This is gross on multiple levels.
replies(5):
I don’t remember hotornot being amongst asimovs 3 laws of robotics..is this really the future we deserve?
The author is gonna be vilified, but next year someone’s gonna come up with a cute name and a material design for this and gonna make bank.
I’m kinda curious to see what 1/10 people look like but these are real people right.
I am interpreting this as a statement about snap judgements in an age where AI will increasingly play the role of a judge or assessor of humans.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seems too on-the-nose to be serious.
EDIT:
> This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day
From the website. If it is in earnest then I’d be embarrassed to have shilled for it, because I agree that the idea is stupid and gross.
It's made by the dude that has a lot of similarly strange and technologically impressive projects: https://walzr.com/
they made a fake steakhouse real for one night, got Twitter to verify a fake candidate for congress, etc. etc.
all signs point to art project.
It's good to listen and notice how one is being influenced. The real mistake is thinking we do not judge at all.
With that said, only looking at a rating of profile pictures of reviews to judge a restaurant is very funny and becomes art. Kudos to the creator.
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}Similarly, publication of an image on the internet is not implicit permission to use it for any possible purpose, however technically feasible. For example, deepfakes.
In your argument you’re basically saying “it’s impossible to know what affects your choice of where to eat. Some think looks matter even pay for it; ergo, we must consider it too”
What about music type? Worker’s uniform color? Thinking “I wanna eat where the hot people are” is… I don’t know.. Odd?
If I download, copy, or edit images sent to my computer, the original is still there.
The artist puts their art on the gallery with the intent that people will enter that gallery and look at it without touching. The image uploaders uploads the image with the intent that a copy (not the original) gets sent to our computers when we look at Google Reviews.
It’s very confusing to technical people, but plenty of people were (still are) confused by the concept of the internet. What do you think all those people posting private information on each other’s facebook walls were doing? They are on their computer talking to their family member. How is anybody else getting in here?
This feels oddly old school shit posty made reality
Female Picks:
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1. Big Apple Brunch | Hell's Kitchen | 9.2/10
2. Pietro Nolita | Nolita | 8.6/10
3. Kanü Bar|Grill | Hamilton Heights | 8.5/10
4. STK Steakhouse Downtown | West Village | 8.2/10
5. Lighthouse Fish Market | East Harlem | 8.2/10
Male Picks:
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1. Lahori Kabab | Kips Bay | 2.3/10
2. Big Arc Chicken | East Village | 2.5/10
3. Hop Won Express | Midtown East | 3.1/10
4. Subway | Hell's Kitchen | 3.1/10
5. Nica Trattoria | Upper East Side | 3.1/10
- Drawing a mustache on the art = Vandalizing the original data (not what's happening).
- Taking the art home = Deleting the original data (also not what's happening).
- Scraping faces for an AI = Following visitors around the gallery, taking secret photos of them, and publishing a book that rates them by attractiveness.
The fact that the gallery is "public" does not make that behavior acceptable. The same is true here. "Publicly viewable" does not mean "publicly available for any use."
Gallery visitors aren't publicly publishing gallery reviews with their pictures. This website doesn't go into restaurants and take pictures of the customers.
All the pictures here were attached to restaurant reviews by the person themselves with the expectation that the picture would be sent to others and be available to people not currently in the restaurant.
The visitors took the photo, supplied the photo, and put it in a public place.
Well my response was to the question "Does anyone do this for restaurants?" and tried to answer it by saying "yes, many people may consider it along with other factors"
Yes, I agree it is superficial and odd to consciously and only think it. But we choose things with a range of subconscious influences, multiple reasons. Yes, uniforms and music could also be influences too. We could stop and spend time examining our thoughts and feelings to identify all the factors but generally people don't do that do they? :-)
And if you think about bars... it becomes commonplace for some people. "I want to drink where the hot people are" seems to be a very commonplace thought, or at least a thought which is encouraged by the marketing of bars.
Thinking wider now, we can ponder why do many places hire attractive people in their marketing photos? We humans are more superficial and less rational than we would like to admit to ourselves.
Personally I prefer real ale so will drink where the beer is better, but if I'm on a date where my friend doesn't appreciate beer as much, I will choose a nicer feeling and looking establishment over the beer quality. The people inside the place might or might not influence that choice to a greater or lesser extent. It is at the very least a factor. For a restaurant I think it's less of a factor.
I sampled quite some dark red markers, representing "attractive", and on the balance they're almost always overwhelmingly reviewed by females.
There were some exceptions though. Especially in the south west for Chinese cuisine.
The rate limits are such that you can get tens of millions of data points just from a single browser.
Are memes, or for that matter, satire and parody unethical?
The hot vs not score is a separate score. (e.g you have Big Arc chicken as a 2.5. That means mostly male. It's hotness score is 5.5)
Another recent example from HN would be that site which just lists hotel rooms that have a desk and a chair. It would be an incredibly dull task for a human to look at a million hotel room pictures and just select if they have a desk or not.
What else somewhat useful/fun could we do applying perhaps a little worse than human attention at something, but a lot of it?
The Map Rating Restaurants Based on How Hot the Customers Are
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/dining/looksmapping-hot-c... (https://archive.ph/3ItEb) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44444973)
So perhaps this is really just searching for restaurants that people into social media review.
It’s the average pilot thing. Nobody is the normal. Everyone’s life experience does not resemble a normal one.
That cluster coincides with Harlem which has a majorly Black and Hispanic population and (I think) is generally lower-wealth.
Unintentional race and/or wealth/class bias in the model exposed here?