4 ms·

Show HN: HumanamuH predicts which people will enrich your life

43 points by HumanamuH 14y ago

HumanamuH 14y ago
... and it will let you meet them. Hi everyone! I'd much appreciate your feedback, ideas, questions etc. regarding HumanamuH [1]. HumanamuH is all about efficiently meeting people who you find worthwhile to meet. It works like this: 1) You search for people 2) You talk to them 3) You rate them 4) HumanamuH predicts who else is worth meeting Your predictions are based on people who like and dislike the same people as you do. It's important to note that people don't get a global rating, so there won't be good and bad people. There will only be people who are more or less likely to find meeting each other worthwhile. There are still many issues I have to work on. The biggest challenge I am currently facing is to get users in order to find out how people feel about HumanamuH. If you have any advice on how to "go viral", I'd be happy to listen. [1] Why this name? Its slogan is "Where humans meet." therefore "Human" meets "Human" => "HumanamuH".
- lubutu 14y ago
  I think it would be much more inviting if you could at least search for people without having made an account. As it stands I have no idea what kind of people I could talk to, so I have no idea if it would be worth giving up my email address. Edit: Interesting idea, though. With social networks like Facebook you really need to have met in order to befriend — it doesn't encourage random meetings. When I was younger I would find likeminded people by chance on odd websites; I think that's become harder as I've grown older.
  - HumanamuH 14y ago
    Yes, I understand your point. I didn't want to share the user profiles with non-users. I also haven't looked into how easy it would be to harvest profile pictures and profile data. Any thoughts on this?
    - lubutu 14y ago
      Perhaps you could only share a limited amount of information to non-users, like the topics they'd like to talk about, and an "about you" or something. Just enough to catch one's interest.
      - HumanamuH 14y ago
        Interesting idea. If one doesn't want to leak any profile information, one could only show the number of results to non-users but not the actual profiles. Of course, it's very hard to prevent any malicious use of the profile data.
    - unconed 14y ago
      "I didn't want to share the user profiles with non-users." And yet, if someone wants to harvest profiles, they'll just sign up with a fake/throwaway email address, while legitimate users have to give up real information to do the same.
      - HumanamuH 14y ago
        True. I'm not sure how to effectively prevent harvesting. Limiting the rate at which profiles can be fetched only goes so far.
- SatvikBeri 14y ago
  Some suggestions for what kinds of things to write in the "Intentions" area would be helpful. It's pretty vague right now. Edit to add: I really love this idea, and am looking forward to seeing if it takes off! One more suggestion: this is the kind of service that actually would really benefit from Facebook integration. You could take likes, photos, etc. to very quickly populate a profile instead of filling it out by hand.
  - HumanamuH 14y ago
    Glad you like the idea! I'll think about suggestions for the "intentions" field. However, I don't want to suggest something that will end up in most profiles. Priming is powerful. I expected someone would bring up Facebook integration. :-) As someone who doesn't use Facebook and who has some issues with it, I haven't even considered integrating it and I'm not sure how much the profile data would match. I don't intend HumanamuH to become an advertising column, so much for sure. Can you suggest anything besides photos that would fit the current HumanamuH profile?
juanbyrge 14y ago
This is an amazing idea. I think it has infinite potential. Are you working in it full time ?
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  I'm glad you like the idea. I am working near full time on it. Who needs weekends anyways?
taybin 14y ago
Don't these sort of graphs always end up with a couple nodes having the majority of connections? I'm leery of the idea of rating people and suspect this will just make explicit existing hierarchies.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  It would be great if I had a big enough graph to answer your question. Hopefully this will change. It would be very interesting data. My hope is that, given enough users, there will be many predictions across existing hierarchies.
jkaljundi 14y ago
You should provide more information on how the service works and what it does before asking for an e-mail address to sign up.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  I haven't yet decided on how much of "how does it work" I want to make public. Regarding your second question. I thought the landing page and the tour would answer "what it does". Sorry. Obviously, I'd be very curious to know what it didn't tell you. But if you haven't registered, you probably can't answer this question. I'm not blocking any email domains, so feel free to use some trash mail address, if you want to have a look without sharing your email address.
  - naturalethic 14y ago
    I almost didn't sign up because I couldn't really tell what this was. I went ahead anyway and when I finally saw the landing page I thought, "Oh it's a dating site. No thanks."
    - HumanamuH 14y ago
      Do you know what made you think it was a dating site? The wording? I thought "meeting people" was quite neutral.
      - naturalethic 14y ago
        The gender requirement. Even if you removed that stuff it's already too much work to maintain my LinkedIn account the couple other social networks I'm on. I'm not sure what you can do to mitigate social network burnout while still achieving your goal.
        HumanamuH 14y ago
        Actually, there isn't a gender requirement. It's optional. I am not sure if there is a general social network burnout. Maybe it's specific to social networks with lots of noise, likes, shares, news, ads and so on? At least one new user told me that this was a social network that he can actually imagine to use.
dylanpyle 14y ago
FYI - the confirmation email ended up in my spam folder. I'm not sure if that's gmail's default behavior or whether I've encouraged it to be a little too agressive, something to watch out for though.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  That's a pity. I cannot remember anyone else telling me that it was spam filtered. But that doesn't have to mean anything. Do you have any suggestions what I could improve to make these emails pass?
  - adgar 14y ago
