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Show HN: EarthData – find places to visit or live that match what you care about

Hacker News Show2026-11-11 23:080 views

Hi HN,

A few years ago, I was trying to find the place on Earth that had the optimal combination of attributes to vacation to or live. I couldn't find anything that wasn't a marketing funnel or was limited in geography. So I built EarthData essentially for myself, but others might find it useful.

There are two modes: "visit" for a trip (travel month, length of stay, things to do) and "live" for relocation or retirement (housing, healthcare, day-to-day fit).

The way it operates is to allow the user to sculpt the attributes they care about in where they visit on vacation or live. Rate and rank what matters to you. And it will returns 10 initial places, down to specific towns, with a written explanation of why each one fits. From there, the user can expand on places that look interesting, and ultimately pull a TRIP KIT with full itinerary, web links to venues, packing list and other information.

A few design choices:

- It's anonymous. No account, no email required, and preferences live in your browser's local storage. Nothing is tied to a named profile, your preferences are sent to xAI's API to generate matches, but without any PII.

- No ads and no advertising cookies.

- I went with a mid-century travel graphic design. To me, it evokes nostalgia and romance for international travel.

- It supports 10 different languages.

- The initial top 10 Matching is free. The only paid part is an optional $3.75 trip kit for a single place (itinerary, 10 matched activities, checklist, PDF). It covers the Google Places API costs for venues and links, which seem oddly 'expensive'.

- Matching uses an LLM (currently xAI's Grok) to generate and reason about candidates, which get shaped into place cards, maps, short videos and activities.

One area I struggled with was how to group and refine the attribute selections. Higher slider levels reveal finer-grained choices and give that topic more weight. So if it matters a lot, you can really dial in what you're looking for. If it doesn't matter to you, you can skip entirely. If you see any that seem out of line, please point it out. It was a lot of work to make sense with the slider settings, and I'm not convinced it's dialed in.

Finally, if you're looking for something that doesn't have a selection, you can free-form a must-have before submitting.