Show HN: 5000 best movies | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 5000 best movies

5000best.com

23 pointsarekp28 comments

Cool site. I love the simple interface.

From a UX perspective, the header should be sticky when you scroll. I was having fun looking at the "moods" and genres that get highlighted when you hover over a movie, but after I scroll down, I can't see it anymore

Great feedback. I see I should do it this way.

Also include the column headers in the sticky part so that you can see those as you scroll too :)

So, please, for God's sake, use a <frame>. I hate all those javascript/CSS fancy tricks.

With <frame>s, you can press space/page down key to go to next page. Those stupid CSS tricks break this 35+ year-old tradition, and add literally zero benefit.

Please no more frames, they are deprecated. http://stackoverflow.com/a/4263583 and http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html (1996).

Edit: Not entirely deprecated, but are obsolete and highly discouraged.

I must confess that I use this website quite daily ( in fact everytime I want to watch a movie ) since I discovered it a few weeks ago here on HN. its a real gem. I love the interface too, even if I think that we could polish just a bit the css to make it more attractive ( if you want, I volunteer :) )

I do not know when I will have time to experiment more with the website, but volunteers are always welcome.

Pretty decent and clean interface, I like that -- I think the next step to take from here would be implementing a system that lets users keep track of a list of watched/not-watched movies.

Up for it? :)

Anyway, do please remark on what kind of stack you've got going and what went into making this.

Thanks. We'll see. Each feature costs developer's time.

Edit: the stack is G-WAN and everything is written in plain ANSI C. I wrote my own HTTP servers in C/C++ for my previous websites, but this time I tried G-WAN. I think it saved me one week of work or two.

The website is running on the cheapest virtual dedicated server from 1&1 with 25% of one processor time. The total cost is less than $10 monthly.

what is (approximately) the actual traffic and load of the server... i've been curious about g-wan for a long time :)

The website should withstand several times larger traffic than the HN frontpage effect. I am not sure about the reddit effect.

Very nice. Different but distinctive and useful design.

Row selection highlighting would help with navigation; I find myself getting a bit lost when parsing such long rows. I would also like to see a bit more info about how the site works.

One tiny recommendation: Give a visual indication that the movie I just rated will move elsewhere. It was very confusing to see things vanish when I clicked on them :)

But leaving nitpicks aside - I really like it.

I'm finding your personalization algorithm to be impressively accurate.

Is there some way to download the personalized results?

It wouldn't have to be pretty - even plain XML would be great.

This is an awesome little web app that I immediately bookmarked for later reference. On a side note, only on HackerNews could this interface draw praise.

Yes, the interface became a little complicated. The previous version was more accessible for a casual user, for example the following article about the website was received pretty enthusiastically (retweeted about 1000 times) http://gigazine.net/news/20121012-5000-best-movies/

I guess the right way to fix it is to hide some features and add a tutorial.

I love the functionality, I wouldn't change anything there. I would just try and clean up the interface a bit. Bring some consistency to alignments, add some hierarchy to the controls with font weights, sizing colors etc... Normal UX stuff.

Honestly, it may not be a priority for you. I was NOT trying to bash. I just thought it was funny that the interface was drawing praise.

As a UX Specialist at my agency, I see interfaces like this all the time (I'm usually being paid to fix them). We call this aesthetic "engineers designing". Don't take it too hard, I'm sure my PHP looks like designers engineering :)

So after I used the site, my first thought was, "That's awesome, but it's definitely painful to interact with; engineers designing." Then I pop to the comments and the first one is about how much they like the interface. Excellent HN moment for me there.

Yea, that Excel-table-like design probably breaks all design rules. It surprises me most when I occasionally see design professionals complementing it. I am rather a backend programmer and I have no illusions.

But even the Hacker News audience does not have enough geekiness to understand my previous attempt at a movie recommender system: http://5000best.com/movie-galaxy/

Way simple, yet charming. Loved the show-categories-on-hover feature, but it's impossible to see the categories when scrolled down.

How does the score works? 12 Angry Men has a 9.4 score and 7th place, but when I filter by "Law" movies the score goes down to 7.5.

Score is different in each of the 55 rankings. I do not know if this is clear in the interface, but "Law" is one of the rankings, not a filter.

And The Wire ranks below The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in "Law" themed tv shows? huh?

Something seriously wrong with the "writer" credit. E.g. anything based on a book, Full Metal Alchemist.

I'm really impressed. The "recommender" system works really well.

Thank you. I was in top 50 in the Netflix Prize and wrote a book about recommender systems (http://arek-paterek.com/book/) if someone is interested how the bread is made.

How come "The Godfather" is a Horror movie?

I have to tune that one. Violence and blood alone should not indicate a horror.

once you scroll down, the whole information section becomes useless.

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