    Use the most trusted e-mail sending service you can find and afford. Don't roll your own. Spam has made e-mail such an untrustworthy system that your e-mail's origin has to have a track record, these days. You'll find a continuum of options for e-mail sending services. I'd pick the one that's most trusted within reason, not necessarily the "best deal." To me, it's an image thing: every time your e-mail ends in a Spam folder you let that user down a little. If they do find it, you've still disappointed them a little.
  - rcavezza 14y ago
    I'd go with sendgrid. I hook up their api to every app I build.
    - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      Sendgrid and mailgun are the tops right now, IMO. They both have great services, but it seems like getting trusted SMTP at lower volumes was cheaper at mailgun. Sendgrid's API is awesome, though.
- angry-hacker 14y ago
  Same here, it went to Hotmail's spam folder though.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  Edit: Not sure if my comment still fits as the parent has been edited. I'll try to update it later on. It's not intended to be a dating site in particular. But I assume that wherever people meet, some of them will want to date. I like the idea of HumanamuH bringing love to the world, so I'm fine with it. By providing some fields like orientation and whether someone is looking for a partner, I hope to give people who don't want to date a way to make that clear upfront. And those who want to date a way to make it clear what they are looking for. If, for example, someone is in a partnership and not interested in dating, it's possible to add this info to his or her user profile. Hopefully this will minimize dating requests for them.
FredBrach 14y ago
I think I got the point of the website finally. You should probably consider removing the sexual orientation of the profile informations, at least for a time, because it can be misleading about the goal of the website.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  (My reply mysteriously disappeared. Second try...) HumanamuH is not meant to be a dating site in particular. But I assume wherever people meet, some of them will want to date. I like the idea of HumanamuH bringing love to the world, so I'm fine with it. The possibility to state one's orientation and whether one is looking for a partner is there for at least two reasons. If you don't want to date, you can make that clear upfront. Hopefully this will reduce unwanted requests. If you want to date, it's easier for everyone involved if the orientation is known beforehand.
  - FredBrach 14y ago
    Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Btw, the website is strong, looks serious and relatively trustable. It's a bit tedious to access the content but it's not very important, some people will care anyway. Best luck with it.
    - HumanamuH 14y ago
      > Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Sorry, I don't understand the question. Can you elaborate what felt tedious to you?
      - FredBrach 14y ago
        > Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Sorry, I don't understand the question. HumanamuH is about meeting people right? Will people meet other people like they would in private life - friends, love etc, or like they would in their non-private/professional one? There is a distinction between the two in the real world. So if I seek to meet people in a non-private mode with HumanamuH, which is what I thought was the point because of its design, I don't want to see any sexual things in it. In other words, I will not want to meet, let's say a software engineer, with a profile which say: "I'm not looking for a sexual partner right now.". Concerning what's tedious to me, I think the precise thing is the splited registration process: first the email, then check it, and after I have to re-enter other informations. Maybe: enter register informations and then just check the email would be ok. [edit: change/update professional by non-private]
autophil 14y ago
Love the name. Clever. The website is a little more mysterious than I'd initially like, but I'll give it a try. I wish you success with this!
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  I didn't expect so much love for the name as I've got mixed opinions before making HumanamuH public. Please let me know what was mysterious to you. (If it's not too mysterious for you to know...)
  - autophil 14y ago
    I just didn't know what I was signing up for, and the name doesn't tell me anything. But I like the name a lot. I just think you need a killer tagline or something.
    - HumanamuH 14y ago
      Just curious. Did you read the current tag line, the landing page and the tour and still felt that you've got no idea what it's all about?
      - autophil 14y ago
        Right.
TimPC 14y ago
Are you doing any machine learning? Are you using an Amazon style recommendation system where instead of recommending people based on overall rating you're looking for poeple user's like me rated highly (based on the ratings we've given to other people so far and our declared goals for the site?)
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  I am not doing any machine learning (yet). If the site takes off a bit and generates some data, I expect optimizing the prediction algorithm will become a top priority. Accurately predicting human relationships sounds incredibly hard. Currently, it's looking how similar your ratings are to the ratings of others. Similar people will influence your predictions more strongly. The declared goals or intentions are currently not affecting predictions. And I'm doubtful if they should. Any opinion on this?
corin_ 14y ago
Small postcode bug, it won't accept "PE29 3EW" in the UK.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  Ah, thanks. I haven't yet finished testing all post codes. ;-)
begriffs 14y ago
Two things I really like about this social network: it's simple, and it's oriented towards connecting interesting people. I love that people get to post their intentions. Intentions mean people are doing things -- and can meet and help each other. This site is not for photosharing narcissists who are scared to venture outside their circle of friends, it's for adventurous people who want to meet more people to "enrich their lives" as the site says. I'm excited to see HumanamuH take off, and I'm looking forward to using the "enriching" social network.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  I hope that knowing what people intend to talk about and intend to do makes meeting people online a better experience. Especially in combination with predictions. After reading online profiles, I often feel that I'm still missing something to decide whether I want to meet that person. Knowing about favorite movies or brands or whether someone is bad at describing himself, doesn't tell me much.

