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freyfogle

1,848 karma · joined May 16, 2010

co-founder: https://opencagedata.com

organizer of Geomob: https://thegeomob.com

mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@freyfogle website: https://www.freyfogle.com

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freyfogle··on Mapzen Shutdown
A comparison is challenging in that in our experience there are many different use cases. It all depends on which geographies you are interested in, and what level of accuracy, speed, data freedom, and cost you are willing to accept. I mean of course we can do query X on different services and say service A returns answer 1, service B returns answer 2, etc. But that's only useful if your queries look like X, and very often they don't. So it's difficult to say "service A is better". Much more relevant is which is better for your specific needs (and budget).

The only guaranteed way to know if a service will meet your needs is to test, hence why we offer 2,500 free queries per day for as long as you like.

Happy geocoding!

freyfogle··on Mapzen Shutdown
sorry you had a bad experience. Feel free to contact me if you want me to take a closer look. "Geocoding" is a very broad term, it really depends if you need reverse, forward, what level of specificity, which region of the world, the quality of your queries, etc. I'm happy to concede we're not perfect for every use case, but we are definitely more than good enough for many (as proven by our many long-term clients). Thanks for trying us out, and as said happy to have a look at your needs specifically if you contact me.
freyfogle··on Mapzen Shutdown
Our code is not, that said it is "just" a very thin layer to various opensource and open data geocoders.

See: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/credits

freyfogle··on Mapzen Shutdown
I can't speak for the commenter above, but as someone who runs a paid service built on open geodata I can tell you our best customers are those who first try to self host and then realize what a pain that is. The challenge is not just keeping the software up to date, but that you also need to keep the data fresh. How fresh of course depends on your exact use case, of course, but for perspective OpenStreetMap has 3-4 million edits per day. It's totally doable - and is technically very interesting, but in much the same way that fixing your own car or baking your own bread is doable and fun. It's more cost-effective to hand it off to a reliable expert.

Building/installing is (relatively) easy. Maintaining is hard.

freyfogle··on Mapzen Shutdown
Do you need geocoding? I ask because I am one of the makers of the OpenCage geocoder. We offer forward and reverse geocoding from open data (primarily OpenStreetMap, but also others). We're listed in the migration guide, and we'll be offering 20% off our pricing for all former Mapzen customers. Blog post about that is coming shortly.

I hope we can help you.

https://geocoder.opencagedata.com

Edit: here's the post about the 20% lifetime discount for former Mapzen customers: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/mapzen

freyfogle··on An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions (2016)
Then I think you would probably enjoy Colin Woodard’s “American Nations - A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America”
freyfogle··on Earth on AWS – Open geospatial data
Facebook and Bing were both Gold sponsors of the most recent State of the Map US: https://2017.stateofthemap.us though in fairness Google was a bronze sponsor

Bing was a gold sponsor of the most recent State of the Map (global conference) in Japan, Facebook silver: http://2017.stateofthemap.org

Bing has for years allowed the use of their sat images for OSM tracing.

freyfogle··on Earth on AWS – Open geospatial data
Hi,

I'm one of the makers of the OpenCage Geocoder: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com

We provide a single, simple API that behind the scenes aggregates numerous open geocoders, including nominatim, DSTK, and others. Please give us a try, there is a free testing tier you can use as long as you like.

freyfogle··on Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries
That article has it's own biases and factual inconsistencies (not sure if intentional or just due to neglect). For example the article claims what3words doesn't work offline. It does.
freyfogle··on A New Way to Tell Your Airline You Hate It
Brands looking to manage the challenge of communicating one-on-one with their customers via messaging should have a look at: https://hubtype.com

They recently completed YC Start-up School.

Full disclosure, I am a very minor investor in the business.

freyfogle··on Building an API on open data
Or you could get many people and organizations to contribute data under an open license. That's exactly what OpenStreetMap is: http://www.openstreetmap.org
freyfogle··on Raising a Truly Bilingual Child
It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking world, but definitely not the case in many other areas. I live in Catalonia, it is very normal for locals to be fully fluent in Catalan and Spanish, I've seen the same in the Basque region. Go to India and almost every person you meet at all levels of society speaks several languages.

