TE
科技回声
首页24小时热榜最新最佳问答展示工作
GitHubTwitter
首页

科技回声

基于 Next.js 构建的科技新闻平台,提供全球科技新闻和讨论内容。

GitHubTwitter

首页

首页最新最佳问答展示工作

资源链接

HackerNews API原版 HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 科技回声. 版权所有。

Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

132 点作者 teejae超过 1 年前
Is anyone having a big wedding reception&#x2F;event with assigned seating soon? Or know anyone who will?<p>I&#x27;ve been working on a tool to optimize seating charts for assigned seat events, such as weddings. I&#x27;m hoping this site will save people enough time and stress, to charge for the service for larger events.<p>At the moment, there&#x27;s no login required, and the service saves no data.<p><pre><code> Why? * Save time, rearranging people automatically * Help with politics of large gatherings * Try moving people and quickly seeing how everything shakes out Currently, it will try to optimize for: * Keeping groups together as much as possible * Use fewer total tables * Keep people either together or apart, as indicated Current Capabilities: * Import guest list&#x2F;table capacity information from Excel file (there&#x27;s a template) * Generate fake guest list to play around * Dragging people to different tables and reoptimize * Selecting sets of people who you want to keep together or apart * Locking people to certain tables * Edit history On roadmap: * Prioritizing people to seat at &quot;better tables&quot; (VIPs, close family, etc) * Rearranging tables visually </code></pre> What do you all think? Is this valuable? How&#x27;s the UX?<p>I haven&#x27;t come up with a great name for it yet, so naming it &quot;Better Seater&quot; for now.<p>All feedback and suggestions welcome and appreciated! Let me know what would be useful for you!