43 points by HumanamuH 14y ago

... and it will let you meet them. Hi everyone! I'd much appreciate your feedback, ideas, questions etc. regarding HumanamuH [1]. HumanamuH is all about efficiently meeting people who you find worthwhile to meet. It works like this: 1) You search for people 2) You talk to them 3) You rate them 4) HumanamuH predicts who else is worth meeting Your predictions are based on people who like and dislike the same people as you do. It's important to note that people don't get a global rating, so there won't be good and bad people. There will only be people who are more or less likely to find meeting each other worthwhile. There are still many issues I have to work on. The biggest challenge I am currently facing is to get users in order to find out how people feel about HumanamuH. If you have any advice on how to "go viral", I'd be happy to listen. [1] Why this name? Its slogan is "Where humans meet." therefore "Human" meets "Human" => "HumanamuH".

lubutu 14y ago
I think it would be much more inviting if you could at least search for people without having made an account. As it stands I have no idea what kind of people I could talk to, so I have no idea if it would be worth giving up my email address. Edit: Interesting idea, though. With social networks like Facebook you really need to have met in order to befriend — it doesn't encourage random meetings. When I was younger I would find likeminded people by chance on odd websites; I think that's become harder as I've grown older.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  Yes, I understand your point. I didn't want to share the user profiles with non-users. I also haven't looked into how easy it would be to harvest profile pictures and profile data. Any thoughts on this?
  - lubutu 14y ago
    Perhaps you could only share a limited amount of information to non-users, like the topics they'd like to talk about, and an "about you" or something. Just enough to catch one's interest.
    - HumanamuH 14y ago
      Interesting idea. If one doesn't want to leak any profile information, one could only show the number of results to non-users but not the actual profiles. Of course, it's very hard to prevent any malicious use of the profile data.
  - unconed 14y ago
    "I didn't want to share the user profiles with non-users." And yet, if someone wants to harvest profiles, they'll just sign up with a fake/throwaway email address, while legitimate users have to give up real information to do the same.
    - HumanamuH 14y ago
      True. I'm not sure how to effectively prevent harvesting. Limiting the rate at which profiles can be fetched only goes so far.
SatvikBeri 14y ago
Some suggestions for what kinds of things to write in the "Intentions" area would be helpful. It's pretty vague right now. Edit to add: I really love this idea, and am looking forward to seeing if it takes off! One more suggestion: this is the kind of service that actually would really benefit from Facebook integration. You could take likes, photos, etc. to very quickly populate a profile instead of filling it out by hand.
- HumanamuH 14y ago
  Glad you like the idea! I'll think about suggestions for the "intentions" field. However, I don't want to suggest something that will end up in most profiles. Priming is powerful. I expected someone would bring up Facebook integration. :-) As someone who doesn't use Facebook and who has some issues with it, I haven't even considered integrating it and I'm not sure how much the profile data would match. I don't intend HumanamuH to become an advertising column, so much for sure. Can you suggest anything besides photos that would fit the current HumanamuH profile?

