HN Explorer

Show HN: Hacker News clone for books

10 points by marai2 ↗ HN
I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good condition!" type of reviews drive the signal-to-noise ratio down. So I decided to scratch my own itch with this project. It's a bare bones MVP, shamelessly copying HN's look-and-feel (even on mobile!) but Im hoping it will get used for quality comments and recommendations on books. Would love to get some feedback. Thanks! marai2books@gmail.com or http://twitter.com/vivalabooks1

http://www.vivalabooks.com

6 comments

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krapp
It looks nice, although the contrast on the top links makes them almost unreadable for me.

What did you build it with, and is there source code available?

I'm always interested in how people put these together.

marai2
Thanks for the feedback! I've adjusted the colors so hopefully the contrast is a little better. I was trying to differentiate book categories that have not yet had any discussions in them. The idea being that if people are interested in a specialized category say "Computers > Programming > Elixir" they could easily identify categories where there is no content.

Believe it or not one of my aims in doing this project was to put my knowledge of Haskell to use on a practical pet project. However my Haskell-fu is not strong enough yet so this is built on the language of the (lesser) Gods :-) http://xkcd.com/224/

sideproject
Cool! I run a site called "HelloBox", which lets you create HN-like communities! Would love for you to check it out - although you've created your own clone! :) http://hellobox.co
marai2
That looks very neat! I will definitely take it out for a spin to get some ideas! Thanks!