Show HN: For all cities over 100k, calculated the farthest and closest cities
cityextremes.comHow I built this: I pulled the population data from the UN statistics report on cities over 100k and then batch geocoded all of the cities (there was also a fair bit of data cleansing required). I then used a macro in excel to calculate the distance between every city pair (using Vincenty's formula) and uploaded the results to a database. Happy to share more if anyone is curious.
This is quite fun actually. I live in Milan (Italy) and my cousin lives in Aukland (NZ). These cities are listed as being the furthest from each other at more than 18,000 km.
Incidentally as a kid I was quite obsessed with the idea of visiting the antipode of my home's exact geographic location, but sadly, when I finally got around to calculating it, I discovered it lay in a nondescript expanse of ocean.
Whats the tech stack may I ask? I like the simple design and interactions. easy to noodle around and learn.
Just some simple PHP / MySQL
ok. was wondering if you used open source data tools etc.
I took the list of 4 thousand odd cities from the UN statistics report of cities over 100k and then ran it through the batch geocoding site: http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ ... apart from that just old fashioned excel to calculate
This was definitely fun to try.