
Yelp Hipster Finder - struys
http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/sf/hipster
======
iharris
Try the "sketchy" keyword... is that the infamous Tenderloin that I hear
about? (I haven't been to SF before)

~~~
hammock
The keyword sets seem to differ across the cities, can't find sketchy for my
town.

~~~
vmialik
Most cities have sketchy places, what is unique about Tenderloin, it has hole-
in-the-wall restaurants that are actually quite good. So you go in to a place
and might say in the review, this place looks sketchy, but the food is great.
As apposed to purely sketchy place that you do not even want to go in to. So
you do not go or leave a review. Another possibility are the massage parlors,
which are truly sketchy. I learned that having the opportunity to sit in at
the SF Coalition Against Human Trafficking which is a collaboration between
the non profits and the government organizations in the city fighting the
issue.

------
semiprivate
This is actually a good way to figure out where to stay when visiting a city.
Click tourist and avoid, click hipster and go there. Maybe go to the slightly
less red areas for a more low key night. At least that's how you'd have fun if
you were a 20-30 something in NYC.

~~~
dwyer
> when visiting a city. Click tourist and avoid

So you're too good to be a tourist when you're a tourist? You sound like a
hipster.

> click hipster and go there

Oh wait...

But in all seriousness, if I go to Rome, I want to see The Colosseum. If I go
to Amsterdam, I want to see the Van Gogh Museum. Not being a tourist somewhere
means having already seen what the tourists there are just seeing for the
first time. Would you really prefer to go everywhere and never see anything at
all? I'm not going to NYC just to see hipsters. I can see that at home.

~~~
ritchiea
Or you could see historic landmarks during the day and explore restaurants and
bars local residents actually enjoy in the evenings. Restaurants that cater to
tourists do so because you can profit off of their unfamiliarity with the area
without having to provide a competitive dining experience in a municipality
that broadly offers many excellent dining options. Wanting to find a plethora
of interesting experiences when you travel and avoid being taken advantage of
doesn't make you a hipster. And even if you are a hipster, who cares?

PS - this comment was written by someone who you probably would consider a
hipster. Full disclosure just in case that colors your view

~~~
josefresco
How does being a tourist based business mean you don't have to "provide a
competitive dining experience". Sure local based businesses have to cater to
local residents in order to win repeat business but that doesn't stop for
tourism. People vacation in the same places each year, the businesses that do
well are ones that not only cater to these visitors, but leave a lasting
impression. Top business get reviewed by publications/websites and generally
do better if they provide a competitive product.

Don't let the exceptions (aka tourists traps) cloud the rule which is fairly
globally true no matter what sector you operate in.

Disclosure: I live and work (B2B) in a primarily tourist based economy. I talk
every day with business owners who cater to tourists, locals and part-time
residents. Tourist traps that do well despite shitty service are rare.

------
sadfaceunread
Kinda interesting but I wonder if it is normalized at all for the yelp review
density in a given area. See xkcd:
[http://xkcd.com/1138/](http://xkcd.com/1138/) as I draw some unusual
correlations in the Boston maps.

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
Either answer should give a valid measure of regional hipsterdom. Is it just
hipsters that use Yelp? If so, go where they're reviewing. If not, follow the
hipster tag. I can certainly vouch for the validity of the London version,
that's for sure.

------
liquidcool
Am I missing something? For LA, it's telling me that the hipster areas are
Silver Lake, WeHo, Venice, etc. Well, duh. As the Dothraki would say, "It is
known."

Why doesn't it actually show the individual establishments adding heat to the
map? I realize I could just search for it on their site, but I don't know if
the measure of relevance would be the same. I'm really curious what's causing
all that bacon heat.

------
cb18
My initial thoughts were to comment, This is really freaking cool, great idea
whoever. But when I realized I couldn't put my own keywords in the url and
zoom the map out and move it around I was somewhat less impressed, it's still
a neat idea though.

But, I think it would be 'really freaking cool' to do this while accessing the
entire database of places and reviews with any keywords you want. I know that
would require more development and server resources. It would probably be
rather challenging to do this efficiently on the fly rather than using
preprocessed data from a limited geographic range, I'm sure there is a yelp
engineer or two that would like to take on the challenge though.

------
captainbenises
How does this work - is it rendered server side or client side? Very cool!
Reminds me of the 2d historgrams and contour maps you can generate with R.

~~~
captainbenises
To reply to myself, it looks like it's rendered client side - the json just
returns a bunch of points and the heatmap must be canvas.

