

Show HN: Pretty Girls at SxSW - zachster

Clickables below:
http://hot-spot.me/sxsw.php<p>A couple days ago, I posted a mashup I did of the SxSW panelist directory. I found it a lot easier to pick panels based on what companies people came from. I got no love from YC:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281104<p>So let's try this again. This time, pick the pretty people, and if you make it through all the pages, I'll give you a list of the "prettiest" panels based on everyone's votes.<p>When I conceived of this, I wondered how evil it was. But after testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident in saying that pretty people propose great panels! I'm sure a larger discussion could be had on this topic. Maybe a panel next year? Anyone pretty want to propose it?<p>And in my defense, against claims I'm being objectifying and mean, I'm not showing anyone's ratings and I'm only showing the 20 most popular panels for each gender. If your panel was not picked, you were probably #21 and missed it by a hair.
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Jun8
OK, I've got to say this: I went through a few pages, so I saw ~100-150
people. It seemed to me that women's pictures tend to (i) show more of the
body and (ii) how to say this, had a more "flirty" look.

Now, this is my _completely subjective_ impression. However, it seems to me
that the women in such technical conferences tend to send in more glamorous
shots, to perhaps cater (subconsciously) to the highly skewed gender ratio.
What do you think?

As an aside, I think if you want to get more love (from HN or anywhere else)
don't emphasize the "pretty girl" angle because the label "girl" is felt to be
demeaning by many people and after all in your site one can select both men
and women, so why not say "attractive attendee"?

EDIT: Just thought of this: If you gather a lot of data, you can post results
on how speaker/panelist attractiveness affects the number of people attending
a session, corrected by the effect of the topic, of course. There are many
organizers, I think, who would even _pay_ for such information.

~~~
zachster
Thanks for this input. It's well thought out.

Honestly, part of putting the word 'girls' in the title was to counter my last
attempt at promoting my SxSW data. That one was very legitimate and
professional. And in some ways, I think the data is even more valuable. But
that one failed because the headline wasn't 'sexy' enough (IMO).

Whereas this one is getting some good buzz. Unfortunately, even using a
demeaning term can sometimes get attention. I try not to be objectifying, but
I fall short some times. Hopefully no one will be too offended.

If there's enough data, I will definitely post a recap. Stay tuned.

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shazow
Quick suggestions for improvement, design-wise:

* Put the rows into a fixed-height container so that the size of the page doesn't keep jumping as the images load.

* After the second page or so, I found it too annoying to skim such a large list of images, so I just picked one and hit "next". Maybe only show a random subset of the pictures to every user to reduce overwhelmingness, or do it facemash/hotornot/cubeduel style and do 2 at a time.

* Bonus points if you can make all the images somewhat larger (maybe 50%) and the same sizes (by cropping with the face centered).

Overall, I applaud you for your effort. Unfortunately I can't imagine this
having any longevity after the next week or two. Which doesn't necessarily
make it a waste of time, some things are just worth doing for the sake of
doing. :)

~~~
zachster
All good points, though your last one kind of negates the motivation I feel to
implement your suggestions :)

I do mix up the order a bit to make sure people at the end don't get
neglected. But people in the middle probably have fate set against them. Poor
middle panelists :(

I'm very happy wasting the amount of time it took. ;)

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Splines
_When I conceived of this, I wondered how evil it was._

I have to admit, I felt pretty slimy going through this. I like a pretty face
as much as the next person, but these people (I assume) didn't send in their
picture expecting for it to be run through hotornot. Which brings me to the
next point...

 _But after testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident in saying that pretty
people propose great panels!_

You're kinda hand-wavey here. What sort of data do you have to back this up?
And what exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean that attendees have a more
enjoyable time interacting with a more visually pleasing panel, or that
attractive people are inherently better at running a panel?

~~~
zachster
I know, I know. I feel guilty already. I'm often torn between things I want to
do because they seem exciting and controversial, and the effect it will have
on people involved. I really hope I don't get any tear stained emails from
panelists upset at this little project.

But to answer your question, I'm actually talking about the panels that were
recommended to me by the system based on my choices. The best one, which I
never would have found otherwise is this one:
<http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5380>

I'm super-excited!

And not to be too hand-wavey, but what if (I know this sounds crazy) there's
actually a reciprocal effect here? What if there's a natural conceptual
affinity between people who are attractive to each other? What if I only like
the topics I like, because those are the ones the people I find attractive
like? Or they like them because I do?

~~~
Splines
_And not to be too hand-wavey, but what if (I know this sounds crazy) there's
actually a reciprocal effect here? What if there's a natural conceptual
affinity between people who are attractive to each other? What if I only like
the topics I like, because those are the ones the people I find attractive
like? Or they like them because I do?_

That's an interesting idea. You'd need to do a similar experiment, swapping
the topics for faces, and do a scatter plot to see if there's any covariance
between topic-interest and attractiveness. I'm inclined to think that there
isn't, but it'd be interesting to see the data.

~~~
zachster
You know, I was actually thinking of this. What SxSW really needs is just a
tiny bit of NLP to do a tag cloud for the panels. I think that could be used
to perform the kind of experiment you describe.

And I wouldn't bias such a thing by predicting the outcome, but can we agree
that the panelists on topics we're interested in will be appealing to us in
some way? Maybe not physically all the time, but they will be attractive to
us.

I guess all I'm saying is that the inverse is true. Someone's nature, and
interests do come through in their appearance (book cover judging rules!),
especially in a set of people already pre-selected for common interests like
the sxsw crowd.

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phren0logy
Aaaaand HN has officially become Reddit.

~~~
JoshCole
People are down voting this, but to me it seems like a very justified comment.
I find this to be to be intensely, but shallowly interesting. It appeals to me
as a male, but does nothing else. This certainly doesn't teach me anything
about the world.

~~~
zachster
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fxcyd/pretty_gir...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fxcyd/pretty_girls_at_sxsw/)

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zachster
Can I also say that I like how I don't tell people who in the panel helped
them make the top 20 list?

For example, this is currently on the list of boys:
<http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP8383>

Will Pete and Dennis fight over who got more votes?

I will never tell.

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rmobin
I didn't see your first post, but I like this one. Your title was interesting,
so I clicked through to the website. Once there I saw at least one pretty
girl, so it was easy to get started and go through all the pages. You suckered
me in!

~~~
zachster
Heheh. I like to think of it as me passing along all the suckering pretty
girls do to all of us. I'm just the messenger. (that sounds dirtier than I
intended)

~~~
rmobin
I forgot to mention one thing - some of the pictures were a little small, and
so a potentially pretty girl was ignored by me because I wasn't sure. Not sure
if there's a way to fix that, you might have to get creative with fetching
alternate pictures for people.

~~~
zachster
Haha. Good idea. I could scrape together their turn ons and turn offs too :)
Maybe v2

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zachster
Pretty People: <http://hot-spot.me/sxsw.php>

No Love: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281104>

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listic
Who created this Hot-Spot.me? I want to get in touch with them, but can't find
the info.

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wonderyak
It's unfair to compare most of these people with Felicia Day.

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dpio
hey this is pretty entertaining.

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ig1
flagged

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pitdesi
Relatedly: Is X going... check if someone is going to sxsw
<http://www.isxgoing.com/>

Other cool SxSw data: <http://www.isxgoing.com/report>

~~~
zachster
Nice work! I like it a lot.

