Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

goodbre.ws

57 pointsdavidcelis50 comments

Thanks for looking guys. This site has been a side-project/hobby of mine for a while now. The past few days for me have been spent rewriting it from the ground up to be a much better site. I know that there are other beer sites out there, but I think that there is something special about making a service like this freely available and open source, and I'm really proud of what I've created.

You can check out the code here: https://github.com/davidcelis/goodbre.ws/

The code that powers the recommendations themselves is here: https://github.com/davidcelis/recommendable/

Any feedback would be nice. This new design is in its infancy but, as far as I can tell, it's been very stable. If you find a bug, please, please let me know here or post on the issues tracker.

This sites page loads are really fast. Well done in that respect.

PJAX, man. Loving it.

Whoa. Ok yeah that is seriously fast. This is the first I've heard of it -- if anyone cares to comment, I'd be really interested to hear what the limitations of pjax are. As used in this application anyway it's pretty impressive.

If I recall correctly, it was written by github co-founder (defunkt) and powers github. It's pretty solid.

What algorithm are you using to make recommendations? I've been looking around in the recommendable source but can't seem to find it.

That's under `lib/recommendable/acts_as_recommended_to.rb` towards the bottom. It's a combination of the `similarity_with(rater)` and `predict(object)` methods. Additionally, I detail the algorithm here: http://davidcelis.com/blog/2012/02/07/collaborative-filterin...

Thanks!

Maybe have some filtering by country visible on the home page. It took me a while to figure out you actually had British beers in your database.

Also, I realise you're a ruby programmer but you should really consider including Python IPA http://littlevalleybrewery.co.uk/our-beers/python-ipa :)

I'm getting a DNS lookup failure (I'm in the Netherlands).

Same, USA. Looks like google's DNS servers 8.8.(8.8|4.4) haven't picked it up yet.

Switched to OpenDNS and it works fine.

The domain resolves to 74.207.230.240 if anyone wants to add it to their hosts file instead.

Looks like my DNS account ran out of funds in the middle of the night. Whoops. Sorry about that guys. It should be good to go now.

Same from Japan. Can we get an alternate link?

DNS failure, getting it here in the US

Same here in Austria.

Same here in Poland.

Some of the letters that have diacritics are stripped:

"Leák" should be "Ležák" "Měťanský" should be "Měšťanský" "Velckopopovicky" should be "Velkopopovický"

I have problem risolving the site, dont know why, we have an internal DNS server (but i see that google's 8.8.8.8 can resolve it..)

I rated a few beers, but my recommendation screen is empty. I get that it's a new site, so I can accept that it might be tough to get recommendations right away, but it would be really helpful to explain why there aren't any results. Is it because I haven't rated enough beers? Is it because there aren't enough other users that have similar tastes? Is it because there's a delay before results show up?

Also, I had to try searching for some beers multiple times because my search didn't quite match how it's entered in your database. For example, I didn't realize that "redhook" is one word instead of two. I know that search is tricky and it's perfectly understandable, but I just thought I'd let you know.

Other than that, it looks great. I'll definitely be checking back for recommendations in the future.

I had been monitoring that my background workers were, indeed, working... But it seems as there's something else going on here. For some reason people aren't getting recommendations. I'll try to see what's going on.

EDIT: looks like the process had actually silently died at some point, but was still reporting as running. I think I've fixed the issue now.

Good site. Some comments:

- After a search or going to my profile, getting back to my dashboard should be more obvious.

- "Fridge" is an odd term and icon for the want-to-try mark.

- Can I submit beers?

Looking forward to updates.

Yeah, I'll be adding an additional and more obvious link back to the dashboard soon. As far as submitting beers, that's also coming soon. I need to also make it more easily to accept said beers into the database, as I'm the only person working on the site. Managing this database (which has some 60,000 beers currently) is really tough to do alone. Thank you for looking!

I like the design, it's quite clean. Your blogs make for interesting reading too.

The concept reminds me of Untappd (http://untappd.com/) though theirs is a mobile app.

