AMERICAN NEWS

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

By Unknown Author from NYT Home Page https://ift.tt/10BGxgm

Ask HN: What do devs use for quickly setting up a feedback form? 15 by mmarian | 17 comments on Hacker News. I'm a software engineer who keeps building little web apps / MVP landing pages in the hopes that they make me a pretty penny (they never do). I like adding basic forms to the websites; usually to collect feedback, sometimes with an optional email address so I can get back to people. I've tried 3 options so far: - fully-fledged forms embedded onto the website (eg Google Forms) - quickest to set up but absolutely hideous and bad for SEO - 3rd-party form backends - I'm constantly worried about hitting the free plan limit; and some services have some deliverability/uptime issues - writing up my own server (I use Go) and hooking it up to a 3rd-party email service; cheapest but more worried about deliverability/uptime Right now I'm gravitating towards the 2nd option, but am curious how other developers approach this problem.

A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe 43 by rntn | 4 comments on Hacker News.

Road planners embrace the diverging diamond interchange 41 by frob | 72 comments on Hacker News.

By The Associated Press and Reuters from NYT World https://ift.tt/rcqKaFj

Tantivy – full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene 19 by kaathewise | 1 comments on Hacker News.