The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game | Hacker News Reader

The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game

blog.exe.dev

125 pointsbryanmikaelian21 comments

This is very cool. I concur on the conclusion that we'll soon see a lot more use of AI coding tools in gov as people discover what can be done with all these existing data sets. Would love to see more resources put into creating and publishing them. I'm sure there's plenty of ways for govs to make their money back on the data these days with some creative licensing.

Tangential, but I'm also a little obsessed with taking municipal data and turning it into something else. Lately I've been building an online open world game built on Philadelphia's terrain. It similarly uses a Philly LIDAR scan, the land use maps, the street data, building lots, and a few other sources to make the game map.

There's a signup but it doesn't validate or anything I just haven't gotten around to making a demo mode. Any fake email will do: https://cityrider.jpsmaps.com/. The general idea is to pick up trash around Philly to power/build other fun things like your jet pack and ramps. Buy properties and customize the facades. Run from Gritty. It's been a blast, and while not conservation, I believe what is effectively a littering PSA to be a worthy output of my time ha.

You can also click on many trees to see what they are, as most are from the Philly Tree Inventory (though more are added to fill out forest areas for style reasons).

Love this so far! From the mechanic perspective, sure; but even more from the sheer degree of Philly love and whimsy that shines through. Can't wait for the Show HN.

Hey, thanks, that means a lot! Yes, I love my city and I have a long to do list of things to add in honor of it. Do attend.

"The apps are open source, and Hickisch doesn't expect to make money from them anytime soon. "

I'd like to try out the settlers-style game, but can't find them? Nothing here, either: https://github.com/raffael-hickisch

The game is here: https://siedler-oesterreich.exe.xyz/

Thank you! Not sure why it's so hard to find (still don't see where you got this from), esp if it's using exe.dev's platform.

(exe.dev co-founder here) The platform is designed make it easy for you to share if you like, but we are not typically in the business of pointing directly at products users make. Maybe we should change that! It would be fun to have a "best of exe.dev" on our site.

Ask creators before featuring them, but medium and substack and YouTube are popular platforms because of their discovery mechanisms, not because hosting text or video is especially hard these days.

I wonder if .exe in the domain sets of all kind of overenthusiastic "safety" mechanisms in search engines, AV software, etc.

Interestingly, it's the .xyz on our VM domain that causes problems. It's apparently far more of a problematic gTLD than I realized. E.g. it appears Southwest Airlines blocks the entire thing, as do some enterprise networks are working with.

(We have a fix for this coming in a few weeks.)

Sorry for this being hard to find. I've put the links to the live apps and repositories here https://kohlschwarz.at/

>The files are huge—up to 15 gigabytes each—so as a general rule, nobody downloads them.

This is not the reason and it's hard to call 15 GiB huge in 2026. Plenty of people download video games or stream television series that are more than 15 GiB.

You've got to place that within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa.

For Hickisch himself, yes, but that part was about data from "Hickisch’s home country of Austria".

I think it's well worth noting that while streaming does imply a full download, it doesn't actually render the full sized download on the client device at any one time, it's simply cached and then the oldest parts are evicted when the cache fills up.

HuggingFace and access to a fiber connection changed my concept of "large downloads". I can easily grab a 20GB model within a minute or two now, same for big Steam games. Meanwhile my childhood self was hyper aware of loading images and other assets that would bog down our home dialup connection.

The broadband speed to my work PC is the same as my hard drive read speed from 15 years ago. My hard drive read speed is the same as a single channel RAM read from 15 years ago.

It’d absolutely unbelieveable how much faster machines are even since 2011

Not everyone have fast or unlimited Internet. For example my 4G phone that im using for having internet is capped at 40mb/s and 200gib per month.

But 10km from the city center i barely got 2mb/s (megabits).

(ad)

It’s actually a really good one. I do not regret reading the entire thing.

Hickisch’s home country of Austria publishes a LIDAR scan of the whole country every year, including the height of every object on the ground, along with high-resolution aerial photos.

Smells like communism! How are large corporations supposed to keep the public in thrall if the plebs have easy access to public resources? Why is the government even spending money on doing things for the general use of their citizens?! Public data must be kept in private hands! Won't someone think of the potential future billionaires?

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