Show HN: WhyThere – Compare cities side-by-side to decide where to move

by daversa • 6 months ago

14 22 6 months ago

danpalmer3• 6 months ago

I do feel like one of the main disadvantages of Sydney over London is that it's 3411 miles from the nearest "national" park, instead of 3074 miles away.

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?

mstngl• 6 months ago

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.

daversa12• 6 months ago

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.

daversa12• 6 months ago

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.

daversa12• 6 months ago

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!

figassis• 6 months ago

Maybe you can take some data from the world happiness report/index?

baby• 6 months ago

Can you do celsius?

daversa12• 6 months ago

Great point, we'll add a toggle.

daversa12• 6 months ago

Done

Imustaskforhelp• 6 months ago

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.

daversa12• 6 months ago

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!

daversa12• 6 months ago

We just added average home and rent cost for the U.S.—looking into international options.

vbs_redlof• 6 months ago

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)

daversa12• 6 months ago

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.

smusamashah• 6 months ago

The population of Cambridge, UK is showing up as just 394.

daversa12• 6 months ago

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.

xtiansimon• 6 months ago

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?

Show HN: WhyThere – Compare cities side-by-side to decide where to move

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