juanbyrge 14y ago

This is an amazing idea. I think it has infinite potential. Are you working in it full time ?

HumanamuH 14y ago
I'm glad you like the idea. I am working near full time on it. Who needs weekends anyways?

taybin 14y ago

Don't these sort of graphs always end up with a couple nodes having the majority of connections? I'm leery of the idea of rating people and suspect this will just make explicit existing hierarchies.

HumanamuH 14y ago
It would be great if I had a big enough graph to answer your question. Hopefully this will change. It would be very interesting data. My hope is that, given enough users, there will be many predictions across existing hierarchies.

jkaljundi 14y ago

You should provide more information on how the service works and what it does before asking for an e-mail address to sign up.

HumanamuH 14y ago
I haven't yet decided on how much of "how does it work" I want to make public. Regarding your second question. I thought the landing page and the tour would answer "what it does". Sorry. Obviously, I'd be very curious to know what it didn't tell you. But if you haven't registered, you probably can't answer this question. I'm not blocking any email domains, so feel free to use some trash mail address, if you want to have a look without sharing your email address.
- naturalethic 14y ago
  I almost didn't sign up because I couldn't really tell what this was. I went ahead anyway and when I finally saw the landing page I thought, "Oh it's a dating site. No thanks."
  - HumanamuH 14y ago
    Do you know what made you think it was a dating site? The wording? I thought "meeting people" was quite neutral.
    - naturalethic 14y ago
      The gender requirement. Even if you removed that stuff it's already too much work to maintain my LinkedIn account the couple other social networks I'm on. I'm not sure what you can do to mitigate social network burnout while still achieving your goal.
      - HumanamuH 14y ago
        Actually, there isn't a gender requirement. It's optional. I am not sure if there is a general social network burnout. Maybe it's specific to social networks with lots of noise, likes, shares, news, ads and so on? At least one new user told me that this was a social network that he can actually imagine to use.

dylanpyle 14y ago

FYI - the confirmation email ended up in my spam folder. I'm not sure if that's gmail's default behavior or whether I've encouraged it to be a little too agressive, something to watch out for though.

HumanamuH 14y ago
That's a pity. I cannot remember anyone else telling me that it was spam filtered. But that doesn't have to mean anything. Do you have any suggestions what I could improve to make these emails pass?
- adgar 14y ago
  Use the most trusted e-mail sending service you can find and afford. Don't roll your own. Spam has made e-mail such an untrustworthy system that your e-mail's origin has to have a track record, these days. You'll find a continuum of options for e-mail sending services. I'd pick the one that's most trusted within reason, not necessarily the "best deal." To me, it's an image thing: every time your e-mail ends in a Spam folder you let that user down a little. If they do find it, you've still disappointed them a little.
- rcavezza 14y ago
  I'd go with sendgrid. I hook up their api to every app I build.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Sendgrid and mailgun are the tops right now, IMO. They both have great services, but it seems like getting trusted SMTP at lower volumes was cheaper at mailgun. Sendgrid's API is awesome, though.
angry-hacker 14y ago
Same here, it went to Hotmail's spam folder though.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

HumanamuH 14y ago
Edit: Not sure if my comment still fits as the parent has been edited. I'll try to update it later on. It's not intended to be a dating site in particular. But I assume that wherever people meet, some of them will want to date. I like the idea of HumanamuH bringing love to the world, so I'm fine with it. By providing some fields like orientation and whether someone is looking for a partner, I hope to give people who don't want to date a way to make that clear upfront. And those who want to date a way to make it clear what they are looking for. If, for example, someone is in a partnership and not interested in dating, it's possible to add this info to his or her user profile. Hopefully this will minimize dating requests for them.

