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Preview HN: match-making site for food

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#11

Post by doctorj »

notahacker wrote: post #9

I was a little surprised to find a McDonalds chicken sandwich with over 50% of recommended daily salt intake (default 'hacker' settings) given a four out of five star recommendation. There's a fine line between not being too harsh about people's diet and being overly generous in ratings! I like the basic concept and I'm sure there are plenty of ways of extending and expanding upon it.

Thanks for pointing that out. The ranking system is a multi-dimensional algorithm that optimizes for a variety of micro and macro nutrients. Individuals with different dietary needs have different star representations / health scores for the same meal. For example for someone with hypertension that chicken sandwich will have a very poor health score.

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#12

Post by notahacker »

doctorj wrote: post #11
notahacker wrote: post #9

I was a little surprised to find a McDonalds chicken sandwich with over 50% of recommended daily salt intake (default 'hacker' settings) given a four out of five star recommendation. There's a fine line between not being too harsh about people's diet and being overly generous in ratings! I like the basic concept and I'm sure there are plenty of ways of extending and expanding upon it.

Thanks for pointing that out. The ranking system is a multi-dimensional algorithm that optimizes for a variety of micro and macro nutrients. Individuals with different dietary needs have different star representations / health scores for the same meal. For example for someone with hypertension that chicken sandwich will have a very poor health score.

that's a fair enough answer. It'll help the usefulness of the app massively to be able to compound the effects of particular meal combinations over the course of time (not least to give committed users a reason to keep returning and updating their details).

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#15

Post by LeBlanc »

Interesting application. Good luck with your launch!

One thing I noticed is that it is not very clear what the little plus icons next to a recipe mean (the ones that are either gray or green). Pretty sure that represents the "health score" but is more green plus signs better?

Also, not all the things I was craving were on there. For example, I couldn't find any variant of steak. Would it ever be possible for the user to submit recipes from a recipe database and have your algorithms calculate its health score and then recommend other things? I feel this should be doable to a certain extent if you have the ingredient list.

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#16

Post by bajsejohannes »

This is a great idea! I hope you succeed in helping people eat healthy.

About meal swapping, I would try to make as little emphasis on the "swapping" as possible. If people first need to think of the most delicious thing they could eat, and then get something else, they will probably be less happy than if they just get a recommendation [1][2]. How about calling it "compare meal" instead?

[1] As seen in the book Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz

[2] So it is great that you have recommendations!

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#17

Post by doctorj »

LeBlanc wrote: post #15

Interesting application. Good luck with your launch! One thing I noticed is that it is not very clear what the little plus icons next to a recipe mean (the ones that are either gray or green). Pretty sure that represents the "health score" but is more green plus signs better? Also, not all the things I was craving were on there. For example, I couldn't find any variant of steak. Would it ever be possible for the user…

That is definitely doable. One of our partners describes us as a recipe database that is tethered to a personal health record.

The plus icons are the health scores. We tried to stay away from the user rating stars but in retrospect that seems to be causing more confusion that anything else.

Thanks for the good wishes.

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#18

Post by bajsejohannes »

I really liked going into that site and testing it out. Unfortunately, this will not be true when there is no 'hacker' account. If the site is going to be free in the future, I would definitely try to get rid of the mandatory creation of an account. How about being able to use the site (using cookies for a temporary account) and make the registration something you can do after a while? (like stackoverflow.com)

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#19

Post by jasonkester »

Once you're logged in, there's no way to get back to the homepage to figure out what the site is supposed to be about.

I can click through restaurants and menu items, but there's no indication as to what is actually going on. Tooltips pop up randomly, and if you can manage to keep one on the screen, they give you a paragraph that doesn't actually explain what's going on.

There seem to be star ratings that you can click on to rate things, but clicking them does nothing.

Eventually I clicked "Select" on something, and it popped up "Looks like you selected a combo" in a javascript alert box. Was that an error? Confirmation? What next?

If I could make it back to the homepage, or to some form of documentation, maybe I could find out. But I can't, so I left.

Re: Preview HN: match-making site for food

#20

Post by dkarl »

doctorj wrote: post #11
notahacker wrote: post #9

I was a little surprised to find a McDonalds chicken sandwich with over 50% of recommended daily salt intake (default 'hacker' settings) given a four out of five star recommendation. There's a fine line between not being too harsh about people's diet and being overly generous in ratings! I like the basic concept and I'm sure there are plenty of ways of extending and expanding upon it.

Thanks for pointing that out. The ranking system is a multi-dimensional algorithm that optimizes for a variety of micro and macro nutrients. Individuals with different dietary needs have different star representations / health scores for the same meal. For example for someone with hypertension that chicken sandwich will have a very poor health score.

notahacker raised an interesting point about not being too harsh. Some people could benefit a lot if they cut down from a burger, fries, and a large soda to a chicken sandwich and a diet soda. If you rate the chicken sandwich 2/5, your site will just depress them. On the other hand, a knowledgeable person with aggressive goals wouldn't trust your site if you gave that chicken sandwich a higher rating. Have you thought about making the ratings relative to a person's current dietary standards?
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