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Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by dmuth on Thursday August 10, 2017 @03:48PM (#14983438)
I built a website which offers real-time statistics for Philadelphia's Regional Rail train system: https://www.septastats.com/

This lets public transit passengers answer questions like:

- "My train is getting later and later, is it actually moving?"

- "My train is getting later and later, has it actually STARTED its journey?" (sometimes the answer is "no", sadly)

- "Is it just my train, or are many trains running late?"

- "What was the on-time performance of this train like yesterday? 2 days ago? 7 days ago?" (Some trains tend to be chronically late)

It may come as a surprise that the backend of the system is actually not a database, but Splunk (http://www.splunk.com). DBs are nice, but Splunk is fantastic when it comes to data analytics and reporting.

I'm currently waiting for Splunk to make some of their machine learning modules available for free so that I can start pulling in weather data, train the machine learning component against both that and the train data, and use that to predict the likelihood of any given train becoming late.

Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by killahpriest on Thursday August 10, 2017 @04:40PM (#14984018)
Nice! You should add it to https://github.com/luqmaan/awesome-transit. There's another SEPTA perf related thing on the list: http://phor.net/apps/septa/.
Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by qzervaas on Thursday August 10, 2017 @08:02PM (#14985519)
This is pretty cool.

My "project that doesn't make me money" is https://transitfeeds.com

Currently it archives a ton of static schedule data, and some basic GTFS-realtime archiving stuff.

My longer-term goal is to archive all the GTFS-rt feeds every 30 seconds to provide similar analysis to what you've done here.

Obviously this requires even more storage than I'm already using and a ton of data processing, which is probably above my pay grade.

Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by tomascot on Thursday August 10, 2017 @11:32PM (#14986391)
Do you know where the gtfs file is located by default? I know a bus company in Argentina that has that info somewhere and Google.is using it in maps but I couldn't find the gtfs file.

ty

Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by ClimbsRocks on Saturday August 12, 2017 @02:29AM (#14996726)
If you've got the data, try tossing it into auto_ml: https://github.com/ClimbsRocks/auto_ml

Super easy automated machine learning in Python. Fast enough to run at production speeds. I'm the author, and would love any feedback you have! The whole point of the project is to make ML available to people like you who just like building things, and think their thing could be better with a bit of ML.

Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by kmano8 on Thursday August 10, 2017 @11:16PM (#14986346)
This is great!

I made this septa app years ago when realtime-ish data became available.. http://septa.kaybox.org/

Displays all on-time trains as blue, and late trains red. Locations update every 30 seconds, I think.

Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by spondyl on Thursday August 10, 2017 @08:18PM (#14985601)
Sweet! I've been wanting to make something similar for my local transit line (they have a public JSON API) but I've been wondering how best to structure it.
Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by skykooler on Thursday August 10, 2017 @04:28PM (#14983863)
As a Philadelphian, this is pretty awesome!
Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by MadSax on Thursday August 10, 2017 @04:22PM (#14983797)
Neat.
Re:Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doi... by fl0wenol on Saturday August 12, 2017 @01:11PM (#14998783)
boo (it's neil)