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Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

opennutrition.app

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Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#131

Post by joshdickson »

nqzero wrote: post #119
Zealotux wrote: post #3

Congrats on the launch! Looks slick and reactive. Now I wish there was an app to analyse my meals from pictures and estimate the calories/macros, I guess it exists somewhere but I doubt the accuracy, honestly the only thing I really want from so-called AIs.

any idea how the webapp is written ? eg, what libraries or framework is used

Pretty standard Next app on Vercel. Some pre-fetching. Food pages are cached post-generation. Custom go-based search server behind a Cloudflare cache. Any other questions?

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#132

Post by joshdickson »

creativeCak3 wrote: post #127
Cheer2171 wrote: post #75

> Final nutritional data is generated by providing a reasoning model with a large corpus of grounding data. The LLM is tasked with creating complete nutritional values, explicitly explaining the rationale behind each value it generates. Outputs undergo rigorous validation steps, including cross-checking with advanced auditing models such as OpenAI’s o1-pro, which has proven especially proficient at performing high-qu…

I agree so much with you. This is not a dataset. This is the vomit of an LLM making stuff up. Like...why couldn't you just collect the data that already exist?? Why do you need an LLM? Adding an LLM to this just adds a unnecessary layer of complexity, for what benefit? For street cred?

There's an in-depth review of the reasoning for undertaking this project in general and this approach in particular in the Methodology/About section below, see "Current State of Nutritional Data".

Millions of people use food logging apps to drive behavioral change and help adhere to healthy lifestyles. I believe there is immense societal good in continuing to offer improved tools to accomplish this, especially for free, and that's why I created the project and chose to open source the data.

https://www.opennutrition.app/about#current-state-of-nutriti...

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#133

Post by ZunarJ5 »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #75

> Final nutritional data is generated by providing a reasoning model with a large corpus of grounding data. The LLM is tasked with creating complete nutritional values, explicitly explaining the rationale behind each value it generates. Outputs undergo rigorous validation steps, including cross-checking with advanced auditing models such as OpenAI’s o1-pro, which has proven especially proficient at performing high-qu…

As soon as I saw "AI enhanced for Accuracy" I laughed and wondered if this was a belated April Fools joke.

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#134

Post by joshdickson »

sputknick wrote: post #45

I like the concept, but I think a more reliable/less compute intensive way to implement it would be too use AI to call up non -AI data. I could just type in "some red beans and rice" and the LLM parses what I mean, and retrieves stored verified data.

That's what OpenNutrition does. However, in many cases, there is no publicly accessible "non-AI data" source to refer to. OpenNutrition tries to bridge the gap, using the public data when available, and providing additional inferred data to fill in the gaps. For "red beans" and "rice", OpenNutrition provides a long list of foods with full citations in public databases. See the "References" section where you can click through to the source material.

Red Beans

- https://www.opennutrition.app/search/red-beans-canned-and-dr...

- https://www.opennutrition.app/search/red-beans-dry-vIh9Ofhcl...

Rice

- https://www.opennutrition.app/search/enriched-white-rice-tlA...

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#135

Post by neilv »

Small objections to the licensing terms, and the name...

I've recently been considering making my own open source nutrition app, (since every single one I've looked at seems to either violate my privacy&security, or is designed/works very poorly), but the available "open" nutrition info databases for bootstrapping have seemed poor.

So I looked at the license of this database, and the idea of making it "open" is good and maybe appropriate. But the attribution requirements to promote this other, commercial, product are a little annoying. And could also be a little confusing in app store listings.

> Attribution Requirements: If you display or use any data from this dataset, you must provide clear attribution to "OpenNutrition" with a link to https://www.opennutrition.app in:

> * Every interface where data is displayed

> * Application store listings

> * Your website

> * Legal/about sections

Additionally, I've soured on single companies that call themselves "open". "Open" has a few-decades history in computers, as everyone realized the dangers and costs of proprietary lock-ins, and so created concepts such as "open systems" and "open standards". Appropriating the "open" term for a single company, for something more proprietary than open (like the very proprietary OpenAI that's mentioned many times in https://www.opennutrition.app/about ), rubs a bit the wrong way.