25 条评论

verelo超过 1 年前
My wife and i just went through this for our wedding. A few remarks from that experience that might be helpful:<p>1. Versions matter - she&#x27;d often make a draft and want to tell me &quot;ok tell me if you like this better than the previous version&quot;. Id just compare the cells above to the cells below.<p>2. We organized people based on common interests - these people are very into music, these are very into home renovations, these people work in tech...etc. Tagging people with &quot;attributes&quot; and letting the system try optimize for as much overlap as possible would have been amazing.<p>3. Warn me of duplicates - sometimes in the copy paste madeness, we&#x27;d double up someone.<p>4. Import - We almost missed someone due to me skipping a line in the initial transription of their name into the spreadsheet.<p>5. At the end of the day guests need to find their seat. I made a QR code that linked to a website where people could type their name to find their table (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andrewmcgrath.info&#x2F;wedding" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andrewmcgrath.info&#x2F;wedding</a>) we didn&#x27;t want to use a big board, it was 1 more thing to make (the website was a 2 hr project i did the day before) and the QR codes were just print outs we put in dollar store photo frames at the entrance, the bar and at the end of the day...we got great feedback over this. With the guest lists, you could easily automate making someone this website.<p>Good luck!
评论 #38851746 未加载
评论 #38847055 未加载
评论 #38851431 未加载
评论 #38858089 未加载
Brajeshwar超过 1 年前
Ok. This may be slightly off-topic, but I&#x27;m pretty serious when I suggest getting feedback and ideas from an Indian aunty&#x2F;uncle who has done and helped arrange or take primary roles in weddings in their families. Here in India, for all significant events, there is always an aunt&#x2F;uncle who knows everything, and everyone asks that person.<p>Looking at the website and seeing Tables numbered less than ten by default, I realized this targets people who invite their best friends and relatives and strictly choose who they want to see at their events.<p>One of my friend’s father was that uncle. I once asked him how he knows everything and can organize everything. He writes a lot and writes them down and refers to those writing when he thinks. If I asked him something, he is thinking about his notes in the back of his mind. Once, he gave me directions to go and send out over 50 paper invitation cards. My journey was precise and in perfect sequence, including the cow traps to avoid, the gates I might encounter, and the homes with dogs (so I call out before entering). This is in the 90s, with no phone, while I ride a bicycle to deliver those invites with no marked address on roads I had never traveled, in an Indian rural town.
评论 #38852016 未加载
thom超过 1 年前
Bit of a blast from the past for me, as we used Perfect Table Plan when we got married. I heard about that from its creator Andy Brice who frequented the Joel on Software forums, a spiritual precursor to HN.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfecttableplan.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perfecttableplan.com&#x2F;</a><p>Anyway, we used it to get _most_ of the way there, but ultimately reverted to hand crafting stuff at the end. For us there were many constraints that were vague feelings, only coming to light when we had a plan in front of us, and if you end up doing many rounds of tweaks you lose any real efficiency gain from using software.
评论 #38851618 未加载
评论 #38852120 未加载
devilbunny超过 1 年前
Simply contemplating having to do this is one of the reasons I&#x27;m very happy that the local standard for weddings (even big, expensive, nighttime ones) in my hometown was buffet service with available but unassigned seating. People hang out with who they want to, as much as they want to, and can just avoid those who bother them.
评论 #38846908 未加载
kasperni超过 1 年前
I would reach out to some wedding planners&#x2F;wedding venues and see if it would be useful for them. I think that would probably be your biggest market, if you nailed it. Could be pretty cool as a venue to provide the tool to your clients to plan the seating (I don&#x27;t know what is out there already)<p>I definitely think you need to work on the UX if you want want to make on it
评论 #38846085 未加载
_jnc超过 1 年前
This is really cool!<p>Some ideas:<p>- Let me drag out guests to tables and then optimize around what I&#x27;ve done so far. It looks like optimize wipes the slate clean each time.<p>- You might consider letting people pick how many seats should be at each table with a +- tolerance.<p>- People really like seeing seat numbers, whether globally or local to a table.<p>- If you clean up the UI a bit this could also be something people print out for a reference chart at events.<p>Automatic seating has been one of the more common feature requests of my own seating chart app, seatpuzzle.com, but I haven&#x27;t quite gotten around to modeling the right parameters and prioritized a different set of things instead.
评论 #38846804 未加载
wayfinder超过 1 年前
