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Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

harvestsignal.com

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Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

#11

Post by gabemart »

dbingham wrote: post #4

Neat! But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana. I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what…

Thanks for the feedback - this is very first version, and there are a lot of improvements to make.

I think you're right about the wording, reading it with fresh eyes it is very confusing, and I'll change it ASAP.

Right now, all the farm information data is pulled from aggregated USDA data so there is a ton of work left to do to get better, finer-grained results. My plan is to look at which zip codes get the most queries and the most user sign ups, and improve results for those first.

The data wrangling aspect of this is definitely one of the biggest challenges. I've spent more time than I'd care to say extracting data from PDFs and other non-parser-friendly materials with regular expressions, and, often, manually.

Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

#14

Post by aj_g »

Awesome idea. My zip (59718, MT) shows 250 miles away as the nearest food. Definitely as others have pointed out, needs a lot more data to be viable. If you are to take this more seriously, maybe target a single community and connect with local farms, i.e. https://www.strikefarms.com/

Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

#16

Post by navaati »

nerdponx wrote: post #15

Nice work. Worth mentioning prior art: Harvest: https://itunes.apple.com/app/harvest-select-best-produce/id3... Seasons: http://www.seasonsapp.com/ Locavore: http://www.getlocavore.com/

Seasons: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'new' (T_NEW) in /homepages/14/d154513924/htdocs/seasonsapp.com/wp-settings.php on line 204

Uh oh…

Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

#18

Post by gry »

aluminussoma wrote: post #2

I like this! This was an idea I toyed around with in my head for a long time. I am glad to see you actually implement it. One suggestion I have is this: it would be great if there was a way to "peek" ahead and see what other items will soon be coming into season within the next 1-2 weeks.

I toyed with this idea just the same and expanding it to provide recipes with the peak fruits and vegetables.

Not only was collecting the data time intensive, but determining the feature ingredient(s) was a challenge.

Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code

#19

Post by gabemart »

codingdave wrote: post #3

No, not quite accurate -- the only results it returned are apples and cherries. Apples are 100% correct. Cherries are not. And there are a plethora of squashes and pumpkins recently harvested, as we just had our first frost last week, so the list is clearly incomplete.

The database is definitely incomplete - I have a ton of work left to do.

There is also the problem that just because a certain produce item is being harvested within x miles doesn't necessarily mean that produce is available at local stores, and vice-versa.

My hope is that if I can get some early adopters, I'll be able to concentrate improving the data in a smaller number of targeted areas. This is the first time I've shown the site to anyone, so I'm hoping I can get some feedback to make the most effective improvements first.

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