Geohashing | Hacker News Reader

Geohashing

xkcd.com

16 pointssant0sk110 comments

Am I the only geek who just doesn't get xkcd? I mean it's clever and all, but I've never been able to see why so many people have become so attached to it (and post every issue to reddit and news.yc).

They post it because it resonates with them. Personally, I'm always happy to XKCD pop up on HN or reddit.

It's irritating that they all pop up. If it was somewhat noteworthy, it'd be different. In the meantime, I assume most of us have RSS readers.

I posted this one because it wasn't your average xkcd comic. Its an interesting idea that is backed up by actual working code at http://xkcd.com/geohashing.

Yes we all have RSS readers, but I was happy the first time somebody posted an xkcd comic on Digg (back when I used it) because I didn't have that feed in my reader yet. I'm willing to accept multiple exposures on behalf of the guy who is having his first exposure right now.

I must admit I totally didn't get it. What is the purpose of that algorithm? And why the dow-number, looks like snake oil to me?

http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Main_Page

The Dow provides an unpredictable (if you can predict it, you probably have other things to deal with) random seed that determines a location inside of a consistent geographic region. For example, here is today's location in the East Bay area: http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2008-05-21&...

This allows for unpredictable, spontaneous meet ups of like minded folks.

I believe its purpose is to generate a random different location near you every day... and then you are supposed to go to that location sometime during the day and meetup with all the other people that are following the algorithm

I actually don't have an RSS reader that I'm happy with. What software does everyone here use? Something that works across both Linux and Windows would be nice.

Google Reader seems to be the most popular webapp for reading RSS feeds.

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