Skip to main content

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Every mountain, building and tree shadow mapped for any date and time

Show HN: Every mountain, building and tree shadow mapped for any date and time
30 by tppiotrowski | 114 comments on Hacker News.
I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer any questions. [1] https://ift.tt/KRr6PEa

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New top story on Hacker News: Tell HN: I think I found Toyota's battery

Tell HN: I think I found Toyota's battery 173 by scythe | 29 comments on Hacker News. Recently there was a thread about a "breakthrough" in battery technology at Toyota. https://ift.tt/nUtv4yY Toyota has been putting out PR puff pieces about their "solid-state" (solid-electrolyte) batteries for years, but this story was unique in that it had a quote from Keiji Kaita, who holds some high-level role at Toyota. Anyway, I didn't think much of it, because there was no paper referenced in the Guardian article, which seemed to be the original source. But while reading about something else, I came across the paper "A near dimensionally invariable high-capacity positive electrode material", published in Nature Materials last December: https://ift.tt/24ZXPy5 This paper, reporting a cathode that has very little (much less than normal) change in size or shape when charged and discharged, claims reversible storage with a solid electrolyte. It stands to reaso

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Neucards – Privacy based digital contact card

Show HN: Neucards – Privacy based digital contact card 7 by bdominy | 1 comments on Hacker News. Neucards is an end-to-end encrypted contact information sharing and updating iOS app that protects your identity while letting you keep in touch with people. I started working on neucards as a side project more than ten years ago, and I decided three years ago to go full-time and try to build a community around it. There are two major problems that neucards addresses. First, most people end up with contact lists that are hopelessly out of date. Over time, people move, change jobs, or add social profiles and unless they tell you, chances are you could lose touch. Second, your contact information ends up in the wrong hands. There has been a huge increase in robocalls, unsolicited emails, data breaches, and online scams that is driven by accessing a person's contact info. Even worse, with AI now being able to imitate a person's voice or other mannerisms, knowledge about the connecti