Hacker News Reader

Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

My favorite:

hayo @red_hayonnaise

I want an app that takes me on a timed, random drive; like I wanna drive around for an hour, map me a course that winds backroads and brings me back home in that timeframe

View on HN

It’s for running rather than driving, but Trail Router finds round trip routes:

https://trailrouter.com

HN discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802317

I was eyeing up a satnav for my motorcycle, one option it had was to create a windy, indirect, touristy route instead of the fastest / most efficient one. It was an interesting one.

But in the end I couldn't justify paying €400 for something that my phone could do. I know, motorcycle satnavs are hardened, deal with direct sunlight better, work offline and are much more energy efficient, but still. I feel like at that time (this was only a few years ago) those systems should be a lot better already, like offloading work to your phone (becoming more of an external screen), etc.

Interesting.

I wanted a similar app, but A to B, rather than round trips.

Best I could do with the majors is disable highways & toll roads, but often it would still try to take similar routes.

BJ Landcruiser tops out at ~120k, and who wants to go in straight lines on highways. More fun to try and find a fire road it can’t get down. Still searching.

Maybe the custom routing from GraphHopper is what you want: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2020/05/31/examples-for-cus...

You can eg. avoid primary roads additionally to motorways and tolls.

(note, I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper)

Not only for car but also for motorcycle, bike, walking, ...

Can be further tweaked with preferring/avoiding curvy roads or elevation.

And GraphHopper also supports round trips.

OsmAnd~ might have this capability. It has ways to avoid main roads when I use it cycling.

Very cool product.

I'd probably take the mountain biking directions, until the proper backroads and then hema maps are the best so far.

https://graphhopper.com/maps/?point=Gisborne%2C%203437%2C%20...

Lets me know if you ever do 4x4 mapping, although I can't imagine there's a strong business case for it.

We have a simple 4 wheeler config: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/blob/master/core/...

Just set an alarm, turn off all your devices and get lost. When the alarm goes off, reconnect and go home.

We've lost so much magic in our lives because the phone is too easy to use. We've eliminated serendipity

This would be spectacular if it could find fun/twisty roads nearby, similar to https://www.motorcycleroads.com.

I've used Twistypedia to learn about such roads https://www.twistypedia.com/

An idea with no societal downside.

We definitely need ethics to be a core part of software dev training.

Well, I guess you'll have to weigh the amount of fossil fuels that you burn doing that against whatever else you were going to do in that time.

Unsure if that's a joke, but no! That is absolutely not what you would rely on! You can't simply delegate all ethics to the level of the individual user! Your actions matter, the technology you create shapes the world, and you have to consider the consequences of it.

My GPS cycle computer does something similar - plots a random route close to a fixed length.

What model cycling computer does that?

Garmin Edge Explorer 820 has onboard route planning and I have the whole of Europe on the device! Amazing little unit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com