Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

muler.pythonanywhere.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 40 posts

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#31

Post by pizzicato »

usrme wrote: post #13

Congratulations on a very nice hobby project, and reaching the front page of Hacker News! A few questions though: - is the indentation of section headings, such as "Indication", "Pharmacodynamics", etc, intentional? The yellow highlight seems to take care of the emphasis on its own. It feels, to me, it should either be one or the other. - when sections (e.g. "Pharmacodynamics") include clear points of emphasis within…

Thank you!

Yeah I indented the headings but you're right, it looks better with the highlighting alone.

That's a good suggestion about subheadings. I'll try to do something with regex - shouldn't be too difficult I imagine.

Thanks for taking the time to test it and give feedback :)

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#32

Post by pizzicato »

mrmattyboy wrote: post #9

Looks great - only thing that immedaitely felt missing (although probably due to not being a member of the target audience) is a typeahead for the search :)

Yep, I'd planned to use something like autocomplete.js but that's something I'll explore after I've cleaned up the core python functionality. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#33

Post by pizzicato »

louis___ wrote: post #22

I do not know anything about drugs, but I searched for "heroin", and was brought to the "Diamorphine" page, which seems a bit different. Regarding your request on unit tests : do not do too much of them, too low-level. Try to write tests whose output should not change, should you refactor, this way they will help you avoid side-effects of refactoring. If your unit tests are too low-level, you will need to change them…

Someone else suggested including a disambiguation to highlight synonyms, which should be helpful in cases like codeine/heroin.

Thanks for the helpful advice re unit tests!

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#34

Post by pizzicato »

danhanlon wrote: post #15

This is pretty good, nice work! I think you're spot on that sometimes you just need a simpler overview of info. One thing I've noticed is that the first line under the drug name, I guess is the category? Some of them are probably a bit more specific than they need to be, like ibuprofen: https://muler.pythonanywhere.com/Ibuprofen You could take the summary from DrugBank instead of a category, but that might have other…

Yeah the category is taken directly from the Drugbank dataset, which can be rather specific and arbitrary. I'll see if there's a summary like you suggest that I could use instead.

Thanks very much for the feedback :)

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#35

Post by pizzicato »

dn3500 wrote: post #19

Very nice. As others have said, the sections that start with headings inside double asterisks ("*") should be set off somehow. I would suggest a paragraph break, with the heading either on a separate line or on the same line with some distinguishing typography such as bold.

Will do, thanks a bunch!

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#36

Post by pizzicato »

contravariant wrote: post #17

Is the markdown in the descriptions supposed to say unrendered? I'm seeing quite a phrases with ** around them, which would normally indicate bold text.

I've noticed that too, which is strange because some entries are rendered fine (e.g. Names of bacteria in the antibiotic entries). I'll have to poke around and find out what's wrong.

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

#40

Post by pizzicato »

CiceroCiceronis wrote: post #16

As a fellow medical student this looks very useful, thanks. If you want an idea for a future project, I conceived a little while ago of a browser extension enabling hover-over drug info pop-ups in the same vein as YomiChan (a tool providing mouse-over definitions for Japanese language learners). Maybe I’ll get to that at some point.

That sounds really cool, I hope you manage to work on it :) would love to see it
Post reply on HN