MapFilterFold is a side project I’ve been kicking the can on for a while, it started out as a monstrous spreadsheet I maintained for a few months in 2018.
The site uses Amazon affiliate links.
There have been a few similar projects [1] [2] which create lists from links to Amazon and other stores. MFF differs by only using data from Ask HN threads about books and using book titles (or acronyms like GEB or SCIP) since most comments on those threads don’t include links. More about the data can be found on the About page.
This is also my first Elixir + Phoenix project, which was a joy to use once I got moving.
Can you change the page titles to be more descriptive? I've bookmarked a few of these pages but had to manually change the titles to have the book title in them.
On my wishlist is a book site that will also give you top positive and negative reviews for each book from high quality sources like Boston Review or The Atlantic. I like to pair reading a book with what's happened since or other ideas at the time.
I don't always remember to do this though so that's why getting these review recommendations from GoodReads (for example) would be ideal.
For example, parts of Thinking Fast and Slow have widely been discredited and the author has walked back claims. But you wouldn't know that from the book or its popularity.
After the Why We Sleep fiasco I'd quite like a site which peer reviews all the references in a book (could be crowd sourced wiki-style) individually. And then the book, or each chapter, gets a rating for factual correctness.
That is a good point. Also reminds me I'd like a site that lists all the references in a book so I can more easily search them on the computer and not necessarily need to even own the book.
That's a good thought. The next step is going in reverse, selecting the best referenced material and auto generating a quality non-fiction book from it. That's my dream.
Would Wikipedia not be the best place to do this (an objective evaluation of the literature)? With links deep linking into the book with Open Library (and Internet Archive initiative)?
I did too, and it turns out a lot of the claims are either made up (the literature doesn't support the claims, or doesn't seem to exist at all!), potentially harmful or misleading (modified plots to suit the narrative).
In hindsight some of the claims are just weird, like saying you can measure the effect of one bad night's sleep months down the line.
On the whole it got people talking about sleep, which isn't a bad thing. But, the peer review (see sibling posts) only looked at one chapter I think, so God knows what else is wrong.
I don't think anyone is doubting that you should probably get a bit more sleep, try not to blast blue lights in your face and get into a routine. Standard sleep hygiene stuff.
Tangentially related, it would be interesting to require book recommendations to always come with anti-recommendations, i.e. which books not to read. Often, I feel like there's a bias towards recommending books, after oneself committed to reading them. If I were asked to list the top 50% of books I've read (without counting), I'd probably list more than 50% of books I read.
This is fantastic! I've often come across book recommendations in HN comments and then struggled to remember where it was posted when it came time to purchase a book on topic X.
This also seems useful at aggregating different perspectives on the same book depending on the context of the thread it was mentioned in.
How is the site itself built? Is it a static page or do you have some sort of backend?
I did something very similar for a local podcast that gives book/movie/music/etc recommendations a while ago: https://enpassant.tk/ . It is statically-built with Ruby.
The site is a Phoenix app (Elixir's popular web framework) with PostgreSQL. The pages are just Phoenix templates and I let Cowboy, the default HTTP server for Phoenix, serve the app directly... so it's not sitting behind NGINX or any similar web server that's frequently used as a reverse proxy.
I used Bulma as for the CSS, just to try something I haven't used before.
The only line of JS is in the dropdown menu's onChange tag, to submit the "form" when you select a book category.
I like the UI on En Passant! Really clean - great use of icons so I know what the media type is at a glance as I scroll.
I am trying to build something similar and I was wondering if there are any legal issues with showing content from the source website into mine, in your case for example the content is the user's comments.
Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally upload to the Site.
I really wonder if I need to ask for permission from each website about showing some text from their website into mine?
Hi, thanks! Frankly the articles (the three panels/links at the top of the home page) need more attention, but I wanted to have the feeling of "done" so I pushed the site out as-is.
On those pages, books aren't ranked in any particular order, other than trying to pull attention to some slightly buried books that I do personally recommend. I'd love to hear, are there any books you'd add to those pages?
The "Oddities and fun" page is simply a collection of books from my notes that stuck out as interesting while I manually approved all parsed comments and book mentions.
This looks great. I like how it is setup and I find the value it offers to be swell.
I will however complain that I shouldn't have to recaptcha myself if I took the time to enter my email address, find the email, and click confirm for it. What benefit is there to recaptcha-ing that?
My complaint is in hopes that they will remove that recaptcha for other users who happen to like their privacy and don't let their browser sell everything to mailchimp.
Hey myu701. Thanks for the link. I unticked the setting mentioned a bit lower on that page[0] to disable reCaptcha. It's not clear to me if that changes it for their landing page.
Testing an email alias of mine in incognito mode _looks_ like it's gone for me. Thanks again for bringing this up.
Ok...lets say I am a robot for hypothetical reasons.
So now a robot is on a mailing list. Why is that a bad thing? You may only want human eyeballs I suppose if you were somehow making a profit off knowing your audience was all humans a la broadcast radio advertising rates based on estimated audience size, but OP is using amazon affiliate links, not ads, so that argument is out of scope?
It says something about the disparity of intellectual depth in the community that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged shows up next to books actually worth reading like SICP, GTD, or Cialdini's Influence.
I think you can strike lines between technical and fictional books. In doing so, I would expect a difference in quality since the avg HN lurker is a technical person.
Pretty much this. The average HN lurker will be reasonably sophisticated when it comes to technical subjects, but they are incredibly naive when it comes to all of those humanities subjects they skipped in university. When it comes to politics, economics, philosophy and other such subjects the average HN response vacillates between the extremes of either outright dismissal or arrogant pronouncements that are such a caricature of the Dunning-Kruger effect that you initially assume it to be satire.
The site uses Amazon affiliate links.
There have been a few similar projects [1] [2] which create lists from links to Amazon and other stores. MFF differs by only using data from Ask HN threads about books and using book titles (or acronyms like GEB or SCIP) since most comments on those threads don’t include links. More about the data can be found on the About page.
This is also my first Elixir + Phoenix project, which was a joy to use once I got moving.
[1] https://hackernewsbooks.com/
[2] https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/