FredBrach 14y ago

I think I got the point of the website finally. You should probably consider removing the sexual orientation of the profile informations, at least for a time, because it can be misleading about the goal of the website.

HumanamuH 14y ago
(My reply mysteriously disappeared. Second try...) HumanamuH is not meant to be a dating site in particular. But I assume wherever people meet, some of them will want to date. I like the idea of HumanamuH bringing love to the world, so I'm fine with it. The possibility to state one's orientation and whether one is looking for a partner is there for at least two reasons. If you don't want to date, you can make that clear upfront. Hopefully this will reduce unwanted requests. If you want to date, it's easier for everyone involved if the orientation is known beforehand.
- FredBrach 14y ago
  Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Btw, the website is strong, looks serious and relatively trustable. It's a bit tedious to access the content but it's not very important, some people will care anyway. Best luck with it.
  - HumanamuH 14y ago
    > Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Sorry, I don't understand the question. Can you elaborate what felt tedious to you?
    - FredBrach 14y ago
      > Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Sorry, I don't understand the question. HumanamuH is about meeting people right? Will people meet other people like they would in private life - friends, love etc, or like they would in their non-private/professional one? There is a distinction between the two in the real world. So if I seek to meet people in a non-private mode with HumanamuH, which is what I thought was the point because of its design, I don't want to see any sexual things in it. In other words, I will not want to meet, let's say a software engineer, with a profile which say: "I'm not looking for a sexual partner right now.". Concerning what's tedious to me, I think the precise thing is the splited registration process: first the email, then check it, and after I have to re-enter other informations. Maybe: enter register informations and then just check the email would be ok. [edit: change/update professional by non-private]

autophil 14y ago

Love the name. Clever. The website is a little more mysterious than I'd initially like, but I'll give it a try. I wish you success with this!

HumanamuH 14y ago
I didn't expect so much love for the name as I've got mixed opinions before making HumanamuH public. Please let me know what was mysterious to you. (If it's not too mysterious for you to know...)
- autophil 14y ago
  I just didn't know what I was signing up for, and the name doesn't tell me anything. But I like the name a lot. I just think you need a killer tagline or something.
  - HumanamuH 14y ago
    Just curious. Did you read the current tag line, the landing page and the tour and still felt that you've got no idea what it's all about?
    - autophil 14y ago
      Right.

TimPC 14y ago

Are you doing any machine learning? Are you using an Amazon style recommendation system where instead of recommending people based on overall rating you're looking for poeple user's like me rated highly (based on the ratings we've given to other people so far and our declared goals for the site?)

HumanamuH 14y ago
I am not doing any machine learning (yet). If the site takes off a bit and generates some data, I expect optimizing the prediction algorithm will become a top priority. Accurately predicting human relationships sounds incredibly hard. Currently, it's looking how similar your ratings are to the ratings of others. Similar people will influence your predictions more strongly. The declared goals or intentions are currently not affecting predictions. And I'm doubtful if they should. Any opinion on this?

corin_ 14y ago

Small postcode bug, it won't accept "PE29 3EW" in the UK.

HumanamuH 14y ago
Ah, thanks. I haven't yet finished testing all post codes. ;-)

begriffs 14y ago

Two things I really like about this social network: it's simple, and it's oriented towards connecting interesting people. I love that people get to post their intentions. Intentions mean people are doing things -- and can meet and help each other. This site is not for photosharing narcissists who are scared to venture outside their circle of friends, it's for adventurous people who want to meet more people to "enrich their lives" as the site says. I'm excited to see HumanamuH take off, and I'm looking forward to using the "enriching" social network.

HumanamuH 14y ago
I hope that knowing what people intend to talk about and intend to do makes meeting people online a better experience. Especially in combination with predictions. After reading online profiles, I often feel that I'm still missing something to decide whether I want to meet that person. Knowing about favorite movies or brands or whether someone is bad at describing himself, doesn't tell me much.