User talk:Yosef

Re: Some Thoughts

Hey Yosef, Welcome and sorry for the late reply to your message on my Talk Page. I hope your ankle is healing well.

I see you've been getting out on a few expeditions which is great! Glad we have a fresh perspective on our little game. I know there are definitely Ninja Geohashers around and I recall reading one of Juja's recent expeditions where she actually met a Ninja at the hash. Who knows how many are actually out there though.

I think people stop going to hashes due to timing restrictions (Work, other stuff) or start forgetting to check the location. When it's new, it's exciting, but that wears off after a while and people get interested in other things. However, I think once you start playing, you never really stop; just forget about it for a while. I've seen a few hashers write up an expedition after YEARS of not going on any adventures. Personally, my new job has a longer commute than usual and I've skipped a few adventures I might have taken if I was still in my old job; I've just run out of time or was too tired.

As for your suggestions on changing the rules, those are significant changes and would be extremely tough to push through. I've even made comments similar to your 24 hour suggestion. I'm in the Eastern Time Zone and this really affects me, but now that I've been playing this game for a few years, I'd vote against this change. (Honestly, I could have sworn I came back to that statement and made a second reply indicating my change of mind.) The Rules say the hash is good ONLY for that day and so that means it's a Retro Hash if you're late and arrive any time after midnight. Plus, this makes things simpler when writing up the expedition and titling the page.

As for that other suggestion, I don't fully understand it, nor do I think it's a good idea, It's already a random point and it's super easy to just tack on the decimal points to your graticule Lat-Long Integers. Plus, how do you configure the expeditions that have already taken place?

I'm just one member of this community though, and I'd encourage you to speak up on the wiki or in the IIRC chats if you have suggestions or comments. It's always cool to discuss different ideas and thoughts. Pedalpusher (talk) 21:09, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

PS When leaving comments on discussion or Talk pages, it's good to end your comments with ~~~~, which upon saving, will auto-stamp your wiki-name and timestamp so people can easily reply to you. The end result looks like my time-stamp above.

Algorithm Upgrade

Thanks for your comment on my talk page. The fairness of the algorithm has been bugging me at a low level for a long time. I have have made a proposal for a tenth anniversary anti-discrimination upgrade. To get a bit of momentum behind this idea, perhaps you could comment on this proposal. And welcome to geohashing too! --Sourcerer (talk) 11:23, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

2017-07-24 -35 149

Yosef, you are an angel! Thank you for fixing the mess-up I created. 1PE (Canberra) (talk) 05:56, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Time zone problems

To be honest, I can't find a satisfying solution to the trouble currently beeing discusssed on the main page talk. The problem is that the algorithm currently depends on

• The DJIA which is globally distinct for a given date (let's ignore weekends and Dow holidays for now) and published at 9:30 New York Time (EST / EDT)
• The date, which depends on the local time zone(s) of each graticule.

In the early days of geohashing (and many years before I started with this hobby) some clever people realized that for some areas it is not possible to obtain valid hash points because the NYSE opens after midnight and therefore one can never get the DJIA opening for the current day. Hence the W30 rule was introduced, which made geohashing possible in Asia and Australia and significantly easier in Europe and Africa. However it introduced some unfairness for the fellow Americans. (Note that there are still some areas where no valid hashpoint for the current day can be obtained, e.g. on the Chukchi Peninsula. However there don't seem to be any active geohashers there.)

If we wanted to get rid of all unfairness we'd have to use either a different source of randomness or use dates that are not dependent on time zones (UTC for example). I don't really like to break with the DJIA because it is easy to obtain and to verify while impossible to forecast. And changing the definition of "date" would be confusing because then one could visit two different hashpoints on one (local) day. Also midnight gehohashes wouldn't really be at midnight anymore (except if you happen to live in the UTC +0 time zone).

Do you have any proposal how we might amend the "discrimination" of western geohashers while keeping the original spirit of the game? --Solli (talk) 10:12, 12 September 2017 (UTC)