See the json here: [http://s3-media3.ak.yelpcdn.com/wordmap/2/words/sf/dim-
sum.j...](http://s3-media3.ak.yelpcdn.com/wordmap/2/words/sf/dim-sum.js)

~~~
czbond
Yes - good client side JS to do this has only been around for a year or so.
Before that it was ESRI, or map tile complexity...

------
basicallydan
In London, "cheap" and "pricey" tend to stay around the same sort of area.

[http://www.yelp.co.uk/wordmap/london/cheap](http://www.yelp.co.uk/wordmap/london/cheap)
[http://www.yelp.co.uk/wordmap/london/pricey](http://www.yelp.co.uk/wordmap/london/pricey)

Well, shit.

This is awesome though. Nice one, Yelp :)

~~~
dtf
Soho pretty much is both at once. Expensive cocktail bars next to old men's
pubs, fancy restaurants next to fish & chip shops, exclusive members' clubs
next to dirty downstairs speakeasies.

~~~
walshemj
And full of people who say its not the same since "Jeff" died - I had a pint
in the coach and horses in Soho and the barman actually "apologised" for me
having to wait while he changed the barrel - I felt short changed :-)

------
ctrager
Here's something similar I recently created.
[http://ifdefined.com/hack_week.html](http://ifdefined.com/hack_week.html) It
uses a collection of keywords that you choose and then uses Nokia's HERE.com
APIs to create a heatmap. The fun is coming up with the keywords. "Vegetarian"
and "yoga" work pretty well for finding hipster places in the US, but for
India not so much. Instead I tried "coffee", "pub", "pizza". "Sushi" works
internationally except you-know-where.

~~~
ctrager
Also, for tourists versus locals, this is fantastic, using geocoded tweets. It
confirms what I tell out-of-town visitors to Chicago: Locals don't go to Navy
Pier. [http://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-
gnip/locals/#13/41.9007/-...](http://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-
gnip/locals/#13/41.9007/-87.6005)

------
tracker1
And another one.. this one doesn't have Phoenix or San Antonio.. I mean there
are a _LOT_ of techie types in Phoenix and other cities in the top 10
excluded... it's not all "creative" most of the development here is more
business oriented.. I just really get sick of these types of things not taking
into account some of the largest cities in the country.

I'm just getting really, really tired of living in the 6th largest city in the
US, not even including the very large suburbs, and always being excluded from
these kinds of things.

~~~
natrius
I'm pretty sure Yelp has actual usage data that provides a better signal of
which cities are worth the effort than population. Plus, trendy cities get
talked about more than non-trendy ones by definition. More people care where
hipsters hang out in Austin than where they hang out in Phoenix even though
Austin is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

~~~
tracker1
The problem is, in _not_ including the top 10 most populated cities in the US
in things like this, they exclude a lot of the nation. This example in
particular may not be great... but I am constantly seeing posts about _new
service X_ that doesn't include even the top 5 most populated cities... It's
like excluding a large part of potential users. It's similar to releasing an
IE-only site today.

------
jmspring
Surprisingly, the overlap between PBR and hipster isn't as great as I thought
it would be. Though it is a bit closer in the east bay.

Pity it doesn't go down the peninsula.

~~~
baddox
Perhaps PBR got too popular again.

~~~
dilap
Needs Tecate.

------
Aardwolf
The map refuses to zoom out more than a small bit. Is that some kind of in-
joke about hipsters being only in that area?

------
apendleton
Haha, both my office and home neighborhoods have red blobs over them (for
"hipster" in DC). Excellent.

~~~
ryanSrich
Fuckin' H street man.

------
jaredsohn
It would be interesting to turn this into an API for use with looking at
apartments/hotels, Google Now (and related), etc. as a warning system for
people new to an area. (Thinking more in terms of the 'sketchy' warning than
the 'hipster' warning here.)

~~~
jpdevereaux
[http://www.trulia.com/local/#crimes/san-francisco-
ca](http://www.trulia.com/local/#crimes/san-francisco-ca)

------
hmsimha
Am I seeing things or does it look _just a little bit_ like the PBR heat map
puts a bird on Portland?

[http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/portland/pbr](http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/portland/pbr)

~~~
callmeed
Haha, a little bit ...

For those that don't know the reference:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XM3vWJmpfo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XM3vWJmpfo)

------
wavesounds
This is great! Anyone have information on the technology used? Specifically
what they used for real time front end and data analysis. I also wonder if
they could open it up for dynamic keywords.

