it can get slightly repetitive after a while (or maybe "loopy" is a more fitting word :]). It's actually quite entertaining.
If you want heavy-but-popular, try Foucault's Pendulum or House of Leaves …
I've read it probably about five times, over the years. I'm neither a mathematician nor a musician, so there are parts that I still don't fully get. But so it goes.
For the gist of it, I recommend I Am a Strange Loop.
The dialogues (Achilles & Turtle) between the "essay" chapters are insanely enjoyable if you like wordplay and divertissement writing. "Crab Canon" is amongst the pages of literature I can re-read ad infinitum.
It gets somewhat harder to follow as it proceeds, and the lack of a "plot" makes it easy to abandon it, but I'd still recommend it.
Read bunch of chapters from here and there but didn't complete it. Learned some interesting concepts that I wasn't familiar with, didn't seem like it had any central focus, went on to various tangents. I was recommended to read this to learn about AI, on that, I didn't find it very interesting.
I read it in high school too and found it very thought-provoking; I still think about some of its ideas. You'll definitely get more out of the book if you put effort into it, but it's not heavy like reading Knuth or SICP or anything on category theory, which I never made it all the way through.
I'm not sure how well GEB has aged though since it seemed very tied to a particular point in AI history. Has anyone read it recently?
I read it a few years ago, I think it's aged very well. The parts about art, music, and math are pretty much timeless, and I think the overall theme of AI is general and high-level enough to not really be tied to one era of computer science. You're not going to learn much that can be practically applied to contemporary AI techniques, but that's not really the purpose of the book.
Also read it in high school. Could only read about 2-3 pages at a time before brain was overwhelmingly & delightfully engaged and had to go have a long think.
I'm reading it right now actually, and I actually do find it pretty heavy. That being said, I really enjoy it and find it surprising how applicable the arguments he makes in the book are to the conversations today surrounding AI. Would highly recommend
I think besides some of the excessive explanations about how to generate sequences and strange loops yourself it is quite fun, though I read it slowly; it's not a book you can digest faster than a month or two imo.
I can't edit my post anymore, but I would like to say thanks for all the comments. It was a bit off-topic, but I've wondered about this for some time. Will give it a try this summer.
Read it when it came out, then worked on getting friends and family to read it (rare for me). I recently suggested it to my daughter. I should re-read myself!
I'm a big reader, about 1 book a week or more so this is very helpful to me. One click integration to add to my "to-read" shelf on Goodreads would be massively appreciated.
I love the idea of introducing serendipity. A bold idea: reach out to Amazon: 1. Kindle users have marked numerous snippets for their favorite books, and the snippets marked by most users can be better than your own selection. 2. A link to the books on Amazon can be good to both the user and to you (affiliate program?), that could be your business model maybe.
Cool idea, but not sure why it's a new-tab thing? When I open a new tab I'm usually going to do something, I don't want to be distracted. Would make more sense to me as a one-page site where you just reload to get a random book. Anyway thanks for sharing and best of luck!
Thanks. It's funny you say that, because I made this after making a 1-page website and then a mobile app. People liked those, but engagement cratered because people had no reason to open up a whole new website or app just to discover new books.
So I made this to solve that. To each their own!
Regarding distraction...it's a personal thing. I've been running the extension on my own browser for a few days and I usually just ignore it when I open a tab with purpose.
I think having a single-page website is very valuable since it will allow people to use this as a homepage in any browser, without requiring an extension to be installed.
Another suggestion, now that I have this set as homepage, is to reduce the load time as much as possible. I expect it to load instantaneously, with no javascript or custom fonts - those are luxuries :) Ideally generate a static page for each book and serve one randomly.
Well done on launching, this looks interesting. I just want to add a very subjective caveat, which really has nothing to do with your achievement. Personally, I find my ability to absorb information is contingent upon my staying in a single realm for either a concentrated or a long period of time. This sounds self-explanatory, but I really mean that I can't grasp even fairly simple concepts unless I've encountered them and read about them in more than one or two books. It's as if I require a kind of mental seed-bed for even the crudest thought to grow. So to read a book about mathematics, followed by a book about agriculture, etc etc, is bound to leave me bewildered. Again, this is just me, I'm sure your app will be useful and diverting for many people.
(Parenthetically, it reminds me of the advice Charles Olson wrote to a younger writer: "Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years)".)
It's interesting to see humility cited in an explanation of why someone created something that suggests you read what he, or those curators he eventually chooses to whom to delegate, thinks you should read.
That's why I'm making every effort to expand the sources of these suggestions by crowd-sourcing them as much as possible...while also maintaining a collection of topical, temporal, geographic, and other metrics on my side to ensure the collection doesn't start swaying in any particular directions.
And a good chunk of the existing collection is already sourced from others who've used my previous book apps.
The process is still young so it's imperfect, but improving. Do you have any suggestions how I can do better?
Speaking of humility, it must've taken a good lack of humility on your part to make such assumptions without knowing the details of my process or the background of this effort.
> The process is still young so it's imperfect, but improving. Do you have any suggestions how I can do better?
Publish your book list, your selection process, and your metrics, to enable independent evaluation. I looked for such information and didn't find it; if it's there, surface it clearly. If you're presenting the balanced, apolar perspective you claim to seek, rather than some flavor of "alternative facts", this should not pose an issue, I think.
