Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

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I've always liked the idea of combining distance criteria, especially when something is good for public transit to work, but not good in terms of walkability to anything I care about. (Some people walk for fun, I always seem to need an errand.)

I recall that Walkscore used to have something like this, and then it went away, and then it showed up on some other housing site... I was always surprised the type of feature didn't get more popular.

In terms of new features, there is a tricky problem of how to define things like "near a grocery store, the large kind, not that one tiny mini-mart". This brings in several overlapping challenges: How to get business locations and categorize them, how to allow the user to tweak that categorization or result, and how to efficiently turn a union of those the set of valid destinations into a combined region.

The "grocery store" problem is something I've been thinking about for a while, since it has two problems:

- There are tons of grocery stores (efficiency of processing all of those)

- Not all grocery stores are the same (supermarkets vs pricey luxury stores vs bodegas)

I've been thinking of mass processing one-time then allowing the user to super-impose pre-made heatmaps onto thier existing heatmap.

That would be exactly what I need!

Ideally something like 5min bike ride to the grocery store, 15min walk from a train station, and 30min drive to my in-law’s house.

It would be really interesting to do something like “10 minute bike ride to 3 or more grocery stores”. That would help reduce instances of niche specific stores, but also provides a much more useful variety.

I’d love to be able to find places that have 2+ or 3+ grocery stores within somewhat reasonable distance, and same thing goes for restaurants. Really any restaurant.

I'm imagining:

1. User defines a "multi-location" spec, like "MyFastFood" as "Having [2] or more of [Fast Food] excluding [Taco Bell,]"

2. User defines a requirement for their heat map which references the multi-location, ex: "Within [30 minutes] to [walk] to [MyFastFood]"

3. Within the context of a particular [user's requirement] and broad [city/town/region], a 2D area/gradient can be generated, and cached for a rather considerable period given how slowly businesses open/close.

Granted, that's the ambitious version. A simpler one would be to not support "at least X", and to combine the multi-location and the distance-rules all together into a single condition.

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