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Comment by packet_mover | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, house-number lookup is not there yet. The demo geocoder does place/street-level search + reverse, but house numbers need a richer address index - it's on the roadmap.

Re: a bbox "builder" repo - it's an interesting idea. I could see it going two ways: (a) you want to run a bbox builder yourself, or (b) you want a simple way to specify a bbox so the dataset pack can be produced for you.

I started with the "ship a known-good pack" approach because the build pipeline is the messy part, and I want deployed boxes to stay simple/reproducible.

For your use case, which did you mean - run the build locally, or "draw/paste a bbox and get back a ready-to-run pack"? And would bbox be OK, or do you prefer admin boundaries (country/state/city)?

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I would prefer to run the build locally/myself, and to specify either a bounding box with lon and lat, or a country. The output would be data files and/or docker images with data. But as sibling comment said, if you plan to sell it, I understand it makes less sense to offer building logic.

I get why you created the monaco pack, it's a nice demo and fast to download and run. I would rather choose a big city where potential users live (london, nyc, the bay,?), but maybe there are technicalities that make that more complex.

Drawing box on a map in browser and generating the tiles, routing and geocoding db sounds quite heavy for backend compute. There was a project wiht a website that could generate a tileset (pmtiles file?) from box drawn on a map, but I can't find it now. There was a limit to the box size and if it was over some threshold, you had to have premium, or contact sales, or sth, I thought it was protomaps, but no tool like that there now.

Anyway really nice idea, I will follow your progress for sure!

Thanks, appreciate the context.

Bounding box input is a really interesting idea. For my product, the best use would probably be to automate the request/fulfillment flow if this ever picks up. Letting someone draw/paste a bbox makes the request unambiguous and could be automated end-to-end.

Btw, the pack build process isn’t that compute-heavy. It’s not instant, but as a rough data point: on my laptop, a small country like Austria/Slovakia is on the order of ~1 hour to build the three artifacts (tiles + routing tiles + SQLite geocoder).

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