

Show HN my Hackathon Project: Visual Craigslist w/ HN's algorithm - SeoxyS
http://5thavenue.chartboost.com/
The concept was to rethink the way we browsed Craigslist and shopped online. The main section, the "homepage" is a tree map of recent craigslist posting sorted by popularity using a slightly modified version of Hacker News' ranking algorithm.<p>The newest page is a masonry view of the realtime stream of the craiglist posts as they are added to the system (much like Hacker News' newest page.)<p>The top page is the masonry view version of the homepage.<p>The game page is a FaceMash-like game for the posts, which influences the overall scores and popularity of items.
======
staunch
If I find something I want to buy on Craigslist my incentive is to hide it. On
HN it's the reverse.

------
SeoxyS
The concept was to rethink the way we browsed Craigslist and shopped online.
The main section, the "homepage" is a tree map of recent craigslist posting
sorted by popularity using a slightly modified version of Hacker News' ranking
algorithm.

The newest page is a masonry view of the realtime stream of the craiglist
posts as they are added to the system (much like Hacker News' newest page.)

The top page is the masonry view version of the homepage.

The game page is a FaceMash-like game for the posts, which influences the
overall scores and popularity of items.

------
hung
Too bad this will probably be banned for eating up a lot of CL bandwidth. See
prior hack called listpic: [http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/06/08/jim-
buckmeister...](http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/06/08/jim-buckmeister-
qanda-why-craigslist-banned-listpic/)

~~~
SeoxyS
You'd be surprised, but our entire service does not make a single request to
the craigslist servers.

We get the craigslist postings from the 3taps API, which themselves scrape
Google Caches to import that data.

The images are typically hosted on services like imageshack or flickr. We
store everything in our own database and keep track of our own version of the
data, which we stream from the 3taps firehose.

~~~
hung
O RLY?

<http://i.imgur.com/ccBEs.jpg>

~~~
SeoxyS
Right. Fair enough. But, even then, the requests come from the client browser,
rather than our server, which is much less likely to be a problem to CL.

------
anonymoushn
How do I get to the Craigslist ads? Clicking on the images appears to do
nothing under Mac OS and Chrome.

~~~
progolferyo
Working on this feature. We ran out of time to implement this for the
hackathon.

------
ivanzhao
How do you parse craiglist in realtime? Won't they block your server?

~~~
progolferyo
The data all comes from the 3taps api (<http://3taps.com>), which is who is
sponsoring this hackathon.

------
hansy
I don't understand the Game part of the website. How does picking one item
among a pair of two completely different items (e.g. a motorcycle helmet vs.
Castor oil) influence score?

Considering it was a hackathon, maybe the algorithm you developed isn't
complete to show two similar objects...unless you intentionally chose to do it
in the manner you did. Just curious why.

Fun website by the way :)

~~~
progolferyo
The images are just pulled from a single category on craigslist. So we
currently have no way of separating out the motorcycles from the motorcycle
helmets, without further filtering.

Thanks!

------
markkat
It's beautiful. I don't know if Craigslist is the optimal medium, but I like
looking at it. Nice work!

------
joshontheweb
This is pretty cool. I am currently shopping for a motorcycle and it is much
nicer to be able to browse the images. I do wish that it didn't gray out the
image on hover though.

------
blaines
Nice work!

------
gcb
Seeing it on android... Can't understand what the site is about.maybe
something is not working

------
progolferyo
WE WON! WE WON! hip hip hurray! hip hip hurray!

