[richardbatty]

I really like the idea but one thing that puts me off is if most of the essays end up being blog posts from the last few years.

I'd be more interested in being sent a selection of recommended classic essays. E.g. by people like Orwell or Montaigne. You could populate it with essays found on project Gutenberg, or from high quality magazines like London Review of Books.

Also the examples are very tech focused. Are you planning to include other areas?

[jacobobryant]

Most of the essays currently are indeed blog posts from the last few years. For now I'm planning to rely on user submissions for the catalog--if you have some favorite classic/non-tech essays, you could submit them (there's a URL input box after you sign in).

Before today there were about 60 submitted essays; we're up to 117 now. So the recommendations going forward probably won't be dominated by my own submissions, but they will likely still be tech-focused, given the (initial) HN/programmer user base. Eventually (after we have enough users/submissions/click data), Findka should adapt to your preferences quickly. i.e. even if most of the catalog is tech-focused, the algorithm will look at what essays you've submitted and select recommendations from the appropriate niches. But at this early stage, the recommendations will be sampled more-or-less uniformly from the entire catalog.