{"slug": "show-hn-a-platform-to-find-essays-personally-recommended-to-you", "title": "Show HN: A Platform to Find Essays, personally recommended to you", "summary": "A developer launched a Show HN platform that recommends essays by representing each user as the mean vector of essays they liked and ranking candidates by cosine similarity, after first building a scraper that crawled paulgraham.com and situationalawareness.ai. The platform differs from Substack and Hacker News, the developer says, by offering essay summaries and an algorithm that surfaces essays liked most by similar users. The Show HN post drew 1 point and 0 comments.", "body_md": "Reading a book is great, when you know it will be good. Reading news is great, when you know it will be interesting, and the same with essays.\n\nInability to find great content to read became a huge pain point for me after I read through Paul Graham's essays.\n\nThen I decided to build a tiny scraper app that would crawl seed websites (I crawled paulgraham.com and situationalawareness.ai) and then embed the content of the site. Among the scraped essays, there were ones I was extremely happy about. To find essays that best fit my taste, I just represented myself as a mean vector of essays I liked, then I used cosine similarity to find gems among tons of garbage that the scraper found.\n\nI turned this into a platform which in principle is quite similar, except that people are the ones sharing essays (of their own or external, like on hacker news) and the algorithm is more advanced.\n\nWhat differentiates this from substack or HN is summaries of essays which save time and reduce risk of wasting time and an algorithm that ensures that you find essays that people like you liked the most.\n\nI can explain the technical details, if you'd like. Thanks, for your attention.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223618)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-platform-to-find-essays-personally-recommended-to-you", "canonical_source": "https://essaypod.com/", "published_at": "2026-10-24 18:01:44+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-24 18:20:03.208310+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools", "machine-learning"], "entities": ["Show HN", "Hacker News", "Substack", "Paul Graham", "paulgraham.com", "situationalawareness.ai"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-platform-to-find-essays-personally-recommended-to-you", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-platform-to-find-essays-personally-recommended-to-you.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-platform-to-find-essays-personally-recommended-to-you.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-platform-to-find-essays-personally-recommended-to-you.jsonld"}}