Show HN - My weekend Django project (Pick the violent felon)

Show HN - My weekend Django project (Pick the violent felon)(violentornot.com)

12 points by not_chriscohoat 15 years ago | 13 comments

Empact 15 years ago |

Would definitely like to know the nature of the crime for each in the "correct/incorrect" view.

E.g. for this guy: http://violentornot.com/inmate/44200/

The data would be: [1]:MURDER 1ST DEGREE [2]:SOLICITATION [3]:DANGER/ REPETIT/ ENHANCE http://www.azcorrections.gov/inmate_datasearch/results.aspx?...

not_chriscohoat 15 years ago | |

Yes, that's coming for sure. I was focusing first on scraping if they were violent and then making sense of the data. There are a ton of other states too, and they are for the most part completely different. So linking to the docket was all that I could do in just the few days I have had a chance to work on it :P

Edit: The way it checks if it's violent or not is by checking the "Crime info" column. For the inmate you linked to he is D/R-1, or marked as dangerous. Occasionally I've seen murderers marked as ND, which means not dangerous. Not sure what that's about....

jevinskie 15 years ago |

Is this ethical? Sure, it is just taking data that is already publicly available (it looks like all of the mugshots are from Arizona's DoC) but it almost seems like mocking sideshow...

P.S. It would be spiffy if you used AJAX to preload the next set of images.

not_chriscohoat 15 years ago | |

Well it's less mocking and more "will a large set of votes show us people's split seconds judgements". Hopefully at least...I'd like to think we'll be able to see trends emerge based on gender, ethnicity, and appearance in general.

Currently working on the preloading...a lot of the time spent loading is keeping track of inmates you've seen and inmates you've voted for. Going to roll out a way to determine how biased you are based on your votes (if there is interest)

Quick edit: At first all of the images were pulled in with AJAX, but I wasn't sure if that would affect the performance (and Adsense to be totally honest, there's no great way to monetize something like this. Maybe an application but that's a bit of a ways off). If anyone has any experience with ads and AJAX sites I'd love to hear suggestions.

jevinskie 15 years ago | | |

I see. It would be interesting if you could track the users' cursors and see if they "hesitate" or switch back and forth between certain pairs of mugshots!

And surely other AJAX sites use AdSense, does anybody know how they do it?

not_chriscohoat 15 years ago |

Sorry it's so slow though...still a novice when it comes to AWS instances :/. Definitely not using them the way they were meant to be used, or there's a rogue DB query or 5 in there.

jevinskie 15 years ago | |

This week, I bet you could get away with shifting the blame to Amazon!

nantes 15 years ago |

Wow, I went 0/4 at first and then 6/6. Lesson: I have no idea if my instincts for this sort of thing are correct.

Interesting idea.

not_chriscohoat 15 years ago | |

Sounds a lot like what I've done...I'm 50/50 at best. Vote streaks are just session-based unless you are logged in, but since I have enabled voting I'm at like 54.13% with about 300 votes or so. Not too impressive, even after looking at mugshots all week...

nantes 15 years ago | | |

Huh, so much my theory that I was just getting warmed up with the first four . . .

mkelly 15 years ago | |

For a while I was convinced that a distinct mustache (vs general unshavenness, etc) was a very strong indicator. It's amusing to watch yourself try to develop heuristics.

(Edit: grammar.)