If anyone wants to build this by themselves, I recommend using an optimization solver library like OptaPlanner. It basically implements standard optimization algorithms you can read in academic papers (which are interesting to read!) so you don’t have to.<p>You can probably write a basic planner in under an hour with all the constraints you can think of. You can just continue to fiddle with the constraints and weights until you are happy without having to worry about duplicates or errors.<p>I’ve used it to solve cost optimization problems for companies I’ve worked with and it works really well.
评论 #38853078 未加载
评论 #38855959 未加载
haroldp超过 1 年前
Isn&#x27;t &quot;Keep people either together or apart&quot; an NP-Hard problem, and basically unsolvable for more than a couple preferences?
评论 #38846367 未加载
评论 #38846219 未加载
评论 #38846416 未加载
评论 #38852198 未加载
评论 #38846207 未加载
rav超过 1 年前
Requirements for the Seating Chart Optimizer I made for planning my wedding party:<p>* 120 guests: 49 couples and 22 singles<p>* To be seated at 11-ish tables of 8, 10, 12 people each (by combining 4- and 6-person tables)<p>* Couples must be seated at the same table<p>* Plan only needs to say which guests sit at which tables - individual placement at the table will be decided just-in-time by the people putting the name cards down on the day<p>* It&#x27;s hard for me to give labels to the guests to give you an idea of who can form a nice table and who can&#x27;t. It&#x27;s like, complicated, but I know a good table when I see one.<p>I made a spreadsheet-based app [1] where I first entered couples and singles into rows and then left blank rows as table separators. On the blank rows I put a &quot;table capacity&quot; number (8, 10 or 12), and on the guest rows I put a formula to compute &quot;remaining table capacity&quot;, using conditional formatting to highlight tables where there are too many guests and tables where there are still seats available. By dragging rows around I can quickly rearrange the plan, and the spreadsheet doesn&#x27;t do much except tell me where the plan is currently &quot;broken&quot; due to overfull tables.<p>If I compare my requirements with the Better Seater interface, what I&#x27;m missing is a way to keep couples together always - I don&#x27;t want to make a new &quot;group&quot; name for each couple and I don&#x27;t want to drag twice to move a couple. I haven&#x27;t tried it with 120 guests, but I&#x27;m curious what sort of guestlist size you&#x27;re aiming for.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;1ciib95VBI1YE9KFfPZAp96_3_Bsa39NycF9Pjeulm5E&#x2F;edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;1ciib95VBI1YE9KFfPZAp...</a>
评论 #38846561 未加载
chadash超过 1 年前
This is very cool! I built a tool similar to this, but for elementary school, classroom placements, and people always ask me if I can modify it for wedding seating!<p>One question&#x2F;comment. As you already know, finding the absolute mathematically, optimal solution is hard, if not impossible in a reasonable amount of time, but people don’t care, they just want good enough. Found with classroom placements is that people can put in all the information, get an answer that is very close to optimal (mathematically), And then take one look at it, and know something is off, because you can’t actually model every aspect of the real world. so what I started doing giving good solutions that are pretty different from each other. Teachers can usually take a look for 30 seconds or less and decide that one of them is better than the other. Do you have the ability to do this on your tool? To randomly shuffle and optimize from there?
评论 #38847085 未加载
elicash超过 1 年前
Clever idea! I&#x27;m planning mine for April, but having trouble understanding how to use this tool. In your default data, Liam is listed as a couple but when you drag to a table it says &quot;1&#x2F;4&quot;. Should that be 2&#x2F;4? How do I change number of tables and how many at each table? How do I create the &quot;tags&quot;?<p>The other thing not intuitive is that I was dragging people over to the tables instead of using the &#x27;optimize&#x27; button. Which kinda defeats the point. But I figured that out eventually.<p>I will say, my family lacks drama so it&#x27;s not so much I need to keep certain people away from each other as I just want to figure out who might want to talk the most to who.
评论 #38846302 未加载
pricees超过 1 年前
I tried writing one of these about 10 years ago and failed miserably.<p>It was a generalized banquet hall&#x2F;dinner&#x2F;wedding seating chart.<p>The one that I was looking to write involved the following specs:<p>- friends and +1s sit together<p>- guests could sign up as a &quot;group&quot; (Tom&#x27;s group) and sit together<p>- cluster people from the same area, or not even close to the same area<p>- some guests need to be prioritized as close to the front of the room&#x2F;stage&#x2F;guest(s)-of-honor<p>These were very difficult specs to satisfy and not getting it right was not an option since folks were paying $50 a plate with ~600 guests. The solution has always been to do it by hand.
评论 #38846654 未加载
评论 #38846828 未加载
