Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Still working on my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org that I started in 2008. It's been a 1 man team the entire time. I recently made some major algorithm changes that I think greatly improves the rankings. My algorithm code is open source https://github.com/ssherman/weighted_list_rank

I do plan on open sourcing more of the code over time. I also have started working on other sites using the same algorithm implementation (music, movies, video games)

This has just been a side project over the year generating passive income. I get around 250,000 page views a day, and with ads, memberships, and affiliate links I make around $2,500~ a month.

Tech stack is ruby on rails 8, postgresql 17, opensearch, redis, bootstrap 5.3 hosting on 3 servers on linode.

Ho, so you're the one that created that website. When I wanted to start reading more and I did not know where to begin, I found this site and started reading stuff from the top. It was incredibly useful to me, thanks!

Great idea, great site.

I like the idea of a books list. This gives me new inspiration for books that I could read. Other languages like Spanish and French would also be great. :)

Nice! I've been looking for a reliable book ranking site. The main rankings skew to the "classics" that don't always hold up (looking at you Moby Dick) but the books in the genre filters look more interesting.

A couple questions:

* Is this primarily intended for discovering new reads, or for people who've already read the books to debate which is greatest? I found the book descriptions sometimes give away too much, to the point where I stopped reading them for any book I might be interested in reading for pleasure. Examples include The Great Gatsby and Madame Bovary. Perhaps you could have a concise description that stays far away from plot points, and a more expanded description behind a "more" link.

* What dictates whether a series has one place on the list or separate places? Narnia has one for the whole series but Harry Potter has individual listings per book.

* Are ratings and reviews from your own site taken into account in the rankings?

I think it's most useful for discovering new reads, especially with the advanced search and recommendations functionality. I do agree i could do a better job of non spoiler summaries. good idea

- Series have always been a problem. Some book lists will include the entire series, and then some will have individual books. If the series is sold as a single book I'll often just include that. Like Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I will include only the first book in the series on a list, to prevent always adding every single book in a series when a list mentions "harry potter series".

basically I don't have a perfect way of handling series'

for the last point, kind of. If you add a book to the default "My Favorite Books" user list, it gets aggregated and used for this book list which is included in the rankings. https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/463