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

6•daversa•3h ago

Comments

danpalmer•1h 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•41m 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.

daversa•27m 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.

daversa•28m 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!

baby•54m ago

Can you do celsius?

daversa•27m ago

Great point, we'll add a toggle.

Imustaskforhelp•25m 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.

daversa•18m 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!

vbs_redlof•4m 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)

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