Hacker News Reader

And here's a suggestion for you: don't tell other people how to live; it's unseemly.

You seem to be overreacting. Suggesting is very different from telling.

Would you randomly select and just sit through a movie? A TV show? How about buying a random car? Selecting a spouse?

I think you are conferring a level of undue gravitas to food. Can you really equate selecting where to have lunch with whom to wed?

To pick a place to eat, look at the guests. If it's a bit run-down outside, but has tonnes of repeat customers, it's probably good.

You can spot a place with a local cliental by the way they interact. If all the tables look like circled wagons fending off marauders, they are tourists. If everyone is well dressed, it's a trendy place with good marketing - people go their once to impress their friends, but don't come back. Expect pretentious overpriced food, if that's what you are looking for.

If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business. While you can't guarantee you'll like it, some people do.

> If it's a bit run-down outside, but has tonnes of repeat customers, it's probably good.

If you're visiting a new place (presumably the typical use case for Yelp), how can you possibly look inside a restaurant and know if the people inside are repeat customers?

>If everyone is casually dressed, and seems familiar with the place, it gets repeat business

Oh. So when travelling, you recommend selecting restaurants by looking inside each establishment and inspecting the clothing of the customers? By that argument, how could any restaurant beat (eg) McDonald's, with its casually-dressed, repeat customers?

Wow, "casually dressed" is the nicest thing I've heard anyone say about a McD's customer in a long time!

All I can say is many people love McDonald. I mean, that place wouldn't have succeeded and sold billions of burgers if it was at least partially satisfying it's customers. Sure the food might be horrible for you but I can't say I hate the taste of a BigMac.

You can tell by the look of the place that it's not a high end restaurant or a locally run restaurant. That should let you set your expectation for the place.

I don't know why the above comment has been down-voted - it's completely fair and valid.

HN works best when downvoting is not used as disagreement. If you don't like McDonalds, fine. But it's clearly true that many people do.

A cheeseburger isn't really intrinsically unhealthy. It seems pretty complete, actually (excepting the white bread).

Now the fries and Coke aren't doing much for you.

"There's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking over ideas of where to eat with friends."

This, I think, is the future of crowdsourced review sites. Not necessarily "friends", but at least people with some form of shared experience and mutual interest - and a track record of being honest about what's good and what isn't.

I want the ability to look at a reviewers history, and increase the weighting of reviewers who's reviews I agree with, and to mark as irrelevant the ratings of people who (in my opinion) clearly have no clue about what they're reviewing (or who are obvious shills).

I suspect this could be built on top of Yelp - automatically collate lists of reviewers who's reviews of places we have in common align, and allow me to browse other places they've rated highly (or rated low). I'm guessing doing that as a non-yelp service would be against their TOS, and I'm guessing their business model of "Sorry, we can't 'help' you with negative reviews… Unless of course you choose to become an advertiser?" type extortion would be far less effective if there was a good way to show those poor reviews up as the rantings of the delusional disgruntled that they so often are…

(Of course, if someone were to give me exactly what I'm asking for, I suspect I'd end up with a sanitised subset of "stuff I already know I like" with very little opportunity to discover interesting new things…)

You can do some of this.

If you see someone whose reviews you like, you can follow them. This will cause their reviews to be at the top of any other businesses you look at. Also, you can click on the name of a person whose review you trust to see a list of other places they reviewed.

I think the only things they are missing from what you suggested (just from what I saw in the FAQ) is personalizing the average rating and aggregating information about the people you trust for you.

If you want to try to implement something like this (perhaps as a browser extension), their APIs look pretty thorough. (http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/v2/business)

Myspace actually tried that.

Yelp is not a substitute for your friends. It's not even nearly as good as asking a random person on the street. If you're really stuck, go to a hotel and ask the concierge, they generally don't even care that you're not a guest if you're asking for something as simple as a restaurant recommendation.

On NPR recently, there was a guy talking about a startup that works like Tripadvisor, but only shows you reviews within your social circle. This eliminates shills and only shows you opinions that have a known value to you.

Maybe someone can steal that idea and apply it to restaurants.

Big problem there - lack of data.

Tripadvisor et al have the advantage that, with all the Internet posting (admittedly with dubious quality, but...), they can show a review of almost anything.

Within my social circle? They won't even be 10% comprehensive for my own town, let alone once I start going away.

Nice idea, won't work.

FWIW this just depends on your definition of social network. A friend of a friend's recommendation could show up as well.

What if they expand the data by including reviews from people of second and third order of separation from the user? Each iteration would exponentially expand the data, and perhaps after four or five separations, you'd have sufficient data (though this may defeat the whole premise of getting data from your social circles)

But the further out you go, the lower the quality of the personal link.

What counts as a personal link, anyway? There are people on my Facebook profile I knew years ago in a different town, people on my LinkedIn profile I worked with 6-7 years ago. All people with whom I'm happy to stay in contact at a low level and retain in my wider professional network, but would I want to trust a recommendation from a similarly distant contact of theirs as much as I would a day-to-day colleague of my brother-in-law who I see every week? Probably not.

Like I said - nice idea, won't work.

I think there's a golden opportunity that's less about "social circles" and more about "revealed common preferences".

If there's somebody on your review site, who ranks highly several of my highly ranked coffee shops, and ranks low a subset of my lowly ranked coffee shops, I'd be much more prepared to consider their other coffee shop reviews as relevant to me. Even better, location based services like 4Square of Facebook checkins could expose their "revealed preferences" to the algorithm as well, someone who rates Fourbarrel and Ritual highly, but checks in to Starbucks four times a day is less likely to be someone who's reviews I'd want to read than someone who perhaps rates Fourbarrel and Ritual lower on an absolute scale, but checks into both regularly as well as, say Sightglass and BlueBottle.

I'd really like a time and event aware as well as just venue aware review function. Zeitgeist on a Thursday night, or after a critical mass ride - is a _vastly_ different experience than Zeitgeist on a sunny Saturday afternoon when it's full of slumming sunset and marina crowds. DNA Lounge really needs separate review categories for Death Guild nights, Bootie nights, and out-of-town dubstep artist nights - people who love (and hence rate highly) one of those events are significantly less likely to enjoy the other two as much - which makes a Yelp-style single rating for DNA Lounge not particularly useful.

We're actually working on this from a slightly different angle; rather than "revealed preferences" and machine learning, we're using surveys of psychologically-validated, taste-predicting traits.

There is a Swedish movie review site (http://filmtipset.se) which gives you a predicted rating determined from your previous reviews. They are venturing into books and wine, using the same algorithm. Unfortunately they seem to be better mathematicians than web developers, so all of their sites are pretty crappy and they seem to have problems with monetization.

Another problem is that if your taste is not really mainstream, you have to rate quite a few movies to get accurate predictions. After I reached a couple of hundred movies, the predictions were nearly always completely accurate.

If Yelp is no better or worse than a stranger on the street or hotel concierge then I think that just plays to the point that Yelp has major problems.

Hotel concierges often have more glaring conflicts of interest than Yelp. They are often provided by outside companies that receive kickbacks from various vendors, though they dress like regular hotel staff. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115767671822257109.html

Also, the OP said he just moved, so that's probably why he can't just ask friends. Also, even once firmly established in a given region, not everyone has friends in their specific neighborhood, or a given neighborhood they might find themselves in with a rumbling tummy.

> I just got to this town, and I'd like to start my search with what people think are the most awesome places to eat. Is that so wrong?

No it's not. I don't understand why so many people are reacting with philosophical criticism to a comment about specific problems with Yelp, in a discussion about that very issue.

I think your problem is that your philosophy isn't catchy enough.