
Show HN: An interactive map of restaurants reviewed by the New Yorker - reedk
http://newforkermap.com
======
donohoe
I'm the product and engineering director at The New Yorker and this is
awesome!

I'm pushing to provide public APIs, and this helps demonstrate why.

Of course, you (or anyone else here) is welcome to come and build it for real
(and argue your case for/against dieresis) with direct access to the data.

If you'd like to reëngineer this for TNY, take a peek:

[http://www.newyorker.com/about/careers](http://www.newyorker.com/about/careers)

~~~
reedk
Hi Michael- So glad that you like it! I'd love to hear more about what your
team is working on. (I suppose it's not a dieresis on/off switch.) I'll shoot
you an email.

~~~
Amorymeltzer
This right here is why HN is a great community.

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bradleyjg
Eight restaurants reviewed in Queens in twenty years. If Queens were its own
city, it'd be the fourth largest in the nation -- just ahead of Houston and
not far behind Chicago.

Maybe they should rename it The Manhattanite, or maybe The Manhattanite,
Preferably Below 14th Street.

~~~
CPLX
I wonder if that's accurate. One of the big differences between Queens vs the
rest of NYC is in the way postal addresses are handled.

In Manhattan every single address ends with "New York NY" and in Brooklyn
every address ends in "Brooklyn NY", but in Queens the addresses correspond to
the individual "cities" or rather neighborhoods that comprise the borough. So
instead of "Queens NY" addresses end with "Long Island City NY" or "Flushing
NY" or "Jamaica NY" despite being in the city of NYC.

So maybe this side project, which presumably is based on scraping the data
from the New Yorker site, doesn't have all the various areas of Queens coded
into it.

Or maybe it does, I'm just speculating wildly without actually looking into
the matter.

~~~
reedk
I used the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert street addresses into lat/lng.
It seems to handle the idiosyncrasies of Queens addresses well. That said, if
you see something that looks out of place, please let me know and I'll correct
the data.

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irl_zebra
Interesting! Red ones are closed permanently it appears. I would be interested
in knowing whether there's a correlation between TNY bad reviews and whether a
restaurant is now closed.

~~~
onion2k
I'd be surprised if there wasn't, but only a correlation. The things that get
you a bad review are the same things that stop you building up the sort of
repeat custom a restaurant needs in order to stay in business.

Now, if you could show there was a _causal_ relationship between a bad review
and a restaurant closing, that'd be _really_ interesting.

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danso
I upvoted, but it would be nice to be able to see less of a map (which forces
the user to click on each dot) and maybe a list of the restaurants on the
side, perhaps ranked in descending order of Yelp stars/# of reviews and with
Yelp categorization that could be filtered?

A half-and-half view works fairly nicely in NY because of its oblong shape.

As another addition...you could probably pull NYT reviews fairly easily (via
the article API
[http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/read/article_search_api_v2](http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/read/article_search_api_v2),
or just scraping the restaurants page), and they do have a star-system of
their own. I feel they'd be much more likely to issue a takedown notice,
though.

edit: Though I notice you're actually using Yelp's API within their TOS
[1]...i.e. freshly requesting the Yelp data with each request and not caching
it...so my suggestion would be significantly harder than if you did just a
straight pull of the data and organized it on your side...so ignore my TOS-
infringing ideas :)

[1]
[https://www.yelp.com/developers/api_terms](https://www.yelp.com/developers/api_terms)

~~~
reedk
Thanks for the upvote! I really like the idea of combining reviews from
different publications on one map, especially with a filter to specify which
ones to make visible.

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realalexhomer
Really great idea! This is one of the first things I've ever seen on here that
I think I will actually bookmark and use.

I'm just curious if you would mind divulging a little bit about how you
managed to make this work? Are you just scraping the New Yorker site and
sticking them onto the map, or is there something else going on?

~~~
Omnipresent
I'd be interested to find out details of how you did this. It is a really neat
idea and I wished you had it for my city!

~~~
zeeshanm
Appears data from NewYorker is scraped (unless they have an open API?) and put
into "restos" variable in JavaScript. [0] Then it's plotted on Google Map
using their API. [1]

0 - view-source:[http://newforkermap.com/](http://newforkermap.com/)

1 -
[http://newforkermap.com/static/js/markers.js](http://newforkermap.com/static/js/markers.js)

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klunger
"This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again
later."

~~~
reedk
Sorry about that... Google wanted my money. Back up now.

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JoeAltmaier
I learned: New Yorker reviewers are not very literate. Weak similes, bad puns,
snarky attitude. Not really restaurant reviews; too-clever essays on their
emotional ride.

~~~
onion2k
No one goes to a restaurant because they _need_ to eat. There are quicker,
cheaper, easier options. A restaurant should be seen in the same light as a
trip to a theatre, or to a gig. You don't go to a gig to listen to songs you
could play on your home hifi, you go for the experience. The reason to go to a
restaurant is because it's also an experience - the food is a part of it, but
there's much more. There's the ambiance, the company, the style, the luxury,
the cost.

That is what a restaurant reviewer should write about. A report on what
someone ate, or what they saw, is not a review. There _should_ be an emotional
ride. That's what a review _is_.

If you want to read some of the best restaurant reviews ever written, search
for Jay Rayner's work in the Observer. He is masterful at writing about
restaurants (and food, and wine). They're a joy.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Both are true. Facts can also be useful, as well as feeling.

A useful review should include some objective analysis. Ignoring details that
marred your visit but wouldn't likely impact future patrons for instance;
instead of wallowing in them gleefully.

Also a good reviewer should understand and adjust for their own emotional
state going into the deal. You have a bad day; you write a scathing review -
how is that useful to anybody?

So, what a review _is_ , is a lot more than disgorging a personal emotional
odyssey in print. A professional would write a carefully weighed analysis
including a dispassionate component to factor out their own irrelevant biases.
Would include those elements that were well crafted, _even if_ they didn't hit
home with the reviewer on the particular night they visited. Would resist
cheap jabs, which are the review equivalent of click-bait.

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vdnkh
Nice! Displaying a popup of "at a glance" info on pin rollover would be a nice
feature.

~~~
reedk
Good thought! Will add it to the list.

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hanniabu
How did you check to see which locations are currently closed?

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reedk
To be clear: The red pins are restaurants that have gone out of business and
are closed permanently; not restaurants that aren't currently open, but will
open later in the day for (e.g. for dinner).

The Yelp API provides data on whether a restaurant is still in business and is
fairly accurate.

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imaginenore
Needs a price filter.

~~~
reedk
Filtering by price, date reviewed, and open/closed status are in the backlog!
Would you have a preference for the price as described by The New Yorker or by
Yelp? (Or by some other source?)

