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Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

goodbre.ws

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Re: Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What algorithm are you using to make recommendations? I've been looking around in the recommendable source but can't seem to find it.

That's under `lib/recommendable/acts_as_recommended_to.rb` towards the bottom. It's a combination of the `similarity_with(rater)` and `predict(object)` methods. Additionally, I detail the algorithm here: http://davidcelis.com/blog/2012/02/07/collaborative-filterin...

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

#44
post #9

How long until I can get recommendations? I rated a few beers but it would be nice to have at least some kinda estimation on how many I would have to rate.

Recommendations start getting generated immediately after you rate a beer. The site is in its infancy, of course, so recommendations may start out rocky but they'll get better as more people (and you) rate more beers. The sad state of the cold start! How long it takes for the recommendations to refresh is tougher to say, but it shouldn't be more than a few minutes. I can see that the workers that process them are act…

I've contemplated doing a similar thing but in a different domain (may take advantage of your library). I had an idea for seeding the recommendations by scraping reviews from review sites and mapping their ratings onto likes/dislikes. Not sure how easy that would be though.

Re: Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

#47

Not sure if you're managing your own DB or not but it might be worth looking into http://www.brewerydb.com/

I actually thought long and hard about Brewery DB. Their API is just fantastic, IMO. Really clean. Unfortunately, I wrote Recommendable (the Ruby gem that I wrote to power the recommendations) in a way that it really relies on ActiveRecord currently. My database also has considerably more beers than BreweryDB does right now, but yeah. Managing it by myself slowly gets more difficult as more and more suggestions on be…

Cheers! I've been wanting to make a beer app for a while and always had BreweryDB in the back of my head. Maybe you should open up your database via an API too:)

Re: Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

#48
post #35

I'm getting a DNS lookup failure (I'm in the Netherlands).

Same, USA. Looks like google's DNS servers 8.8.(8.8|4.4) haven't picked it up yet.

Switched to OpenDNS and it works fine.

The domain resolves to 74.207.230.240 if anyone wants to add it to their hosts file instead.

Re: Show HN: goodbre.ws, a fully open source recommendation engine for beer

#50

I rated a few beers, but my recommendation screen is empty. I get that it's a new site, so I can accept that it might be tough to get recommendations right away, but it would be really helpful to explain why there aren't any results. Is it because I haven't rated enough beers? Is it because there aren't enough other users that have similar tastes? Is it because there's a delay before results show up? Also, I had to t…

I had been monitoring that my background workers were, indeed, working... But it seems as there's something else going on here. For some reason people aren't getting recommendations. I'll try to see what's going on.

EDIT: looks like the process had actually silently died at some point, but was still reporting as running. I think I've fixed the issue now.

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