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Comment by Anon1096 | Hacker News Reader

If you have public land do you just have people walking over the property boundary onto your parcel all the time? Especially in the more populous states like NJ some of them I'd expect that to be pretty common, interesting idea as a thing that people search out specifically for though.

Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms

> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.

> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service

plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.

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Thanks, this is useful feedback.

On people crossing over: it depends a great deal on the land. Next to state game lands you'll see hunters in season; next to a big national forest you may rarely see anyone. It's very dependent on individual perspective and location.

Bordering vs adjacent: bordering means the parcel lines actually touch and there's a measured shared edge; adjacent means no shared edge but within about 250 ft (usually a road or a strip of other land in between). You're right that the state pages don't make that clear, and feet is the better unit for a US site. Tho most US geospatial data is published in metric lol.

And fair point on the copy. I run a small design studio and built this in my free time, I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text. The "Why this exists" section on How it works is my own story, but the rest deserves a pass in my own voice.

> I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text.

So that's why the site text reads as AI slop.

For real. Just write it yourself.

I demand a refund!

> checked against official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.

Were you ever seriously fooled?

My land is adjacent to public land and yes we have people coming through all the time. There is a forest road that becomes a private road and cuts through our land and people use it. We could put up a fence if we wanted but we don't want to... we're high enough up the hill that as long as people are being cool it's nbd. There are signs and most people (not all) are respectful.

I've found that living next to public land is an insanely undervalued luxury. There's very little I would trade it for.

It's weird how people think navigating through undeveloped land is like walking across a parking lot. Brush, branches, thorns, downed trees, uneven ground, etc can make walking through undeveloped land difficult to impossible.

Very true. Bordering a big block of public land doesn't mean you can walk through it easily, and the acreage number says nothing about brush or deadfall. That's part of why the site only reports what it can measure (the shared edge, the size, whether a mapped road reaches the parcel) and doesn't promise anything about getting around once you're out there. Trail data would be a nice addition someday.

Really depends on the land in question. Some forests have thick underbrush, some are almost completely clear. A lot of undeveloped land isn't even forest - swamp, desert, rocky mountains. Sometimes it's far easier to navigate than a parking lot, IME.

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