

Show HN: We open-sourced our anime discovery application - radq
https://github.com/hummingbird-me/hummingbird

======
mhurron
Once again, if I have to sign in to look at anything about your service, I
will not look at it. Might be cool but I don't care. MyAnimeList doesn't
require a login to look around.

Yes, I'm not a user to care about, but it's just annoying.

~~~
radq
This is something we do intend to address since we hear it a lot. In the
meantime if you click on the screenshots in the README it will take you to the
corresponding pages.

~~~
tonylampada
I think this would work on your home ;-)

<a href="/anime/" class="a_very_big_button">See Anime List</a>

------
radq
We started working on Hummingbird slightly over a year ago and have grown
quite a bit since then. We have a total of 50,000 registered users and ~30%
MAU.

We decided to open-source it because we don’t always have the time we would
like to work on it after putting in hours at work/school, and we had a lot of
our users interested in helping out. We also found that working out in the
open is a lot more fun!

We have a fairly modern stack, the backend uses Rails, Postgres and Redis.
Front-end is a client-side application written using Ember. (Mostly — there
are legacy pages still rendered using Rails and some performance-sensitive
parts that use React.)

The current incumbent in this niche is a website called MyAnimeList
(myanimelist.net) which has upwards of 2 million registered users. Considering
it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005 we strongly feel this niche
deserves better.

Please let us know what you think!

~~~
sand500
Out of curiosity, how would you feel if MAL used your code in updating the UI
of their site?

~~~
nobotty
hah, that would make the MAL devs competent, not going to happen

~~~
PLejeck
That would require there to actually be MAL devs. Last I heard, they're down
to one guy and he's AWOL.

------
joshschreuder
Great site! Been looking for something like this for a while.

It would be great to be able to search by view all by Studio or Director /
Writer. In fact you tag things like Studio (eg. Ghibli) but clicking the tags
doesn't do anything :)

I'm trying to go on a bit of a Maasaki Yuasa tilt following his Adventure Time
episode, so it would be nice to see all of the stuff he has done in one list.

Also it might be nice to see an overview of ratings when you mouse over
recommendations.

Great site though and I will continue poking around on it!

~~~
graphik
Agreed! This is something we've had planned for a while! :)

------
jey
Why target anime in particular instead of (for example) all TV and movies? Is
it more about having a beachhead, or is it that there are important
characteristics that make anime unique compared to other media?

~~~
Glyptodon
Anime isn't very cross-compatible in terms of both the things its fans care
about and community overlap with fans of regular movies/TV. Though I don't
really have a good means to support my assertion other than that most Anime
torrent or information sites are separate from normal TV/Movie sites, and the
reverse holds true as well - IE normal TV/Movie sites rarely have good
information on anime. So there's definitely a schism.

~~~
PLejeck
I think the fact that normal TV/Movie sites lack information on Anime led to
the schism more than anything. The same things the Anime community has
developed could be equally applicable to normal TV, especially in the age of
DVRs and streaming: Anime fans were watching things asynchronously long before
anyone else

------
seguer
What does this have over AniDB? I'm seeing MyAnimeList mentioned in the
comments, but not AniDB?

Do you guys have an API checking file hashes/fingerprints against episodes to
add to your list etc? That's one of the biggest draws for AniDB (for me).

~~~
PLejeck
I've not used AniDB much, but I once half-finished an API wrapper for Node.js
so I guess I'm about as qualified as we're gonna get.

In my experience, AniDB is effectively unmaintained code. They have
developers, the developers just don't know the codebase well and they don't
mess with old stuff. I've heard this is because it's a behemoth Perl script,
but I don't know for sure.

But to cover your main point of "an API checking file hashes/fingerprints
against episodes to add to your list", I just wanna say that this is kind of a
silly system: you can easily extract that data from a filename.

For example, the desktop app Taiga has an open-source parser which extracts
lots of data effectively
([https://github.com/erengy/anitomy](https://github.com/erengy/anitomy)) and I
myself wrote a simple regex-based one for my own client. Both are capable of
extracting at least the episode number, subber, and series title.

So why would Hummingbird want to store hundreds of thousands of MD5 checksums
when there's better options?

~~~
graphik
Just want to quickly add the Taiga will support Hummingbird fairly soon.
Within the next week or so.

We also have incredible desktop apps like HAPU that detect what you're
watching (including from sources like Hulu and Crunchyroll) and updates your
library. No fingerprinting or hashes necessary.

[http://forums.hummingbird.me/t/mac-hapu-scrobbler-
app/56](http://forums.hummingbird.me/t/mac-hapu-scrobbler-app/56)

------
tinco
The site looks good, I'm an AniDB.net user at the moment, but I could dig a UI
that's a little more pleasing.

I'm a bit confused about your anime titles though, why is Fullmetal Alchemist
in english, while Kara no Kyoukai is in romanised Japanese? Do you have a
system that allows you to give preference to the title languages like AniDB
does?

I also like how AniDB makes fansubs discoverable by showing who has subbed
what and has ratings for the translations. Are you planning on integrating
information about the fansub community? In my opinion it's a core feature of
AniDB.

~~~
radq
We have three title settings: English, Romaji and canonical. Canonical shows
whichever title is more popularly used. Default setting is canonical.

We do not have plans to integrate information about fansub groups because of
the types of relationships we're looking to have with larger presences in the
industry. We will be adding links to legal websites like CR, Amazon,
Funimation, etc though. Sorry!

------
a-nikolaev
The only thing missing in MyAnimeList are good suggestions, based on your
tastes (something similar to Last.fm's recommendations).

------
Joona
Why not also have manga on the site? I no longer watch anime, but manga is a
huge thing for me.

~~~
radq
We are working on it. It is partially done (eg.
[http://hummingbird.me/manga/bakuman](http://hummingbird.me/manga/bakuman))
and should be complete soon but I can't give an exact date.

