Show HN my Hackathon Project: Visual Craigslist w/ HN's algorithm | Hacker News Reader

Show HN my Hackathon Project: Visual Craigslist w/ HN's algorithm

5thavenue.chartboost.com

42 pointsSeoxyS18 comments

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.

Open articleView on HN

If I find something I want to buy on Craigslist my incentive is to hide it. On HN it's the reverse.

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.

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...

We are using the 3taps API, not parsing Craigslist directly. They aggregate all this data for us.

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.

O RLY?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 :)

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!

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

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.

Nice work!

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

WE WON! WE WON! hip hip hurray! hip hip hurray!

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