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Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

Here's the problem. You are considered ignorant if you don't know anything about Pushkin. But it's perfectly normal or accepted to ignore who Enrico Fermi, Alan Turing or Paul Erdős were. We're all ignorant about something but, in society, literary ignorance is frowned upon much more than scientific ignorance.

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You are considered ignorant if you don't know anything about Pushkin.

In Russia, sure. But the Pushkin example is completely atypical of our society. When was the last time you heard Pushkin mentioned among non-Russian non-specialists?

The obscurity of Pushkin is actually the point in this case. If she had said "He hadn't even heard of Shakespeare!" the implication would have been "He's a lout", which is quite different. "He hadn't even heard of Pushkin" is more along the lines of, "He doesn't pass the minimum test for my exacting, boutique tastes".

I noticed that too - I had absolutely no idea who pushkin was until I asked wikipedia. I do, however, know all the people you mention, and why they are known.

People are just different, and so is their taste in books. The idea of finding partners based on book preferences is interesting though. I would love a dating site where I could search for women based on their reading habits. I mean if I could search for women that liked Neal Stephenson or Bob Woodward I would be thrilled.

So could someone here please make it? Please...

We'd definitely consider funding it.

With that disclosure you can probably be expecting a few applications for the idea :-)

And I'd love to use it if somebody gets it right.

Yeah... no reason to stop at books either, you could also do music/movies, all forms of media really.

although, to go back to high fidelity - the big discovery is that it's not what you like, but what you're like that makes a relationship workable

"... I would love a dating site where I could search for women based on their reading habits. ..."

Heard of this exact idea on popular media this week. Can't find the site though. So the idea while not original, is worth trying. How do you really know if a person is really reading the books they claim online though?

damn.. :-)

You could do it with music as well - make a small app that scans through your music library and uploads it. Then match with people that have the same taste in music. Would probably have broader appeal, since more people listen to music than read books.

Or has that been done too?

Delicious Library already does that on the Mac. Put your book/cd in front of the mac's built in webcam (or at least the barcode of the book/cd) and the item is added instantly to your library, with coverart and everything Very cool.

So if you're going to build this type of web-app, you might need to talk to Will Shipley :-)

"... I would love a dating site where I could search for women based on their reading habits ... Heard of this exact idea on popular media this week ..."

That's not a good reason to not try something - because there is already a service. In fact I'd be surprised if there was not more competition. Music is a good one. I'll see if I can find the service ...

some time later ...

There is an interesting article now on just this idea ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149467

www.last.fm, but it's one of those sites where people only incidentally hookup, like yelp.com

I was thinking the same thing some time ago. But maybe it really makes a difference if it is a dedicated dating site? Probably worth a try.

Any sites with an api, to tap into their data?

Lastfm's user profiles are public and show what they have listened to in the recent past - so maybe you could make a site where you add your lastfm username, and scrape the info from lastfm and use that.

There might be legal issues with this approach though.

Not really a dating site but there is a book-centric social network site: http://www.goodreads.com . If anyone wants to look at my list, it's at http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1009306

> So could someone here please make it? Please...

Agreed. Please make this!

A friend and I were talking about such an idea right around the time Friendster was making rounds... and after running through lots of issues and the one sticking point was honesty - perusing friends of friends on frienster, I ran into people I barely knew - but I was pretty certain that they hadn't read "Foucault's Pendulum" or "Infinite Jest", etc - they were listing books that were "hip" (within certain circles).

My conclusion was that Amazon needed to do this, they have a pretty full catalog of personality reflecting items for sale - and the key (in my mind) was that a purchase record was at least as important as a rating/review.

If you only could cut a deal with Amazon to access their customer profiles...

In my dating experience, having interests that matched on paper never correlated with a successful relationship. Often it's a red herring that leads you to try and make something out of nothing. The girl you fall for despite having nothing in common is often the keeper, because the only reason you would fall for her is that there is great chemistry.

Interesting.

If you're talking about books my experience is the opposite, for me there is definitely a correlation between reading habits and girlfriend potential. It has however changed with the years, when I was 17 the first thing I would look at was a girls boobs, now it's more what books she's reading. So it might be related to age.

For me, as long as the girl is intellectually curious, the actual specific books she likes doesn't seem to matter.

I disagree. If you use name recognition as a proxy for knowledge (which is probably a poor metric), than you're probably as likely to have heard of Turing as your are Pushkin. The set of people who have heard both is likely to be much smaller, and by inference, more knowledgeable.

On the other side of the argument, you could argue its easier to understand the contributions of someone like Pushkin than someone like Fermi. But this too is probably true only on a superficial of level.

not really, depends on who you hang out with;-)

That's not really what this is about, however. Knowing who Enrico Fermi, Alan Turing or Paul Erdős is, indicates you know your math. Knowing who Pushkin is, on the other hand, serves as a tribal marking that signals that you're one of a group of people that have a certain outlook on life, namely one in which literature is important.

If you're hiring someone for your startup, that's probably not important to know, but if you're looking for someone to have a relatioship with it can be helpful.

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