

Show HN - My weekend Django project (Pick the violent felon) - not_chriscohoat
http://violentornot.com

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Empact
Would definitely like to know the nature of the crime for each in the
"correct/incorrect" view.

E.g. for this guy: <http://violentornot.com/inmate/44200/>

The data would be: [1]:MURDER 1ST DEGREE [2]:SOLICITATION [3]:DANGER/ REPETIT/
ENHANCE
[http://www.azcorrections.gov/inmate_datasearch/results.aspx?...](http://www.azcorrections.gov/inmate_datasearch/results.aspx?InmateNumber=120022&SearchType=SearchInet)

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not_chriscohoat
Yes, that's coming for sure. I was focusing first on scraping if they were
violent and then making sense of the data. There are a ton of other states
too, and they are for the most part completely different. So linking to the
docket was all that I could do in just the few days I have had a chance to
work on it :P

Edit: The way it checks if it's violent or not is by checking the "Crime info"
column. For the inmate you linked to he is D/R-1, or marked as dangerous.
Occasionally I've seen murderers marked as ND, which means not dangerous. Not
sure what that's about....

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jevinskie
Is this ethical? Sure, it is just taking data that is already publicly
available (it looks like all of the mugshots are from Arizona's DoC) but it
almost seems like mocking sideshow...

P.S. It would be spiffy if you used AJAX to preload the next set of images.

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not_chriscohoat
Well it's less mocking and more "will a large set of votes show us people's
split seconds judgements". Hopefully at least...I'd like to think we'll be
able to see trends emerge based on gender, ethnicity, and appearance in
general.

Currently working on the preloading...a lot of the time spent loading is
keeping track of inmates you've seen and inmates you've voted for. Going to
roll out a way to determine how biased you are based on your votes (if there
is interest)

Quick edit: At first all of the images were pulled in with AJAX, but I wasn't
sure if that would affect the performance (and Adsense to be totally honest,
there's no great way to monetize something like this. Maybe an application but
that's a bit of a ways off). If anyone has any experience with ads and AJAX
sites I'd love to hear suggestions.

~~~
jevinskie
I see. It would be interesting if you could track the users' cursors and see
if they "hesitate" or switch back and forth between certain pairs of mugshots!

And surely other AJAX sites use AdSense, does anybody know how they do it?

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not_chriscohoat
I'm hoping that I can track "time spent choosing" or something to that effect.
I know when I've gone through the dataset (there's about 50k inmates in there,
and I'm working on more states) I have had a lot of split-second guesses. And
I'm usually wrong! So, I'd love to be able to see how long people spend
guessing.

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not_chriscohoat
Sorry it's so slow though...still a novice when it comes to AWS instances :/.
Definitely not using them the way they were meant to be used, or there's a
rogue DB query or 5 in there.

~~~
jevinskie
This week, I bet you could get away with shifting the blame to Amazon!

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nantes
Wow, I went 0/4 at first and then 6/6. Lesson: I have no idea if my instincts
for this sort of thing are correct.

Interesting idea.

~~~
not_chriscohoat
Sounds a lot like what I've done...I'm 50/50 at best. Vote streaks are just
session-based unless you are logged in, but since I have enabled voting I'm at
like 54.13% with about 300 votes or so. Not too impressive, even after looking
at mugshots all week...

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nantes
Huh, so much my theory that I was just getting warmed up with the first four .
. .

~~~
not_chriscohoat
Hah yeah I definitely haven't warmed up yet. I think my longest streak has
been 7 or 8...there's always a match-up of two scary people that just throws
me for a loop.

