Show HN: WhyThere – Compare cities side-by-side to decide where to move(whythere.life)
whythere.life
Show HN: WhyThere – Compare cities side-by-side to decide where to move
https://whythere.life
24 comments
Haha yeah, that needs some refinement! Ultimately it's a restriction of the API's we're using now.
"Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?"
These are all great suggestions, and some are on the roadmap. One thing is we never want to get in the game of saying one place is "Better" or "Worse" than another. We just want to provide data and let people decide what's important.
Thanks for giving it a spin!
"Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?"
These are all great suggestions, and some are on the roadmap. One thing is we never want to get in the game of saying one place is "Better" or "Worse" than another. We just want to provide data and let people decide what's important.
Thanks for giving it a spin!
These are really important questions when evaluating a place to live. The point about “tourism” is somehow covered by mentioning the nearest national park—unfortunately only in the US, which leads to Arcadia National Park for all European locations. In times of endless possibilities for AI-driven data and meta-analysis, this seems all the more poorly done and unimaginative.
Following up on this! Instead of just patching the empty state, we built out a proper 'Local Nature' integration using OpenStreetMap.
International cities now have their own dedicated row showing real local reserves and parks (e.g., Tiergarten for Berlin) instead of a broken generic fallback. It's live now if you want to take another look. Thanks again for highlighting this early.
International cities now have their own dedicated row showing real local reserves and parks (e.g., Tiergarten for Berlin) instead of a broken generic fallback. It's live now if you want to take another look. Thanks again for highlighting this early.
FYI this appears broken. Neither Sydney nor London provide any results, and browser logs suggest that actually the "/parks" endpoint is returning 502.
I'd encourage you to go much wider than parks. Outdoor space is good for certain interests, but not others. Beaches for example are not parks, but might be preferential to be close to for many. Cycle infrastructure for others. Nightlife for more folks, etc.
Also beware what gets classed as a park. Sydney has lots of parks, but they range from a tree and a bench between two houses (still named and mapped!) to large green spaces, to public sports spaces, to national parks. It would look strange to show the nearest bench to the centre of the city while ignoring easy access to large parks, as it would also be odd to say that there is a national park 20km away while ignoring the fact that the local space is very green.
I'd encourage you to go much wider than parks. Outdoor space is good for certain interests, but not others. Beaches for example are not parks, but might be preferential to be close to for many. Cycle infrastructure for others. Nightlife for more folks, etc.
Also beware what gets classed as a park. Sydney has lots of parks, but they range from a tree and a bench between two houses (still named and mapped!) to large green spaces, to public sports spaces, to national parks. It would look strange to show the nearest bench to the centre of the city while ignoring easy access to large parks, as it would also be odd to say that there is a national park 20km away while ignoring the fact that the local space is very green.
Thank you, I think we have the search fixed, but yeah only having Parks show is not ideal and wasn't the intent. We're just dealing with a hodge-podge of API's with rate limits and several layers of caching trying to make things work lol.
Reserves like Drivers Triangle, Rea, and Blue Gum are showing for me in Sydney Now.
Reserves like Drivers Triangle, Rea, and Blue Gum are showing for me in Sydney Now.
Yeah, so I tried again for Sydney and London, and all of the results are really bad.
"Drivers Triangle" appears to be a "park" so small it's not marked in green on Google Maps. It's also in Penrith which is like a 40 minute drive from the city. Rea Reserve is similar. Astrolabe park is... a park, but it's not in the top 10 parks in the city.
Same for London. Belsize Wood Nature Reserve is a very odd pick a long way on public transport or driving from the centre, and despite living in London for 10 years I've never heard of it. Meanwhile Hyde Park, Regents Park, St James's Park, Battersea, Greenwich, Green Park, ... there are so many iconic parks in London.
My advice would be to curate these per city. It's going to be much easier to just decide which the top parks are for any given city, and with a few hundred cities you'd get pretty good coverage of queries.
"Drivers Triangle" appears to be a "park" so small it's not marked in green on Google Maps. It's also in Penrith which is like a 40 minute drive from the city. Rea Reserve is similar. Astrolabe park is... a park, but it's not in the top 10 parks in the city.
