
Show HN: Buzzngo.io – Real-time public polls using RethinkDB - lionpixel
https://buzzngo.io
======
lionpixel
Hi HN,

my name is Basti, and I would like to showcase our project Buzzngo with you.
Our system is running with RethinkDB under the hood and although the company
behind it faded away we still think it's a nice tool to power real-time
statistical analysis.

Our tests in Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg (Germany) were great collecting
thousands of votes during a sunny day. Feel free to sign up if you want to
start public polls in Germany/Europe in the near future.

Happy to hear your opinion!

Greetings Basti

~~~
Tankenstein
Cool project and am glad to see RethinkDB getting some love, a couple
questions, specifically about the hardware, came to mind:

Do you order the hardware and then place it wherever you like, or do you guys
set it up?

How does shipping it work?

What is it underneath: Raspberry Pi + custom stuff (batteries etc)?

Will you be offering fancier machines later on, as in a machine that lets you
input text?

Thanks for posting, i might well have use for this some day.

~~~
lionpixel
Thanks a lot for the feedback!

Yes, using our web platform you are able to create campaigns and attach
stations to it. Everything is automatic and just informs the team that a new
station need to be placed on point X for Y duration. Once placed and activated
the stations need to further watching.

Yes, Raspberry + WiFi + Batteries. :)

We are experimenting with a lot of things. Hitting, high-fiveing, jumping on
the buzzer and many more. They all have there pro and cons. Haha

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degenerate
You should create a sample poll and link to it, so we can try it out. I'm not
going to register for something to demo it.

~~~
Operyl
So, as far as I can tell the polls are hardware based, not website based. And
you can't even register yet, just sign up for a mailing list.

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honkycat
Try to back up and restore a large ( a table with a million rows ) rethinkdb
database and tell me about how much you love it.

Used rethinkdb for my start up. It is a curse.

~~~
cyberferret
Backup and restore is not an everyday DB operation, I wouldn't think?!?

I've got a small side project [0] (actually, am HN aggregation and reading
tool) which uses RethinkDB [1]. Currently has 4.2 million entries (7.7 GB) in
the HN posts table and really no issues that I know of.

[0] - [https://tophn.info](https://tophn.info) [1] -
[https://hackernoon.com/tophn-a-fun-side-project-built-
with-v...](https://hackernoon.com/tophn-a-fun-side-project-built-with-vue-js-
and-rethinkdb-f22159641c1b)

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nbclark
Lots to like here.

> RethinkDB is a wonderful db. Did you guys use Horizon on top for streaming?
> Or something custom? > Wonderful design asethetic

Seeing as you're based in Frankfurt, I'd recommend reaching out to events
hosted locally as live polling is a pretty common ask.

~~~
lionpixel
Thanks for the tipp definitely looking into that.

The platform is build using Vue for front end Node with Express as Backend and
Socketcluster inbetween for real-time comm. And of course RethinkDB as
database.

The landing page is build with Nuxt which reuses some components from the
platform. So when you like the look you will love the member area. :)

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gitgud
Love the idea! but was a confusing explanation. So a station is an hardware
input to the poll? Can you vote online too?

A cool idea would be to have hardware as an output too. I can imagine a
political campaign wanting an LED screen with a live poll count.

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dillondoyle
Two of the example polls in the site screenshot are political (us 2020,
cannabis).

I'm wondering how you get background demo info on poll participants?

I think it could be interesting to think about using visual cues from video
(gender, age) but what about info like is registered to vote or other
demographic info.

I don't see example of the hardware but I'm guessing this is like those smiley
face poll stations in that it just collects a simple response and doesn't
collect say first, last, address, birthday etc?

~~~
lionpixel
Based on the location we get some first demographic information (like banking
sector, shopping mall, university campus,..)

In case of political questions it is not enough to place only one station in
one city but instead up to 20 stations in more than 5 cities. A typical
question would be “Would you vote for Person A or Person B?” The system then
periodically makes a pattern analysis and informs you about insights (“People
with an academic background tend to vote for person A whereas people in north
Germany tend to vote for B”)

The technology is most powerful when many stations are activated and
orchestrated at the same time at different locations.

~~~
dillondoyle
Just some un-prompted feedback. I work in US politics. I'm not a full time
researcher but my baseline insider knowledge is probably pretty high.

I don't think that would be good enough for a poll used by most US political
campaigns. Even the tiny amount of news funded surveys care about xtabs with
meaningful voter data. I have seen a few huge response rate online surveys for
a simple presidential head to head but it's a tiny market without more voter
data attached and only for giant races with news tracking.

I think knowing what census tract one of these machines is in wouldn't be
enough data for political surveys, same w example of being near a university.

We actually field online surveys but we use voter file data to target and we
ask for respondent info to match back to voter file. We mostly only use them
to measure our digital ad's recall and persuasion.

I wonder if your product would be a better fit for say a brand advertiser;
everyone is a potential customer versus in the US few people vote. Plus it's
easy to measure 1-10 do you like this CPG or have you seen an ad recently.

I also think there are some potential cool use cases using ML to infer gender,
age bracket, race. For instance in live person polls often times the
interviewer makes a note of the voice's likely gender. Again more valuable for
a brand advertiser to know those demos for simple CPG attitude surveys. Really
the best value for my work would be if could match a persons photo to like
FB's db or maybe in China lol

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zengid
Glad to see RethinkDB is still getting some use!

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dyeje
Surprised to see no mention of security. How do you prevent people from
messing with the polls? Physically or digitally.

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djstein
really love your guys styling. is it all custom?

Maybe its so much text in one space, or maybe the cool animation in the
background, or maybe just my tired eyes, but I'm having a bit of trouble
focusing on what to read in the top section. I am not immediately faced with
the value prop because there is so much content!

~~~
lionpixel
Good point. Does anyone know of a good space vs. text ratio? Like 60:40 or
even more space?

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koboll
Isn't there quite a bit of selection bias involved in who is willing to walk
up and vote at a kiosk?

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a good question. I remember some stats professor tried to popularize
the phrase "voluntary response data are worthless" (see also: 'tokenadult on
that point,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322237)).
Point being, there's a strong self-selection happening with voluntary polls -
people who are opinionated enough to be bothered to answer a poll are not a
good sample of the population.

Another thing I wonder about: since this is a kiosk that's going to stand out
there for some time, what happens if a group of interest decides to game a
poll, by telling its members to go there and vote (possibly multiple times a
day)?

~~~
koboll
Right. Even worse at an unguarded physical location. What's to stop me from
calling my 30 friends from a student political group for some ballot-stuffing?

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pdappollonio
No demo?

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sergiotapia
Tangent but this is quite funny hahaha

>Now, create a poll for that campaign. For example, "Donald Trump or Kanye
West?"

>In our example, we could place the station near a university to get insights
from academic people.

~~~
0xFACEFEED
Yea but it left me feeling that the product is only intended for silly/stupid
things.

~~~
lionpixel
Upvoted! Good to know that you’re feeling this way. As a German company our
copywriter thought it would be funny.

In reality we’re doing many professional brand lift studies at the moment.
We’ll change the example.

