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Comment by blehn | Hacker News Reader

You should filter out authors from the input books in the output. If liked a book by an author, surely I'd read more of their work if I wanted to — recommending them isn't helpful. Along the same lines, I think interesting recommendations tend to be the ones that (1) I like and (2) I didn't expect. The more similar the recommendations are to the input, the more likely I already know them, and the more likely to create a recommendation echo chamber.

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> You should filter out authors from the input books in the output.

No, or at least make it configurable.

I’d agree for series, but not for Authors, just because I once read a book by someone doesn’t mean I even know they have other stuff, the list of Authors I read and enjoyed is very long.

Configurability is fine, but it's too obvious a recommendation and just creates noise. The purpose of a recommendation system is to help you find things that aren't obvious. I'd still filter them out by default even if it's configurable.

I don't agree at all.

VERY few authors write consistenly good books.

If you liked one book by an author, it is not at all likely that you will like the other books as well. For example, Neil Stephenson is probably my favorite author alive today, but I hate almost half of his books.

The only author that I can think of where I read and liked every single book was Terry Pratchett, and that might have be a case of "I was still young and easy to impress".

I didn't say it was likely that you'd enjoy the other books by that author. My point is that it's not helpful for a recommendation system to recommend more books by that author — it's common sense. If I've read a book by an author, it's easy enough to look up their other work and decide whether I want to read more of them.

yep, was gonna say this. Getting recommended all of the same books I've already read isn't great

Agree entirely - more excluding series than authors but both should be options.

I also i need a way to describe its recommendations as "meh". For example, if I put Gone Girl in, I get Girl on a Train. Which, personally, I thought was bad. I want to exclude that from all future rec sets, and ideally align my preferences to the intersection of liked A and disliked B. vOv

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