jmalmen超过 1 年前
Super cool! Built something similar a few years back to assign kids to boats on a sailing camp using Google&#x27;s OR Tools. Don&#x27;t recommend OR Tools, solver was super slow vs cplex but didn&#x27;t find any good OS solver. I used two objectives in my objective function to ensure someone didn&#x27;t get left out, probably need to do something similar for the prioritization in the roadmap?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jonasmalm&#x2F;lakritsrot">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jonasmalm&#x2F;lakritsrot</a>
评论 #38851893 未加载
hyperman1超过 1 年前
We had a few constraints based on table location:<p>Person notorious to get drunk was out of sight of the bar.<p>Person with medical problem close to the toilets.<p>Young nephew prone to pick candy from jar was diagonally seated to a candy jar, because the whole family loves to see al the strange ploys he came up with to &#x27;randomly&#x27; pass the jar and take a candy. Yes we love him :-)<p>We also seated groups according to preferred language as a secondary constraint, so we had Dutch&#x2F;French&#x2F;German&#x2F;English corners of the room.
评论 #38853289 未加载
pugworthy超过 1 年前
Do you account for not putting right handed people to the right of left handed people? But then maybe you do, if you want to play match maker.<p>So many (imagined) social conditions here. Like A likes B, but B hates A. C and D should meet. E and F are a couple, but F and G broke up in college so it&#x27;s awkward. H and I are divorced but still on good terms so it&#x27;s OK. etc.
评论 #38852157 未加载
评论 #38853310 未加载
lonesword超过 1 年前
Genuine question - why assign seats at all? In my country (weddings with 200+ people are the norm) people sit wherever they want. In the US, you wouldn&#x27;t assign seating at a house party (right?), so why do that for a wedding, since a wedding is after all just a more expensive party?
评论 #38853203 未加载
评论 #38852803 未加载
评论 #38853620 未加载
评论 #38853241 未加载
评论 #38852836 未加载
jerpint超过 1 年前
I’m getting married tomorrow, and doing tables is no easy feat. The list constantly evolves, people come&#x2F;cancel last minute, and sometimes you can play on multiple relationships for seating (e.g. one couple might be family but also friends with other guests attending)
评论 #38853546 未加载
lja超过 1 年前
This looks so much like the bin packing problem [0] if you generalized it you could do a lot with it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bin_packing_problem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bin_packing_problem</a>
评论 #38846237 未加载
huevosabio超过 1 年前
Love this. I got married in 2022 and I started a &quot;friend and family graph&quot; with the goal of optimizing layout.<p>But other stakeholders, <i>cough cough</i> in laws <i>cough</i>, quickly demanded direct allocation.
评论 #38847911 未加载
vekker超过 1 年前
Pitching in as yet another dev who also thought of implementing this :)<p>There were just too many constraints for it to be feasible as a web app in our case. Examples of some of those constraints that make it difficult:<p>* different table sizes, each with a min. and max. seats<p>* every table has a &quot;head of table&quot;, which has to face the bridal couple<p>* we preferred couples&#x2F;genders were mixed at every table, not sitting next to each other<p>* people who must&#x2F;should&#x2F;definitely shouldn&#x27;t sit at the same table<p>* distances between people mattered: certain groups should be closer&#x2F;further away from each other<p>* distances to the main table mattered<p>* the exact location of the table mattered (for example, older people should have more room&#x2F;closer to the toilet&#x2F;away from the dance floor)<p>It might seem like overengineering to some :) But in the end, it didn&#x27;t take us too much time to make the layout: we just printed out all the names, and laid them out physically. Then we used that physical layout at the entrance to show people where they are seated. Most of the work was actually cutting out the names, finding them in the pile, physically placing them, ... So I guess if someone just made a beautiful drag-and-drop UI and let the user do the optimization work, and ignore implementing all the &quot;smart stuff&quot;, that would work for many people. I guess you could even monetize it by allowing people to print out the layouts in a beautiful way (engraved in wood or whatever) and have it shipped.<p>(edit: damn it&#x27;s annoying that HN doesn&#x27;t support fully markdown for bullet point lists)
评论 #38852225 未加载
评论 #38852813 未加载
ape4超过 1 年前
A fun problem to attempt. I bet there are a lot more parameters! Isn&#x27;t there usually &quot;head table&quot;. Maybe its obvious who would sit there?
评论 #38846275 未加载
BD103超过 1 年前
This is pretty interesting! A related algorithm that may be useful is Wave Function Collapse, which can be taught using seating constraints like this.
tunnuz超过 1 年前
Cool to see a project using optimisation &lt;3
评论 #38846247 未加载
jotango超过 1 年前
Looks good! We would use this in a corporate environment, for networking dinners etc.
评论 #38852240 未加载
johnla超过 1 年前
This is interesting. What&#x27;s the algorithm that you use to optimize?