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40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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sanxiynonJan 6, 2017

What's silly about it? If AI could write (for example) Fifty Shades of Grey, it would be super impressive.

Tade0onJan 19, 2021

Where, even in the best, you'll find 1/10th the substance you'll find in the best of books

That's assuming people read the best books.

Let's not forget that Fifty Shades of Grey was the best selling book of the decade (in the US):

https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/20...

StevePerkinsonJune 18, 2015

Eek... that's a rather unfortunate name choice. The "Gor" saga is an infamous series of books spanning the past 50 years, basically the sci-fi/fantasy equivalent of "Fifty Shades of Grey".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor

https://www.google.com/search?q=gor&biw=1920&bih=947&source=...

ZimahlonFeb 15, 2013

bdsm-style desires appear to be more common than is commonly depicted in the media.

It has become only less taboo to talk about recently, coming to the mainstream in books like "Fifty Shades of Grey".

globular-toastonFeb 17, 2021

Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the best selling books of all time. Almost all the women your age have read it or seen the film. You should too.

josteinkonSep 19, 2012

Gruber really doesn't write reviews. He writes Fifty shades of grey for Apple fanboys.

His writing serves little purpose sans as a base for analysis of how the Apple RDF affects basic reasoning.

silverorioleonApr 13, 2019

I did read it. I decided not to take life advice from someone who writes, about a two-year-old child: “I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn’t. But it would have been better for him if I had.” It’s a ‘joke’, but it’s a weird joke. I believe he thinks this over-aggression makes him seem dominant and powerful; in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises about throwing it is just odd. I can see why young men on the internet find it appealing to be told that being aggressive is actually cool and powerful and good, but that doesn’t actually make it good advice.

I also don’t agree with his sexual-marketplace ideas about how women choose mates, and why it’s a good thing for women to choose men who behave badly towards them because they’ll change: “[female lobsters] identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different species, including humans. ... His aggression has made him successful, so he’s likely to react [to the female] in a dominant, irritable manner. Furthermore, he’s large, healthy and powerful. It’s no easy task to switch his attention from fighting to mating. (If properly charmed, however, he will change his behaviour towards the female. This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all time, and the eternal Beauty-and-the-Beast plot of archetypal romance. This is the pattern of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.)” Is this good advice or information for men or women? Personally, I don’t think so, but since it bears absolutely no relation to how I chose my partner, I suppose Peterson would say I am some kind of outlier or unusual female. Readers may make their own minds up about the quote.

rdtsconApr 13, 2019

> This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all time,

There is something strange about that book being so popular.

I think one can argue that women have been socialized to want aggressive men so that becomes a common fantasy vs it's a biologically based phenomenon. I wonder if there is a way to compare how popular the book is in relation to how strongly stereotypical the education and culture is.

defterGooseonMay 5, 2021

And then in the midst of the #MeToo movement, you have books like Fifty Shades of Grey setting sales records, and you're like, "Hol' up".

I think the answer here is that the expectations being thrown into the ring from all parties are unrealistic and self-serving, and the only true bastion of sanity is the one provided by raw biological drives. We as humans can continue attempting to put ourselves above our animal nature, but it does seem that we might be destined to fall on our face.

sytelusonDec 25, 2018

These days if you get in to NYT or Amazon top list, you are talking about windfall in range of $10M. For books like Fifty Shades of Grey this was at $100M for the author. So writing books these days is not poor author trying to getting by but a very very serious business. It's as serious as Series C startup with actual office, roadmap, business plan, marketing plan and even full time employees who would do research, citation collection, word smithing, editing etc for you. People like Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell have made this to an art form and are some of the most successful founders for this type of business. The way they work is by taking couple of known data points in academia and expand it on to 400 page book dishing it out as fundamental insights that everyone is missing out on. Such books are rife with repetitions, personal stories, cherry picked anecdotes, raising underdogs and putting down others that evoke emotions but at the same time tuck away the other side of the story that would have made them more balanced and boring.

I wouldn't be surprised if Taleb has made more money from his books then his hedge fund career and accordingly he might be more aggressive to protect his image as dispenser of great counter-intuitive insights. His assertions in these sets of tweets are obviously overblown. IQ testing is known to be very faulty measure for intelligence but at the same time lot of rebellious personalities including Einstein, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga etc have had high (> 150) IQ. No one would call them people yearning to be obedient salaried drones.

keithwinsteinonJan 8, 2013

I don't think "blogs" deserve collective guilt for Gizmodo's sins any more than "the media" do. The vast majority of blogs acquitted themselves fine here. But wishing for better standards from "blogs" is like wishing "novels were a bit higher-standard." There are a lot of terrible novels in print (the majority even!), but you'd be foolish to blame the whole genre for the literary sins of "Fifty Shades of Grey."

runevaultonJan 26, 2018

Prose is very little indication of success, sadly. Some of it is marketing, but some of it is just hitting a moment in time. Look at Fifty Shades of Grey, the prose is terrible, but a lot of women needed what it was offering them on an emotional level and so it sold a TON of copies. And then once a book hits a certain critical mass people will start to pick it up who aren't the target audience just to see what the hell the buzz is about.

kafkaesqueonSep 25, 2015

I have a blog; a very unpopular blog that is probably read by two or three people. I write essays and "blog posts" on there.

I also majored in literature and philosophy and had to write essays a lot. I got a lot of As.