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#136

Post by justsid »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #75

> Final nutritional data is generated by providing a reasoning model with a large corpus of grounding data. The LLM is tasked with creating complete nutritional values, explicitly explaining the rationale behind each value it generates. Outputs undergo rigorous validation steps, including cross-checking with advanced auditing models such as OpenAI’s o1-pro, which has proven especially proficient at performing high-qu…

I find this actually very upsetting. My wife does calorie counting and all of the apps for it are horrible, especially the market leaders. But those have one thing going for them: Databases of nutritional information, which can be used for easy meal calorie counting. Just enter the ingredients (usually you can scan a barcode) and how much you ate of the total and it tells you where you are standing on caloric and nutritional intake. But even those datasets aren’t always bang on, especially here in Canada where some products share bar codes with US products but they have different nutritional values. Reading the title, I was very excited about the ability to make my wife a better app to support her needs. Unfortunately this is not at all usable for this use case or really any? What’s the point of having data that you just can’t trust at all?

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#137

Post by joshdickson »

neilv wrote: post #135

Small objections to the licensing terms, and the name... I've recently been considering making my own open source nutrition app, (since every single one I've looked at seems to either violate my privacy&security, or is designed/works very poorly), but the available "open" nutrition info databases for bootstrapping have seemed poor. So I looked at the license of this database, and the idea of making it "open" is good…

The licensing terms are identical to similar projects including OpenFoodFacts (which also has an app) and OpenStreetMap, see:

https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/ODBL_License

You may disagree with each of those projects as well, but, I am following long-standing licensing in this space. I also have used some OFF data for product naming, and as a result, their terms state I have to maintain their license.

Creating these databases involves a tremendous amount of time and effort, and it would not make sense for me to make this data available to commercial entities to use without attribution. The alternative is not a MIT-licensed dataset, it is no dataset.

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#138

Post by neilv »

joshdickson wrote: post #137
neilv wrote: post #135

Small objections to the licensing terms, and the name... I've recently been considering making my own open source nutrition app, (since every single one I've looked at seems to either violate my privacy&security, or is designed/works very poorly), but the available "open" nutrition info databases for bootstrapping have seemed poor. So I looked at the license of this database, and the idea of making it "open" is good…

The licensing terms are identical to similar projects including OpenFoodFacts (which also has an app) and OpenStreetMap, see: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/ODBL_License You may disagree with each of those projects as well, but, I am following long-standing licensing in this space. I also have used some OFF data for product naming, and as a result, their terms state I have to maintain their license. Creating these da…

The two you cite, OpenFoodFacts and OpenStreetMap are non-profit/not-for-profit, known for their databases, not for competing commercial apps.

I appreciate the difficulty of building a good database. Can you say why you created a new one, rather than starting with OpenFoodFacts? (Was it quality issues? Too hard to update? You wanted additional info? You didn't want their licensing terms? You wanted the advertising boost?)

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#139

Post by joshdickson »

justsid wrote: post #136
Cheer2171 wrote: post #75

> Final nutritional data is generated by providing a reasoning model with a large corpus of grounding data. The LLM is tasked with creating complete nutritional values, explicitly explaining the rationale behind each value it generates. Outputs undergo rigorous validation steps, including cross-checking with advanced auditing models such as OpenAI’s o1-pro, which has proven especially proficient at performing high-qu…

I find this actually very upsetting. My wife does calorie counting and all of the apps for it are horrible, especially the market leaders. But those have one thing going for them: Databases of nutritional information, which can be used for easy meal calorie counting. Just enter the ingredients (usually you can scan a barcode) and how much you ate of the total and it tells you where you are standing on caloric and nut…

[flagged]

Re: Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

#140

Post by joshdickson »

neilv wrote: post #138
joshdickson wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The licensing terms are identical to similar projects including OpenFoodFacts (which also has an app) and OpenStreetMap, see: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/ODBL_License You may disagree with each of those projects as well, but, I am following long-standing licensing in this space. I also have used some OFF data for product naming, and as a result, their terms state I have to maintain their license. Creating these da…

The two you cite, OpenFoodFacts and OpenStreetMap are non-profit/not-for-profit, known for their databases, not for competing commercial apps. I appreciate the difficulty of building a good database. Can you say why you created a new one, rather than starting with OpenFoodFacts? (Was it quality issues? Too hard to update? You wanted additional info? You didn't want their licensing terms? You wanted the advertising bo…

I've explained why OFF is not an adequate source in and of itself for a food logging app elsewhere in the thread. If it were usable in and of itself, I wouldn't have had anything to build on the database front and would have just used it as-is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43570775

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