My first (quite pointless) Ruby website | Hacker News Reader

My first (quite pointless) Ruby website

sowhatcouldigetatmcdonalds.com

44 pointspluies31 comments

Expand to the other major chain restaurants and source your pricing from Mechanical Turk (except for the dollar menus of course). I'd take a few precautions to validate the data. For example, you could put up an HIT to get Burger King's entire menu and have 5 people complete it. Compare, lather, and repeat. But I see that as only the first step.

Add a dietary component. First, scrape all the various nutritional values (calories, grams of fat, etc.) from each major restaurants website. They all publish that stuff. Then tie into people's bank transactions through something like Yodlee or finkin(a "Show HN" project from a couple weeks ago[1]). You'll then be able to identify when a user buys food at a given restaurant for a given amount.

With a little tweaking, you could give people an automatic and fairly accurate assessment of their food intake. For example, your current site is telling me that 2 sundaes, a medium fry, and a filet-o-fish cost exactly $5.89. According to the McDonald's site, that meal is a whopping 1420 calories and 20g of fat. People would pay money this. Bonus points for sending customized tips on how to quit eating so horribly based on my data.

You'll have to factor in taxes, different promotions, identical price combos, and more to improve accuracy. I think it could have massive potential though. I've done a little research into a concept like this so feel free to drop me a line if it interests you.

-- [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1783823

EDIT: for clarification

Someone's clearly excited about the idea lol

Guilty. I'm most interested by ideas that can produce immediate and tangible results for users while requiring as little behavioral change from them as possible. This is especially important when it comes to something like health--people are always trying to reap the greatest benefits by exerting the least effort.

Also, you'll want to factor in availability.

Have you considered using varnish + cassandra? Take care to avoid the thundering herd problem.

I looked up what the thundering herd problem is but still don't really understand how it applies here? Could you explain further? (Sorry if thats a dumb question, not a computer scientist here).

Hmm. If this project ever expands to a larger audience than the one intended here, I will definitely look that up. Until this happens, I'll apply the YAGNI principle. :)

> Expand to the other major chain restaurants and source your pricing from Mechanical Turk (except for the dollar menus of course). I'd take a few precautions to validate the data. For example, you could put up an HIT to get Burger King's entire menu and have 5 people complete it. Compare, lather, and repeat. But I see that as only the first step.

I have an API that does this automatically for you, http://houdinihq.com. I'd be happy to help the OP if there's an interest in doing something like this.

This is very insightful feedback, thanks!

Do you really think listing what people eat at restaurants/bars/coffees be enough to estimate their calorie intake? This might be my cultural bias talking, but here in Europe it would definitely not be accurate because people eat and drink a lot of "homemade" stuff.

I still consider SoWhat... as a gadget solely created to learn Ruby, but your ideas are intriguing. I'll drop you a line soon (busy schedule this week :) ).

Haha awesome Easter Egg - my friend just sent me this:

(6:54:08 PM) Michelle: it told me this: $1,000,000? Seriously? A whole lot of food. No, I won't compute that for you. That's too much. You'd become obese and you'd die. I don't want to feel the guilt for the rest of my life. I might be a webserver, but I'm not heartless. Unlike you after eating all that and suffering a stroke. Your little human body is not made for that. It's a no.

Well, for $99,999, you can get 5447 Medium Fries, 5422 Big Macs, 5367 Sundaes, 5320 Chicken Selects (3 Pc.), 5275 Filet-O-Fishes, 5272 Quarter Pounders with cheese, 5254 Medium beverages and 5234 McNuggets (10 Pc.). And you'll even have 54¢ left!

There's more:

1,000,000,000: Errr, a few franchises?

1,000,000,000,000: You could probably buy all of McDonalds stock for that kind of money.

Oh and apparently you can buy a Sundae for as little as $.999999999999999949.

> Oh and apparently you can buy a Sundae for as little as $.999999999999999949.

Damn, I was sure hackers here would test the edge cases, but I thought it would hold! :) What you describe look like a weird behaviour in Ruby's string parsing to int (if I remember my code correctly), but I'll look into it.

I wouldn't worry about it, it's just how Ruby and most other languages handle floats. Do a search on Google for "ruby float precision".

You could put some preset numbers to choose from, like $1 $5 $10, for those of us too lazy too type in the box.

Chances are you are going to get sued for having mcdonalds in your domain name.

switch that to sowhatcouldiget.com, add in taco bell, dominos etc...and it might make you a few hundred bucks a month

In addition to the "I'm dissatisfied" button, you should consider leaving the price in the text box so that "go" has the same effect of repeating the search.

I think dollar sign should be before amount, not after.

hm. for some reason, on second page it's correct =) so it's only on front page for me.

It depends on which side of the dollar sign you click. If your click falls to the left, you'll end up with the dollar sign in the wrong position.

I think it's pretty cool actually. If you expanded this to different restaurants, you may have something on your hands. I can't tell you how many times I've gone through this scenario when ordering. Not at McDonalds, granted, but at the places I do frequent.

Yes, it might be useful providing a real dataset... The problem would be finding the menus and making sure prices are correct, etc. That would need to be crowdsourced, and I'm not sure that many people would be willing to participate. :)

Thanks for the feedback!

Could probably get it done on Mechanical Turk for a few hundred bucks. I'd start in a single metro area and expand from there.

Agreed. You could form it into an app where you input how much cash you have on you and you find local restaurant items (or any other kind of product actually) that you could afford.

Props on the project!

Also, as far as your input filtering goes, I enjoy the 2001: responses. But you're not picking up extra "$" characters for it. It gives me an answer for "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$4" and "$$$$$$4$$$$$$" and "$$$44$$$4$4$", for example.

Interesting! I'll fix that. Thanks!

I go to McDonald's about once or twice a month. I get the same thing every time, a 5-piece Chicken selects meal combo. I choose this item because it requires the absolute minimal wait time. It costs $7.09 each time after tax. I put in $7.09 and refreshed the result several times but did not get my choice.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Does pricing vary by location?

"Price and participation may vary."

Yeah, there are airport locations where, for $5.00, you could get a regular cheeseburger and a medium soda. And you'll even have 45¢ left!

The subtly humor throughout the website really makes it more enjoyable to use. I wish more sites were this human.

So i tried hitting $9999999999999999999, priceless result. It actually quite make sense!

Please put a checkbox for vegetarians.

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