As for the rest, I wouldn't feel special about it. In these times, I see no reason why anyone claiming political
motives, and apparently declining any meaningful transparency in sources and methods, merits any kind of credibility. Your claims are your claims, and prove nothing beyond that you've made them. You have an opportunity to substantiate them. Perhaps you will do so.
I noted elsewhere in the thread that I plan to open access to that information when it makes sense. This is a weekend project and I really didn't expect this much attention this soon!
But you made me realize just how important this issue really is. So I just added a Transparency section (link on very bottom of main page) with the titles of all books currently in the system, along with a link to a public Google Form showing all suggestions and how they were handled. I was using Typeform before but results were private.
It's not as thorough as what you had in mind, but I'll put that in place over time.
I suggest crawling Goodreads for books and quotes, rather than crowdsourcing: you could instantly have 3 million books and quotes added to the site.
You might argue that this is against the idea of your site (you seem attached to the serendipity idea) but, if you are crowd-sourcing books and quotes, you'll end up getting something very similar to this with a lot more work. Look at the books and quotes you already have -- they are all in the top few percent of Goodreads, and the quotes have already been selected.
The point is not that you don't want to use algorithms; the point is that you want an algorithm that allows for serendipitous exploration.
All very easy to do! Am happy to do myself if you put the site up on github.
Hey, yeah I'm going to implement something more automated to find quotes. I have nothing against doing that. Only relying on submissions is unsustainable.
As long as quality remains high and variety is verifiably strong, it doesn't matter how the quotes are obtained.
This was more of a proof-of-concept, and I already had a database of books from a previous project, so it was a convenient starting point.
Cool idea, I like seeing book related projects on HN.
Small suggestion: Slow down the image carousel on the homepage it moves to quickly to process what it's showing you. Also it would be neat to able integrate this into other projects, for example I like https://momentumdash.com/ (unaffiliated user) and I'd rather have this than a quote of the day or what not.
After stumbling upon of 5 /100,000,000 I personally would like to have ~3 sentence summaries rather than snippets. Theres probably a db out there somewhere
I really really want to support Firefox, and there is a way to override new tab pages, but a work-around and not official (at least, that's my understanding).
I saw somewhere that official support should be coming in Firefox 57. I plan to implement as soon as it's available.
Unsplash is another perfect example of doing nice stuff with Service Worker. Someone should do it. Then you would only need a Chrome Extension that randomizes between URLs for the new tab.
Again, you don't need a Chrome extension to randomize between URLs. Just write a simple HTML+Javascript page that redirects to a random URL from a list, and set it as your start page.
There seems to be either a problem with your randomisation script or else (with all power to you for shipping) lauched with you a really small data set. Well not really small, just books i have had suggested >3 and a few more >2 times, which surprises me having taken the app title as an achievement rather than an aim.
I didn't want to comment till I had the extension installed for a few hours, and now that I have here are my points:
- I love it, it is making me so hungry to read more and the snippets are great.
- I hate it, because now my reading list is going to go from "I'll only ever finish this in my retirement" to "there is no point to keeping a reading list as its now 100,000,000 books"
I really enjoy it, the only issue is that it is a bit of a distraction when I am about to do something.
1) Pre-fetch the data such that the page can be immediately rendered when opening a new tab. Seeing a 1+ second loading animation for something done as often as opening a new tab introduces unnecessary friction.
2) Retain a history such that the user can see which books they have had shown to them so they don't suddenly lose a suggestion by closing a tab.
1) agreed, will implement this in a future release.
2) books cache for ~10 seconds for this reason, but yes i see why history would help. it's a popular request so i'll also add this in a future release.
TL;DR: that was a mistake in 1.0, and it was quickly removed in 1.1.
The #2 feature request was to show Chrome's Top Sites list somewhere on the page (you know, those sites Chrome shows by default on the New Tab page). So I implemented it, and that required a new permission called 'topSites' which sounded innocent, so I did it.
I guess I should've looked into the details, because I had no idea it would ask users to read all sites they've ever visited...all I needed to see were the top 8 (in order to show links, not harvest the data).
But still that's a no-no. I can see why it'd sound shady, and I'd be wary of granting such permissions myself. The people who wanted that top sites list will have to get by some other way.
In hindsight, I should've done more research before requesting the permission : / Lesson learned.
Is there a way to limit the tabs that it opens on? I think this would be nice to have when I'm trying to waste time but if I'm trying to open tabs for work I could see this getting really annoying. Looks cool though :)
I imagine it's only for new blank tabs, which typically have some frequent visited sites listed on them. I can't see how it would effect productivity (well, unless you often click through to the books).
Opening a new tab is a channel for getting people's attention. Have you tried to do something else in the new tab instead of showing books? Is anything other than books more valuable?
JGreat project and I just added it to my browser. Could you please add reviews or ratings? I want to know that a book has been favorably reviewed before investing time in reading it.
Snippets cache for ~10 seconds. Also keep in mind the library of snippets isn't huge yet, and selection is totally random, so there will be repetition.
For a start, people don't want to be challenged. I'd love to know how much of the bubbling is self imposed. E.g. Ignoring everything else until Google, etc, gets the hint.
That and the fact that everyone seems to feel time poor. Sorting through what's valuable and what's not is a burden. I've tried handling the firehose new Hacker News, or even worse the RSS feeds for all the sites that typically posted. Doesn't last long.
Having said that there was an interesting paper on using Machine Learning to summarise the other day. I wonder if that could help with the snippets problem.