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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI City Roads: A tool to draw all roads in a city at once
cjs_ac wrote 51 min ago:
* Greater London excludes the City of London
* Footpaths and cycleways and shown as roads but railways are not
thih9 wrote 58 min ago:
OSM content attribution is missing (either not added or getting
clipped) when the data is exported for printing on a mug.
pmg101 wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
If you choose Brighton and zoom in on Hove Park you see the fingerprint
maze there very beautifully rendered as a vector, amazing OSM has this
detail!
Defenestresque wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
The hobby-sized projects/videos on your Twitter are mesmerizing: [1]
Talk about a true hacker mindset. Great bloody job!
URI [1]: https://x.com/anvaka
larodi wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
This is the level of projects that our GIS students deliver at the end
of 60 hours of non-mandatory class. Perhaps 70%+ of visitors of HN can
do it if they decide to, it is just an interdisciplinary area that not
many explore. A project of similar complexity in the WEB or ML are
would never get upvoted so much.
aembleton wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Are there are any tools that your GIS students use to create this? Or
is it all code? Any libraries that you can recommend?
I was thinking that I would query the global database for roads and
then take the nodes and their coordinates. Then I would need to
convert those coordinates into points on a canvas and draw lines
between them.
How would I get the boundaries of a city? Some places I've tried are
just a point in osm. Is there some other data source you would use
for that?
cpa wrote 52 min ago:
A combination of overpass turbo and a LLM would get you started
pretty quick.
Regarding GIS tools, download QGis (it sucks on mac but is okay on
linux or windows)
matsemann wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
What is your point? That it's "undeserved" and that's bad somehow?
I think it was a cool visualization and fun to see. And still, 60
hours of research is more than I would put into it, so even if I
technically was able to I would've never gotten around to actually do
it. So nice to see something else than what I normally work with,
even if it might be trivial in that domain.
Capricorn2481 wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
Is this not a project in the web? Or what would be a web project of
similar complexity?
dudeinjapan wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
Well done! I tried Tokyo, and discovered it looks funny/disjointed
because several far away islands like Hachijojima are part of Tokyo
municipality.
JSR_FDED wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
I was intrigued by how many of the 3000 cities youâve cached I had
heard of. You used population size >100k as cutoff, it would be
interesting to compare how many cities someone has heard of with their
population size.
This would be a fun metric to rate someoneâs âglobal
orientationâ.
Only recognize the cities with >1M people? Low GO score (or more
charitably, high Local Focus score :-)
rplnt wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
There are many quizzes like that on Sporcle.
rl_for_energy wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
One of those simple charming tech experiences. Thanks for sharing!
elbac wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
This is wonderful. Great job.
imnotlost wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
Love it! I did a few cities where Iâve lived and it brings me back.
latkin wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
In case others gave up, it took about 2.5 minutes to load my (midsize
city) hometown from OpenStreetMap. So hang in there.
NavinF wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
That's surprising. It only took me a couple of seconds to load NYC on
my iPhone over 5G
zipping1549 wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
Some cities are cached and NYC is going to be in it for sure.
remram wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
Probably going to hit the paradox here, where most people are going
to request a place where many people live, even though most places
are small.
I probably have no chance, living in NYC.
dotancohen wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
I'm in a city well under 50,000 people not in the Americas nor
Europe. The site gave a message that it was retrieving the data
from OSM, then rendered the map faster than the browser would
render a png. Very impressive.
zactato wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
I would expect the opposite with a basic LRU cache before the fetch
to OSM
remram wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
That's fair unfortunately it's not what happened :-(
sandworm101 wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
I'm at 10 minutes now, for a town of <15k. Render time might depend
more on total area than number of lines to draw. Update: gave up
after 20min. Something might be wrong with the particular city.
fnordpiglet wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
Render time for Seattle is a blink of the eye which has both area
and density. I think the time people is observing is loading the
raw data from open street map itself.
Capricorn2481 wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
Because they cache the biggest cities in the world.
> To improve the performance of download, I indexed ~3,000 cities
with population larger than 100,000 people and stored into a very
simple protobuf format. The cities are stored into a cache in
this github repositor
flufluflufluffy wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
About 2 seconds for me to load and draw Los Angeles. Itâs
definitely the load time/network latency, depending on where
itâs loading from. This is amazing! I might use it for a custom
map or something
kayvulpe wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
Incredible! May take a while for a big city, but well worth the wait.
Liftyee wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
In the age of bloated resource hogs, I was pleasantly surprised that
this rendered with no perceptible lag or stuttering, even on my phone.
Impressive how everything is drawn so efficiently.
hiatus wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
Link to the github project:
URI [1]: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads
okasaki wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
Great idea. Might print some and hang them.
dotancohen wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
I was thinking that this would be a great gift, to print a set of
dinner plates with every place that I know the couple lived in. Each
plate a different city.
Though I'm a bit worried about paint near food, especially for custom
jobs.
peppertree wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
There's also a Figma plugin that can import OSM as vector.
URI [1]: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1251030017228239072/vec...
walski wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
I get a 403 for some cities. E.g. Wyk (auf Föhr) returns 403 on this
.pbf resource:
URI [1]: https://city-roads.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/nov-02-2020/3601...
walski wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
Oh damn, I thought this is a Show HN :D
anvaka wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
appreciate the feedback - I'll take a look
semi-extrinsic wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
Would be nicer if it would distinguish (just varying line thickness)
between footpaths, roads, highways etc. Many European cities look messy
in this view.
IMO, prettymaps is quite a bit better:
URI [1]: https://github.com/marceloprates/prettymaps
noiv wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
It's JavaScript and exposes an extensive API via console:
URI [1]: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/blob/main/API.md#loadin...
mulhoon wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
Simple and effective. Beautiful to look at.
Amorymeltzer wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
Neat! Lovely to look at. Is it caching just the most popular or
previous searches?
The option to print on a mug with one link is pretty neat! Might
actually do that...
HellsMaddy wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
From the README[0]:
> To improve the performance of download, I indexed ~3,000 cities
with population larger than 100,000 people and stored into a very
simple protobuf format.
[0]
URI [1]: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads
crabmusket wrote 14 hours 24 min ago:
I have a map of Brugge (Bruges) from this tool printed off on my wall.
It's a great concept!
anvaka wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
oh wow. Glad you liked it!
tekno45 wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
Idk how long itd take normally so just kinda neat.
But i love the slack in the dragging around the map.
DIR <- back to front page