Hacker News Reader

Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

It stacks what I assume to be all unresolved Russian locations to a column the size of Saint Petersburg in the middle of Siberia.

Same thing with China with a large spike in the middle of Gobi desert.

Same with Canada - apparently some lumberjacks code when it snows too hard and they can't get out!

I wonder if there is a similar column in the USA and where is it located.

India is surprisingly bare. Come on, you can do better than that.

P. S. Went to update my Location: in github.

View on HN

Author here, sorry about the spikes where people do not actually live. A lot of users put only their country and not city, and I didn't want to throw that data away.

I probably should've checked the specificity of the location and only thrown out the data for large countries like Russia and China, or distributed it across all other data points in the country.

Interesting project if you want to fork it!

Distributing it across should work well. Throwing out not so much because you're losing a varying big chunk of data.

It would be nice if there were an easy way to hit the population center instead of geographic center of a nation in webgl-globe, at least. That big spike in the middle of Siberia puzzled me at first.

This is the same spot in Google maps (pins), for example if you just type "Quebec" it's hits the same area hundreds of miles from the nearest town.

Take all the unknowns and spread them evenly among all the known cities.

This would falsely flatten the results.

Ah, I was wondering why there was a large column in the middle of Australia. It actually lines up reasonably well with the only real population center there (Alice Springs), but at ~25k people, it seemed unlikely.

I was more surprised by the smaller spike in the middle of Western Australia.

The "unresolved" column for USA appears to be in Wichita Kansas, or around that area.

Is there a big AT&T datacenter there or something? I've shown up as coming out of there on so many Geo-IP sites over the years, DSL, cellular, T1's...

I'd wager it's just the geographical center of the US.

Ah! This makes sense. My first thought was "wow, impressive showing in St. Louis..."

With the state boarders.... Seems pretty close:

http://i.imgur.com/cGuetKg.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_center_of_the_contig...

How'd you get the state borders? That's exactly what I need.

Probably an easier solution, but I edited globe.js in the JS Console to use one with the state borders[1] that I found found used on another globe

[1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/SocialHarvest/world.jpg

submit a PR?

I demand Kenya province borders too, then.

http://www.gadm.org/

That has the administrative boundaries for every country.

The relevant project from the US government itself is here: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html

You might want to run a simplifying algorithm on the shapes first though, they're the official boundary coordinates so there's an absurd number of points on coastlines and the like, making point-in-polygon lookups very slow.

It has the stuff for doing your own geocoding as well. You can install it as a postgis extension and run geocoding SQL queries in postgres. It's an absolute joy.

This also prompted me to add my location in github.

It would be interesting to see if there's a non-negligible difference to run this again in a few days, after everyone who gets word of it also adds in their location.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com