

Show HN: Vamoose, one-click hotel and flight finder powered by NLP - geverett
http://gillian.im/2014/11/weekend-project-vamoose.html

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brianshaler
One of the most interesting aspects of working on this project was the
strategy we used for refining our primitive city detection. We gathered pairs
of article titles & bodies (hoping we'd later accurately scrape them with the
readability.js library...) and set them up as test fixtures. While TDD seems
to go out the window during hackathons, it was crucial for us to quickly and
efficiently iterate while making sure to catch as many edge cases as possible.

In typical hackathon fashion, the code got mangled when I had to switch the
data store from leveldb (node) to flat json files (chrome extension) so the
latest version in the repo isn't the most graceful. But here's a hacky node
app for processing cities1000 data and then running mocha tests against a set
of articles:

[https://github.com/dzhang50/rlt/tree/master/node](https://github.com/dzhang50/rlt/tree/master/node)

Hope someone finds the technique and code useful, interesting, or at least
amusing.

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mtmail
Extracting what location a news article is about is fascinating work. Unlike
geocoding you don't get a fixed query.

The only commercial solution I'm aware of is Yahoo!s PlaceSpotter (middle of
the page
[https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/geo/](https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/geo/)).
Yahoo uses it to better target ads against content, e.g. news articles. I'm
sure Google has something similar in-house.

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rposborne
Looks great but you guys have a name conflict with a major bus provider up and
down the east cost. [http://www.vamoosebus.com/](http://www.vamoosebus.com/)

~~~
geverett
Ha yes realized as much a few weeks after the hackathon. We're not planning to
develop the idea further so not really an issue...

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wbeckler
That's 100 times better than anything else I've seen produced at a weekend
hackathon. You guys are amazing!

~~~
geverett
Aw thanks Bill!

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jszymborski
Dunno why but you seem to have a really bad Web of Trust score :( Results of a
bad former owner of the domain?

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dfuego
Really good hack guys. Keep building it! (I do agree the name is not great)

