I created it in two months using Claude Code. It would have taken me three years without it. I would have never done it.

What about this free service is a win for big tech?:

https://SimilaritiesEngine.com

(That said, I probably still have two of them in my stuff ha.)

Yeah it is imperfect and was maybe not ready for the HN front page hug. But I say, bravo to the person or team!

One experienced developer with extensive anthropology experience, probably a PhD, working with Claude Code and Claude Cowork, full time over a two month period. Or somebody with limited dev experience over four months.

Anyway, sad that all the first comments were complaints… what a wonderful project!

dumb is

what I

think

this

end

is

!

If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.

That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.

On the other end of the spectrum would be to summarize it in the shortest form with the simplest words, instead of with many and multi-syllable words. How about this (not mine, I’ve heard this in addiction recovery rooms, where apologies and amends are often discussed):

In the sentence “I’m sorry I did x, but you did y”, the word “but” means “disregard the above.”

Tell it your 5 favorite albums, get an immediate suggestions list. No sign up, free to use, integrated with Spotify to hear immediate samples (or the whole album).

https://SimilaritiesEngine.com

But it made me think a lot about anti-AI sentiment, hence this post. One poster even said "It sounded cool at first until I saw they're active in the chatgpt sub. Lame ass shit" ha.

I have been promoting the system in communities that can sometimes be considerably anti-AI. But people usually assume that it is AI because, well, it's a recommender system.

Anyways, after a 30-year break, I rebuilt it and got it working the way I always wanted! It basically uses the same 10 lines of code, (for which I was granted now-expired US patent #5749081), but with a good interface around it instead of a lousy 1990s one.

You tell it your 5 favorite albums, and it recommends other albums to try.

It uses collaborative filtering (CF) to generate the music recommendations. It's just now exiting the "cold start" phase that all CF systems have to get through.

The tagline I use is: "No sign-up needed, instant results, takes 2 minutes to try. Not AI."

Try it here:

[https://SimilaritiesEngine.com](https://similaritiesengine.com/)

If you're curious, here's a New York Times article from way back then. (But the URL in the article is wrong, so if you go read it, come back here to try the new version, alive and working):

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/0101miracolumn.html

The system is about 6,000 lines of code, vibe-coded by me using Claude Code. I have basically never looked at a line of the source. (But I have a part-time partner now who is hand-revising some code.)

Up until now, I have publicized the site mostly on Reddit. Boy, did I catch grief there for it "being an AI system."

At first, I got Claude's help on the language for some of the website copy and some of my Reddit posts.

I mostly stopped getting downvoted for it being AI once I learned my lesson (in "The Great r/Vinyl Debacle," https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/comments/1ul7o7c/i_built_a_music_recommender_in_1996_that_only/ ), which led me to tell Claude "Never use em dashes in anything, anywhere, that you help me with!" (To be fair, the downvotes made the post controversial and drove views to 15K, but my actual URL got buried.)

You could argue that my "no AI" claim isn't fully true, and that I should instead say something like "no LLMs or generative AI are in the product itself, just classic collaborative filtering." But what I tell people sometimes is this: The weights file behind a SOTA AI system like Claude Fable is, by some estimates, 2 TB or more. The equivalent file in my system (my graph database or "links" table) is about 3 MB in size right now.

So my question for Hacker News is: how often do you hide the fact that AI was involved in the production of your product?

I actually think, based on some of the things I have seen in the press and on discussions I have had with people, that acquaintances might be talking behind my back in an "oh he's heavily into AI so you should not trust him" sort of way. Yeah, saying that makes me sound crazy. Am I crazy?

Details on the tech (Cloudflare, D1, etc.) can be found on the website too.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074416

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

Rewrite proper prototype router report!

Anybody got a better one?