~~~
omd
It looks to be the plain ole Google Maps API:

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/layer-
heatmap)

------
tzury
For NYC, I would expect the Lower east side to be the hit
[http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/nyc/hipster](http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/nyc/hipster)

~~~
mathattack
Indeed. Even New Jersey gets some love. Brookyln too. No hipsters on the upper
east or west though.

~~~
w1ntermute
> Brookyln too.

Brooklyn (more specifically, Williamsburg) is the center of NYC hipster
culture.

------
austinl
Living in Logan Square, I can attest to this
[http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/chicago/hipster](http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/chicago/hipster)

~~~
tathagatadg
true that :) ... wicker park is awesome too!

------
snikolic
I appreciate how well this lines up with the PBR finder:
[http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/sf/pbr](http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/sf/pbr)

------
Sealy
That is a very cool feature. A great example of well applied Business
Intelligence and data mining.

Hackers take note, this is how you get value out of your growing datasets.

------
mugdho
I couldn't find the scale in the maps are they the same, as SF seems to be
more hipster-y then Portland, which I didn't think was possible.

------
vilius
Hipster Bermuda Triangle in London
[http://cl.ly/image/303A3s1R0E22](http://cl.ly/image/303A3s1R0E22)

------
tathagatadg
some days back i posted a question on quora asking which is the most hipster
neighborhood of chicago. i must admit the map concurs with the humans:

[http://www.quora.com/Chicago-1/Which-are-the-most-hipster-
ne...](http://www.quora.com/Chicago-1/Which-are-the-most-hipster-
neighborhoods-of-Chicago)

------
EricMuller22
This is a hilarious little hack. Neighborhood stereotypes seem to find
themselves reinforced in Yelp reviews.

------
czbond
They're telling us the places to avoid ;) (The areas with high concentrations
of Hipsters).

~~~
shurcooL
What makes one want to avoid hipsters? Serious question because I don't really
know.

------
gourneau
I am surprised the map for 'hipster' and 'pbr' is not almost identical.

~~~
kinofcain
Indeed. My guess is that people who are using the word "hipster" in a review
are using it pejoratively to describe a place that they think hipsters would
frequent, whereas the actual hipsters who are mapping out sources of PBR have
long since moved on to places that aren't cool yet.

~~~
readme
Is PBR still cool? I'd think most of everyone has moved on to craft beer.

~~~
mrgordon
One would think that but...

------
JoshGlazebrook
Well it seems accurate for Seattle. Tourist is dark red all around the pike
place market.

~~~
RandallBrown
With a nice little spot on the space needle too.

And hipster covers the pike/pine/broadway area of capitol hill. It's very
accurate.

~~~
nieve
And don't forget the red blotch of shame where Ballard has been getting
gentrified into the ground. Hipsters here have more overlap with yuppies than
most places I've lived.

------
eksith
That map is alarmingly accurate. And people say meta-data is no big deal.

------
kapilkale
This is one of the best SEO pieces I've seen all year.

~~~
hnriot
How is this SEO?

~~~
kapilkale
It's high quality content that people want to share. Some of those people will
inevitably share it on their blogs, with links pointing at the site. As a
result, Yelp's pagerank improves and they stay ahead of their competition for
things like "best restaurants in San Francisco".

A ton (I'd guess 80%+) of Yelp's traffic comes from Google / Bing search.
Maintaining / growing that traffic is probably a substantial driver of their
decisions.

~~~
michaelt
So, is all high quality content people link to "SEO"?

~~~
James_Duval
Depends on the intention.

I think in this case, as Yelp have admitted in the past they are dependent on
Google/organic search traffic, it is likely that this content is intended to
function as SEO as well as (and due to the fact that it is) something cool.

With a company with more of a business-to-business angle, it might have been
more ambiguous, but in this case it seems likely that SEO is part or all of
the motivation.

------
epynonymous
awesome, now i know the places to avoid when i'm in san francisco!

if this was nyc, you'd see williamsburg with big solid red dots.

------
pinchyfingers
Plenty of tortillas in Austin.

------
wittysense
Yelp does not like Tor.

~~~
dwyer
Yelp is very aggressive against crawlers. They IP banned me for curl'ing their
site a few times for something or another that their API didn't provide. I had
to email them and promise never to do it again. I'd imagine it has provoked
some to attempt to crawl them via Tor. I just use the Open Table API instead.

~~~
wittysense
! Cheers to the tip.