I was also impressed that this didn't just limit down to American beers, but it had some of my native Aussie beers also. Nice work!

Ideas:

- Maybe load the beer names via AJAX for the search box so that I can get suggestions of what I'm typing for.

- Have a mouseover tooltip on the thumbs up/down, bookmark etc. buttons so that I know what they do. It's not immediately obvious what the eye button does.

That last idea is definitely something on my TODO. I give a brief rundown on the /about page, but the tooltips would be useful. The first idea is a good one as well, I'll be looking into how to cleanly implement that. Thank you!

Not sure if you're managing your own DB or not but it might be worth looking into http://www.brewerydb.com/

I actually thought long and hard about Brewery DB. Their API is just fantastic, IMO. Really clean. Unfortunately, I wrote Recommendable (the Ruby gem that I wrote to power the recommendations) in a way that it really relies on ActiveRecord currently. My database also has considerably more beers than BreweryDB does right now, but yeah. Managing it by myself slowly gets more difficult as more and more suggestions on beers I need to add come my way. I'm working on an admin section for me to manage that more easily.

Cheers! I've been wanting to make a beer app for a while and always had BreweryDB in the back of my head. Maybe you should open up your database via an API too:)

My comment is that UX wise, I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing on the site. It took me a few minutes to realize there was a search bar in the upper right that really is the focus for finding the beer you like and seeding the database to get recommendations. I'd add some sort of initial training session, and generally feature the search bar as a sort of "improve your recommendations, rate some beers!" feature.

Thanks, this is exactly the kind of thing I need to hear. As the person who made the site, I already know how to use it. I'll look into ways to make this all more obvious.

Also in the UX department, some search suggestions as you type could be nice, if that wouldn't add too much cost. Not a deal-breaker by any means but I found myself expecting it.

Minor recommendation on the search bar: the search button is a bit too small of a target. I know that most sophisticated web users hit enter when searching, but a sizable proportion are still click-happy.

Nice site. I found all the beers I was searching for easily. I think I'd use this more on my mobile phone while at the bar vs on my desktop.

Yeah if I knew Objective-C I'd code up an iOS app for the site. Once I know for sure the desktop version is stable, I'll at the least be looking into making a more mobile-friendly site.

You can go with something like Titanium http://www.appcelerator.com/

Maybe you could release an API so other people could write clients.

Down for me...

http://downorme.com/goodbre.ws

Cool site! I would suggest trying to scrape taphunter.com to find beers to add to your system. Doing that weekly for some of the bigger beer towns in the country would add a bunch of brews to your list.

For the non nerd two things: - login via FB/Twitter would be nice - user voice (or similar) feedback instead of GitHub issues page: no non-coder is gonna leave you feedback there!

You got a great start here. http://www.brewgene.com/ exists, but I don't think its recommendations are very good.

How long until I can get recommendations? I rated a few beers but it would be nice to have at least some kinda estimation on how many I would have to rate.

Recommendations start getting generated immediately after you rate a beer. The site is in its infancy, of course, so recommendations may start out rocky but they'll get better as more people (and you) rate more beers. The sad state of the cold start!

How long it takes for the recommendations to refresh is tougher to say, but it shouldn't be more than a few minutes. I can see that the workers that process them are active, so I'm fairly sure it's working.

I've contemplated doing a similar thing but in a different domain (may take advantage of your library). I had an idea for seeding the recommendations by scraping reviews from review sites and mapping their ratings onto likes/dislikes. Not sure how easy that would be though.

LIke a few other people here, I also didn't get any recommendations even after liking(and disliking) beers. I'll follow up tomorrow and shoot you an email or tweet if I still don't see any recommendations. Good job! You even got the Philippine beers :)

I liked three beers about an hour ago and my recommendation page is empty. Is the queue backed up due to an HN traffic spike?

Great! And also, this website is a great example how Twitter Bootstrap theme should look like.

DNS Lookup Failure in Argentina.