The first thing to learn is that every group of writers follows different rules.

Think about why you want to publish your writings. Learn that context matters -- that is, your target audience matters. People reading my blog posts don't want the same thing as the people reading my essays at university. My university essays have a different tone and style. To be sure, the essays on my blog are the least popular, because they are very academic. That's okay. I like to write that way sometimes.

Often the things that others find interesting in our writings are things the writer would have never guessed. Because of this, it's all right to swallow your pride and just hit "Publish." Some of it will be horrible, some of it will be great. And there is always the stuff in between.

From a strictly academic perspective, the easiest type of essay to write is a comparative essay. Compare books, ideas, or topics that are similar enough to warrant a comparison; e.g., sexual parallels in Fifty Shades of Grey and Marquis de Sade's literary oeuvre, if you're going for a wide appeal. I just made that up. It's all experimentation.

Another academic "lesson" is when you're stuck writing an essay, it's time to bring in another example.

These are standard techniques that possibly engender a style that is stale and stiff. The more you cater to your reader, the more entertaining it'll be, because you'll speak her or his vernacular.

Having said all that, I have only published my poetry in very small publications. Nobody is interested in my short stories or essays (outside of academia), and I am by no stretch of the imagination a blogger who others read assiduously.

I am read by a very small circle of writer friends.

We have a joke.

We're good at things that don't have much value in modern culture.

It's a big joke.

And we're the punch line.

sytelusonApr 23, 2015

Actually book writing is booming business these days as long as books are meant for general audience. Tim Ferriss, for example, has made more than $3M from his books. E L James reportedly made $100 million from Fifty Shades of Grey. There are many other authors in the millionair list purely from writing books. The reason this is happening now more than before is because of cheap electronic version of book that can be downloaded on phones and tablets on more than 150M devices in US alone. Previously carrying around hard copies meant you need to be serious book lover. Now all the friction and weight is gone and books are more in line with TV entertainment instead of something meant for people wearing glasses. In addition publishers and authors are figuring out how to make books viral. If your book indeed gets viral, you can bet 1% of this population to buy it which immediately translates to $1M-3M. Adding translated editions and international markets would double your revenues.

However this generally doesn't apply to tech books because number of programmers are just around 10 million and if you estimate 1% will buy your book (best case) you will still top out $300K range @ 10% royalty. Even worse, technology will change in next 2-3 years and your royalties would dry up quickly. Most "full time" tech book writers run training consulting business and do conferences as main source of income.

exolymphonJan 26, 2018

Hands down it's marketing, with a side of product-market fit. The latter was part of why Twilight and then Fifty Shades of Grey exploded. Product-market fit for a book relies more on engagingness, and pressing the right buttons of a certain demographic, than it does on literary or academic measures of quality (which are subjective, of course).

jiggy2011onApr 6, 2013

"Because if you look at the books that are selling, and you look at the fiction books that have impacted our popular culture (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.)… they are for women."

This seems a little selective!

What about stuff like Tolkien, Pratchett , A song of fire and ice and countless other fantasy/sci-fi things?

Perhaps Women see reading as a more social experience , whereas for men it's more of an individual activity?

Amongst my female friends , it seems that if one of them has read a book then they have all read it. So perhaps that might explain why the bestseller lists will tend to favour books intended for women?

balabasteronJune 8, 2015

I have a number of thoughts about this article. I don't necessarily disagree with what they're saying but: People are going to fantasize anyway, the fantasy is impeded without any possibility of it being fulfilled... they're probably never going to marry a prince(ss), but some do. The dollar they spend makes the fantasy a possibility. Like the little girl playing dress up and make believing what it would be like before she ever has any real understanding of the reality. People fantasize about all kinds of things every day (most with no direct financial cost, except by what they're not earning while they're busy daydreaming), at the cost of things they probably should be worrying about, but don't.

Day dreaming is a means of escaping your existing reality... but if you take no action, then your day dreaming is just that. You need to take action to give any possibility of it ever becoming more than that. In this case, the $5 for the ticket is that step. Perhaps the fantasy is what you live for. Perhaps you spend your life with your head buried in romance novels, who knows, the effect is the same - you paid $5 for the book which gave you a few good hours of day dreaming, or perhaps even a number of days of escape. The lottery ticket gave you a couple of hours escape before you come back to reality. It's just a pleasant way to pass the time. You can tell just how many people have this mindset by the number of copies of Fifty Shades of Grey you saw being read on public transit after it came out.

tomkuonMar 16, 2013

The difference between his book and "Gone Girl" or "Fifty Shades of Grey" is that he sold a couple thousand copies in a week and dropped off the radar, while those books are numbers 12 and 9 on the list almost 9 months later. Being a best-seller for a week is a great way to sell a couple thousand copies, but you don't sell hundreds of thousands or millions due to one week at the top caused by some temporary publicity.

planetguyonJune 28, 2012

Quite possibly. Certainly in the old days one could express an opinion that "Hey, maybe there's certain advantages to copyright law" without getting modded down to numbers so low that the HN system refuses to express them.

Y'know that book "Fifty Shades Of Grey"? Well that's what your comment's gonna go through in the next hour if you disagree with (I can't believe I'm saying this) the hivemind.

edit: Also, what's with this new "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down" message you get if people start downvoting your posts? I've had it swallow a bunch of (intelligent) posts this morning due to the fact that I expressed an unpopular opinion on a copyright thread.

That fucking does it.

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