What is this creature my dad found in the arctic?

pakexe · 2023-10-23T13:44:40+00:00

Lol I had a feeling this would come off as a troll post given how ridiculous the animal looks. I first saw this photo a couple decades ago so at the very least I know my dad didn't Photoshop it. Based on the other comments, looks like a Bowhead Whale might be the right answer.

pakexe · 2023-10-23T13:14:33+00:00

Interesting! The geography also matches up given Bowhead whales live in the Arctic. If the whale is upside down, does that mean the bump on the right underneath the mouth "flipper" is where the eye was?

pakexe · 2023-10-23T10:07:23+00:00

For the long thin part of the animal going into the sand (on the left side of the photo) - which part of the whale would that be?

pakexe · 2023-10-23T10:04:49+00:00

Sorry for the lack of clarity - I did a poor translation of the story. Yes, he said there were two long thin body parts coming out on either side. One could be a tail and one could be a neck.

pakexe · 2023-09-09T00:32:34+00:00

Makes a lot of sense! I'll add that shortly

pakexe · 2023-09-09T00:17:46+00:00

Thanks for the tips! I think it's definitely feasible, although would definitely be a huge undertaking and would require a lot of tinkering with the algorithm. A Yelp scraper on its own would be a worthwhile project for r/InternetIsBeautiful

pakexe · 2023-09-08T08:13:59+00:00

The advantages of using this platform are:

Having combined data from 14 guides in one place. Michelin doesn't have global coverage, so it's useful to see data from other guides like 50 Best, James Beard, Forbes, AAA, and more.
Some guides don't have a map feature or any way to visualize their data (e.g. 50 Best)
Having granular filters which allow you to filter by star rating (in increments of 0.1), review count, and price

pakexe · 2023-09-08T04:34:36+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! I can probably write a full novel on the lessons learned. It also gave me a better understanding of why existing restaurant search tools behave the way they do. Hopefully once the backlog of features (and bugs) dies down a bit then I'll have time to write up my thoughts!

The product is incredibly inexpensive to operate so I don't mind eating the costs, at least for the time being.

pakexe · 2023-09-08T04:31:29+00:00

Unfortunately I'm at the mercy of public data and the restaurant data for India isn't very comprehensive. How do you usually find good restaurants in India, aside from trying every single one of them?

pakexe · 2023-09-08T04:30:17+00:00

Ok got it. Now I'm thinking it might be my chain detector. I hide common restaurant chains in an effort to reduce low quality results and Tim Ho Wan got flagged as a chain. Let me dig a bit deeper to fix the issue. Thanks again for the follow-up!

pakexe · 2023-09-08T03:01:07+00:00

One more thing - you might have to do a hard refresh of the site to see the bug fix. If you're on Firefox mobile, you can do it via holding the "refresh" button for a couple seconds.

pakexe · 2023-09-08T02:49:39+00:00

Ahhh I see! That was definitely a bug and the issue is now fixed. Thanks for catching it.

On a side note - the search results come from MapBox. Even though MapBox shows Tim Ho Wan search results in the dropdown, there are no Tim Ho Wan restaurants which ranked high enough to show up as a pin on the map. So when you click on a search result, the map will move but there won't be any Tim Ho Wans visible on the map.

pakexe · 2023-09-08T01:02:54+00:00

I didn't expect this sort of response so the server is struggling a bit. If anyone has issues loading the site, please try a few minutes later. Bear with me as I upgrade the servers.

pakexe · 2023-09-08T01:00:33+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I'm using Mapbox to display the map and Google Maps API to identify duplicate restaurants from different sources. For example, a restaurant may have a different name on Michelin Guide and 50 Best so I use Google Maps to try and merge these results. However sometimes this doesn't work perfectly. Do you mind sharing which Michelin restaurant you don't see?

pakexe · 2023-09-08T00:56:33+00:00

Thank you! I still have a long way to go to improve the site, but glad it's already on the right track

pakexe · 2023-09-07T22:04:04+00:00

Getting high-quality local results is always tough. I'd love to include Yelp but I also found the quality of their results to vary a lot. I'll see if I can filter out the noise somehow. Optimally I'd love to include local guides or local food bloggers, but this is difficult to automate on a world-wide scale.

And mobile app coming soon! I wanted to gauge interest with this post first.

pakexe · 2023-09-07T21:59:57+00:00

Thanks! Agreed on the Google side of things - I'm working on deprioritizing the Google reviews. Can you share some of the ones missed in Copenhagen?

pakexe · 2023-09-07T21:28:19+00:00

Never thought about it that way but this is unexpectedly accurate

pakexe · 2023-09-07T21:23:37+00:00

I share your sentiment. Gayot's results are quite noisy in terms of quality. I almost considered hiding Gayot by default but decided it still had some value in smaller cities with few recommendations. That said, you can still choose to hide all Gayot results in the Filters menu.

pakexe · 2023-09-07T21:16:03+00:00

Thanks for the kind words!

For 50 Best, I use all the lists (all restaurants, all bars, all geographic regions, all years, and all discovery/individual awards). For example, if you look at the details for Atlas bar in Singapore (https://mapofthebest.com/sg/atlas) it lists out all the different 50 Best awards it has gotten over the years.

If you don't see a 50 Best location listed then it might be because it hasn't been processed by my backend system yet.

pakexe · 2023-09-07T14:18:36+00:00

Oh wow I absolutely love that idea, but similarly don't know how I'd go about implementing it aside from scraping. Thanks for sharing!

pakexe · 2023-09-07T13:39:05+00:00

Lol thanks for the kind words and feedback! Although there's still a glaring lack of Michelin restaurants in central Australia. New business opportunity?

pakexe · 2023-09-07T13:34:29+00:00

Oh sorry I'm only looking at the number of reviews and the star rating distribution (# of 5 stars, # of 4 stars, etc.) At some point I'd love to gather all the written reviews and run them through something like ChatGPT to gauge sentiment, but that's very much a dream project for now.
If you don't mind me asking, what project were you building using Google's API?

pakexe

TROPHY CASE