[HN Gopher] Show HN: Essays curated for you with machine learning
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2020-10-28 23:01 UTC)