Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • I love this. Suggestion: make locations linkable eg. https://edjefferson.com/localwiki?lat=xx&lon=yy

    Then post on location specific subreddits. Folks will eat this up.

    by waterproof
  • This is super cool! Just punched in my zip code, and hit "random article" three times, and came up with three weird stories I didn't know about the history of places within a few blocks of me in Portland, Oregon. What an awesome idea for travelers!
    by noduerme
  • This was much cooler than I expected. It doesn't seem to be accurate with regard to the "half hour walk" but it still paints a nice radius. I'm in a fairly rural area, so I didn't expect to find much of anything, but it's got local parks and trails as well as churches and landmarks. It's a short list; there's just not much around us, but this seems like a cool resource
    by everdrive
  • Wikipedia has a nearby feature that works in other languages as well

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby

    by slymax
  • Distances measured in yards for European destinations is an insult
    by darkest_ruby
  • This is a great idea but I'd definitely make the distance configurable. Where I am right now would need several hours walking to reach anywhere Wikipedia worthy but if I expanded to say a 15km circle there's probably a couple of places of interest.

    Meanwhile if someone lives in a city they'll get loads of results.

    EDIT: actually this is just a wrapper around wikipedia's nearby feature I think. I tried a couple of places and they give identical results.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...

    by esperent
  • Weird psychological quirk: otherwise banal articles seem much more pertinent when they happen to be nearby (I just read about a random plane crash from decades ago but felt very invested in it, due to proximity).

    Wonder if this is related to the biological phenomena of humans tending to care more about humans who resemble themselves than those who don't (homophily)

    by nomilk
  • The nearest Wikipedia entry to me is about a 3 hours 15 minute walk away, the nearest town. But there are so many interesting things closer, perhaps I should add them to the wiki. Twenty minutes to the north there's a pleasant shady area at the bottom of a canyon with a fallen log with a curve that fits my buttocks nicely. Fifteen minutes to the southeast there is a dead elk cow that has only been 3/4 eaten by the local coyotes, etc., and has a quite remarkable odor. To the northeast is the spot where I found a perfect arrowhead, the prize of my collection. But maybe it's better for me to horde these places to myself.
    by delichon

Explore Birbla archives