[HN Gopher] Show HN: Essays curated for you with machine learning ___________________________________________________________________ Show HN: Essays curated for you with machine learning Author : jacobobryant Score : 6 points Date : 2020-10-28 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (essays.findka.com) (TXT) w3m dump (essays.findka.com) | jacobobryant wrote: | Hi. I pivoted to this recently from a cross-domain recommender | system (see previous Show HN[1]--it could, for example, recommend | movies based on which books you like). Long story short, people | thought the idea was interesting (landing page converted at ~7%, | and I got hundreds of signups), but the recommendations weren't | accurate enough to get people to stay (retention was nonexistent; | I also did some user surveys)--and I wasn't confident that I'd be | able to make the recommendations much better with the resources I | have. I was originally hoping that Findka would be good enough at | least to sustain growth so that I could improve the | recommendation quality gradually over time, but that didn't pan | out. | | Findka Essays is a simplified version of the old app. It | recommends only essays (instead of any type of content), and you | get recommendations through email only, not through a web app. I | record which links you click on, and links in future emails get | picked based on your click history. | | Since the domain (essays) is much more restricted, a more-or-less | randomly selected item should still have a decent chance of being | a good recommendation (especially since right now I manually | curate most of the essays). So I'm hoping that the system will be | worth using even before we have lots of data to feed to the | algorithm, unlike the old Findka. | | Also, I genuinely love essays (reading and writing). I think they | are the most valuable form of content, and I think helping good | essays spread further would have a big impact on the world. So | I'm pretty excited about this pivot. | | For those interested, I've written a detailed description of the | architecture here.[2] The web app is written in Clojure, using | Biff[3] (a web framework I made), and the recommendation | algorithm is a ~100 line Python file that uses off-the-shelf | k-NN, with some of my own additions for handling exploration and | countering popularity bias. See [4] for details. | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23541840 | | [2] https://findka.com/blog/essays-implementation/ | | [3] https://findka.com/biff | | [4] https://findka.com/blog/essays- | implementation/#recommendatio... | redwoolf wrote: | I'm excited to try this out. I'm a fan of essays as well and | always looking for high quality content. | jacobobryant wrote: | Awesome, let me know how it goes. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-10-28 23:01 UTC)