3 pointsby kidnoodle3 hours ago2 comments
  • kidnoodle2 hours ago
    Morning hacker news folks. I made this thing I call leafle - it is a bot you can talk to about books, that can give you suggestions for books you can borrow right now at your local library (at least for 6,900ish libraries it can: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).

    It leans very heavily on the fact that LLMs have very broad latent knowledge of.. well, most books written in English, really. So it tries to do a good job of finding you books which aren't just another one by the same author, or happen to be in vogue right now.

    You can try it out a little without signing up, import your reading history from other services (Goodreads, storygraph, particularly nicely with hardcover), or just take a pic of your bookshelf. If you do sign up, it'll get better at suggesting you things as you talk to it more about things you've read (hopefully it does a reasonable job of holding an intelligent conversation on that score), and you can also then connect it to claude and friends via an MCP or play around with the API.

  • bsonmez192 hours ago
    Curious how well it handles non-English books. Does the quality drop a lot outside of English or does it still manage decent suggestions?
    • kidnoodle2 hours ago
      It is gonna be a bit variable - it has definitely got less knowledge of non-English literature. Couple of French friends tried it out and it did a reasonable job though!
      • bsonmez19an hour ago
        Got it, thanks for the detail.
        • kidnoodlean hour ago
          No probs! I’d be super interested to hear how it does if you give it a try.