Same for London. Belsize Wood Nature Reserve is a very odd pick a long way on public transport or driving from the centre, and despite living in London for 10 years I've never heard of it. Meanwhile Hyde Park, Regents Park, St James's Park, Battersea, Greenwich, Green Park, ... there are so many iconic parks in London.
My advice would be to curate these per city. It's going to be much easier to just decide which the top parks are for any given city, and with a few hundred cities you'd get pretty good coverage of queries.
You’re not wrong at all. Automated discovery breaks down fast in big global cities because raw tags don’t capture “iconic” very well.
I actually just pushed an update that heavily retunes the scoring, boosting national and royal parks and penalizing tiny or generic parcels, which knocks out a lot of the “Drivers Triangle”–type noise. It’s meaningfully better now, but Sydney and London are good examples of where the limits show.
Treating Hyde Park differently from some obscure patch of trees using only OSM-style data is a genuinely hard problem, and at a certain point manual curation just wins. I’m likely going to add curated overrides for major hubs so the obvious, culturally important parks always surface first.
Appreciate the concrete examples. This is exactly the kind of feedback that helps tighten things up.
I actually just pushed an update that heavily retunes the scoring, boosting national and royal parks and penalizing tiny or generic parcels, which knocks out a lot of the “Drivers Triangle”–type noise. It’s meaningfully better now, but Sydney and London are good examples of where the limits show.
Treating Hyde Park differently from some obscure patch of trees using only OSM-style data is a genuinely hard problem, and at a certain point manual curation just wins. I’m likely going to add curated overrides for major hubs so the obvious, culturally important parks always surface first.
Appreciate the concrete examples. This is exactly the kind of feedback that helps tighten things up.
This is an early Alpha and we actually were considering locking it down to the US initially but I think it's important to get out there early and expose problems like this. All valid points.
Would benefit from cost-of-living data (e.g. something like numbeo), on top of the housing data.
And something like Hoodmaps to discern safe/unsafe suburbs in a city (quality of life differs a lot within a city, often more than between cities)
And something like Hoodmaps to discern safe/unsafe suburbs in a city (quality of life differs a lot within a city, often more than between cities)
100%, we want to add that but the data is expensive. If this has legs we will probably spring for Zillow or Redfin API access.
We actually hit a rate limit with the image API tonight, but we're caching everything we pull into a DB, so the more people use it, the less we'll have to rely on API calls.
We actually hit a rate limit with the image API tonight, but we're caching everything we pull into a DB, so the more people use it, the less we'll have to rely on API calls.
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Funny. Comparing NYC to Philly, I see the distance to park/preserve shows local green spaces. Not what I expected. Maybe statistics are better when you’re a major metro?
Would be interested in housing prices the most. It would be great to know what can be the cheapest rent places in Europe for example.
We want to add home prices and rent, but that is really expensive data unfortunately. If this has legs, we may be able to justify paying for the Zillow API or something similar. We do plan on adding affiliate links to realtors in that city, although that's not nearly as helpful.
There's also an entire "Explore" section of this site we're working on once the database reaches a higher level of maturity. We want to do all the filtering you're mentioning.
Great comment, thanks!
There's also an entire "Explore" section of this site we're working on once the database reaches a higher level of maturity. We want to do all the filtering you're mentioning.
Great comment, thanks!
We just added average home and rent cost for the U.S.—looking into international options.
The population of Cambridge, UK is showing up as just 394.
Great catch! It turns out there is a tiny village in Gloucestershire also named Cambridge (pop. 394) that was trying to steal the spotlight from the University town. Because they were both labeled as 'Cambridge, England,' our system was getting them mixed up.
I've just pushed a fix that includes the County for international cities to keep them distinct (e.g., 'Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK'). I also cleared our database cache so the correct data is ready for you.
If you already have Cambridge in your comparison grid, just remove it and add it back to see the fresh data. Thanks for the heads-up.
I've just pushed a fix that includes the County for international cities to keep them distinct (e.g., 'Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK'). I also cleared our database cache so the correct data is ready for you.
If you already have Cambridge in your comparison grid, just remove it and add it back to see the fresh data. Thanks for the heads-up.
Other than the "national" park comparison and non metric units, I was pleasantly surprised that I could add non-US cities. However it feels pretty surface level. Comparing Sydney and London, all I can really deduce is that Sydney is sunnier and more rainy, but there's nothing about what it feels like to live there.
Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?