Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomaskafka | Hacker News Reader

I love it, thanks!

If I may have a feature request, I’d like to have only some of the features turned on - in my case it would be just the reverse geocoder (so I could skip the map and routing data download and storage).

Right now I have my own reverse geocoder for https://weathergraph.app which downloads OSM dumps and builds in-memory KD tree for lookups. Surprisingly, the whole world can fit in 3-4 GB of RAM, and service starts in 90 seconds on a cheap VPS, no database needed, but of course, having a battle tested solution that just works (and someone else maintains it) would help.

View on HN

Thank you! And yes, Corviont is intentionally a stack of separable services behind one gateway - so "geocoder-only" is exactly the kind of config I want to support (skip PMTiles + Valhalla and ship only the SQLite index + reverse API).

Re: Weathergraph - thanks for the details. Since you already run whole-world reverse geocoding on a single server, that's a bit different from Corviont's current regional/fleet packaging (where you ship only the area you need to each edge/on-prem deployment). A "world geocoder-only" pack could still make sense - but it's a different distribution/update story than my default.

For your use case, do you want reverse results at the city/region/country level - or do you also need street/house number detail? That choice mostly determines how heavy a world geocoder-only pack needs to be.

Thanks for reply! It’s great to hear it’s configurable.

I didn’t realize how many use cases are there - you guessed right that for my use the whole world, but only up to city level, is quite enough.

In my todo list I have adding landmarks, so that I could eg. show a nearby mountain when outdoors and far away from city, but then deciding which POI types to include gets much trickier.

Yeah, I also ran into that when ranking geocoding results - you want to show more "important"/notable places first. In your case, one pragmatic approach could be to keep only features with wikidata or wikipedia tags (and maybe a small whitelist like natural=peak, tourism=viewpoint/attraction).

This is also why I lean on Nominatim-derived data for Corviont - it already condenses a lot of this into a single importance/ranking model. I have not tried a whole-world build though, so I am not sure how well that behaves at planet scale.

That’s definitely worth trying, I would guess many people would want to have a global service that works for any user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com