In many parts of the world bilingualism is the norm.

I don't recall the exact book, but I remember reading a Jared Diamond book about societies in remote Papua New Guinea and meeting indigenous peoples who all spoke several different languages. If I recall correctly he argues that being monolingual is the historic oddity.

freyfogle··on ShareLaTeX is joining Overleaf
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14813511
freyfogle··on Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)
> Hardly something to lose sleep over.

Easy to write that now, but let's see how you feel the next time your armies in Kamchatka are being invaded.

freyfogle··on Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?
Not quite what you're asking for, but here is a service that provides the opposite side of that - all customer messages come into a single queue on your side and can then be processed by customer service and/or answered by a bot https://hubtype.com/
freyfogle··on Awk vs. Perl (2009)
why chose, TIMTOWTDI
freyfogle··on Your.MD raises $10M to grow AI-driven health information service and marketplace
these questions are better directed at the team, not me. I am just an investor. Bear in mind, you are getting health advice, not a medical diagnosis, that would be impossible via a chat service.
freyfogle··on Your.MD raises $10M to grow AI-driven health information service and marketplace
Well they just launched a week ago. I have used it and it works. Happy to put you in touch with the founder if you like, or you could go ahead and risk €9
freyfogle··on Your.MD raises $10M to grow AI-driven health information service and marketplace
Well I'm biased as I'm an angel investor in the business. It is like any price - it is cheap if you use it heavily, expensive if you don't.
freyfogle··on Your.MD raises $10M to grow AI-driven health information service and marketplace
Here's a similar service which uses a combination of AI and actual licensed doctors: https://abi.ai
freyfogle··on CityBikes: bike sharing networks around the world
This bike share visualization is also very good, has many different cities and lets you replay them over time http://bikes.oobrien.com/global.php#zoom=3&lon=-60.0000&lat=...
freyfogle··on Ask HN: What are the Madrid and Barcelona tech scenes like?
I don't follow the Madrid scene at all, so no idea if such a thing exists. Sorry
freyfogle··on Ask HN: What are the Madrid and Barcelona tech scenes like?
Hi,

moved to Barcelona about two years ago (from London). Here's a post I wrote last summer about some of my impressions. http://www.freyfogle.com/post/1466857133/moving-to-barcelona

In short: quality of life is great, and the tech scene, though still small, is growing rapidly.

For the Barcelona I highly recommend you subscribe to this weekly newsletter http://www.barcinno.com

freyfogle··on Tesla delivers a record number of vehicles during the first quarter 2017 ~25,000
I don't follow TSLA closely, and have no opinion about the stock, but I suppose the bull case would be that much of the revenue will come from selling things besides cars - batteries and home power systems I would guess. The car is just a battery with wheels that you can use to store all the extra solar power you generate from your Tesla roof. The bet is that this isn't (just) yet another car company, it's the energy company of the future.
freyfogle··on Ask HN: What SaaS customer service tools does your startup use?
We have started doing blog posts reviewing the various SaaS services we use: http://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/toolsweuse

so far we've covered * Baremetrics * Quaderno

coming soon: * Statsbot * Hosted Graphite * StatusCake * TravisCI * Drip * TransferWise (not a SaaS service, but saves us a ton of money)

freyfogle··on Why we send our friends investor updates
Hi,

one of the co-founders here. If this is keeping you from becoming a large customer let's chat, happy to find a solution for you. Please ping em via the contact form on the site

freyfogle··on Begin LaTeX in minutes
There's a cookbook template on Overleaf https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cookbook
freyfogle··on Astronauts enter China's space station [video]
Valid confusion. Correct headline would be "Taikonauts enter China's space station"

Cosmonauts = Russian Taikonauts = Chinese Astronauts = Western

freyfogle··on Let’s make peer review scientific
Why reinvent this wheel? Why not instead (also) partner with people like Overleaf who already have many of these features?

https://www.overleaf.com

freyfogle··on Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)
Agree there are huge advantages to us all agreeing on standards (English as language of business, metric system, etc). But from that doesn't follow that we all need to be monolingual.
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