Hacker News Reader

jakecoppon How many QMS advertising panels in Sydney are near a Telstra public telephone?

This is an example of why I love OpenStreetMap so much - you never know what amazing things people will use the data for once you’ve mapped it!

jakecoppon Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”

> there are probably enough to build a pedestrian layer _above_ the car layer entirely. Isolating large vehicles from fragile human beings is the best engineering

As far as I can tell, the general consensus among urban planners is that building pedestrian overpasses/Skyways/skywalks is a _really bad idea_.

They suck pedestrian life away from the ground plane and surrender it to cars, which has all sorts of second order effects.

The ground level becomes darker, and more dangerous with less "eyes on the street". Car focused transport planners are more bold to increase traffic volume (with increases in pollution/crashes/noise). Businesses on the street struggle.

> Isolating large vehicles from fragile human beings is the best engineering solution.

It may be the best _engineering_ solution (don't get me wrong, I love some Brutalism and textured concrete), but it's usually a horrible outcome for street life. The best solution for a healthy, livable street is to build large spaces for pedestrians and cyclists, reduce car speeds to 30kph/20mph, or remove cars altogether.

jakecoppon Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”

One of the side effect issues of scrambles is to obtain the same throughput of cars you have to may have to increase the delay in between pedestrian cycles. When only allowing pedestrians on some axis you can allow cars to run in parallel.

One argument I saw somewhere (I can't remember where) is that if there are enough people to make a scramble worthwhile (and you don't care about car throughput) - you probably shouldn't have any cars there at all!

This comment covers some of the downsides: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/27/a-pedestrian-...

jakecoppon Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”

Cheers, this was a typo - just updated.

jakecoppon Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”

I wrote a blog post about Transport for NSW removing full automatic operation of the pedestrian buttons (aka "beg buttons") in the Sydney CBD, evaluating each of their stated reasons why.

You may recognise Australia's parking button sound from a sample in Billie Eilish's hit Bad Guy, I've linked a video at the end of the blog post!

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

You mean using something like this technique?

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/getting-started-with-nvidi...

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

I added a section on taking measurements (under heading "Output accuracy: taking measurements"), it's pretty damn accurate!

Large path:

- OpenDroneMap: 4.54 metres

- Tape measure: 4.56 metres

Small path:

- OpenDroneMap: 1.89 metres (though this varies slightly due to distortions)

- Tape measure: 1.89 metres

> I was just wondering if it’s possible to get the +/- 10cm accuracy

I'm quite confident this is possible - maybe do a few sanity checks though!

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

Yep I've contributed a fair few Mapillary images! I like that OpenStreetMap integrates with it well; I don't like that it no longer shows _who_ contributed an image (whether in the OSM viewer or the Mapillary viewer).

I believe OpenDroneMap uses OpenSfM which Mapillary open sourced:

https://blog.mapillary.com/update/2016/10/31/denser-3d-point...

> OpenSfM is also used internally by the OpenDroneMap project. OpenDroneMap creates 3D models and orthophotos from drone imagery. It includes all the steps of the pipeline so one can go from images to 3D models in one command. It uses OpenSfM to get the camera positions, and can now use it to compute the dense point clouds as well.

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

> any idea what sort of accuracy you’re getting at the end of the process with respect to things like carriageway widths?

Good question! I'll go out there later today and get an on the ground measurement and get back to you on this thread (and upload the blog post).

> great tool for advocacy groups to identify where a road is wide enough to accommodate cycle lanes

Agreed :D

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

Thanks! OpenDroneMap is an awful lot of fun to use, I got into it when making models with a DJI Mini Pro 3.

Wow that is some awesome software! I know OpenDroneMap does have a library of lenses but it doesn't seem to be able to detect the GoPro Fusion. I can't find the code with the presets right now, but https://docs.opendronemap.org/arguments/camera-lens/ is the documentation for selecting the lens type.

My understanding is that if it can't find a lens preset it's not an issue; it will instead figure out the lens geometry which it also can output. I haven't tinkered with the code though and I'm still getting to know the software!

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

> But moving in a line, no matter how much overlap of the features you get, just doesn't work that well, and I do not understand why.

How far apart were the photos taken? I think OpenDroneMap needs lots of overlap with drone photos, and even more with spherical photos to extract features well.

I haven't experimented with a non-360 degree camera - the benefit of a 360 degree camera is you effectively double the photos you get (front/back). Cycling or walking also ensures huge overlap.

jakecoppon Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap

I wrote this guide on generating 3D models and orthorectified imagery from 360 degree cameras. Usually this sort of thing is a lot easier with drones, but there are a lot of places you can't fly drones!

I'm hoping this makes mapping curb/street/parking data more accessible.

For example, OpenStreetMap has a new street parking spec which could make use of lots of street imagery! https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Street_parking

jakecoppon PFC bans are going to change waterproof garments

> Depending on who you ask, it may also be a product that marks the end of an era and a standard we never reach again in the outdoor industry.

Sounds reminiscent of asbestos.

jakecoppon Show HN: Visualising real-time Sydney bus congestion with Marey charts

Is that true or according to sydneytransitgraph.com?

Might be a bug if the latter!

jakecoppon Show HN: Visualising real-time Sydney bus congestion with Marey charts

No worries!

> have you considered graphing trains too?

I'm very keen to! It's actually an identical data format, I just need to change the endpoint from /buses to /trains essentially. Though I would also need to store 2 times the number of protocol buffers (which come in every 7 seconds) and do some UI work.

So many things to do, so little time :D

jakecoppon Show HN: Visualising real-time Sydney bus congestion with Marey charts

Thanks!

> However, I suspect there are some bugs:

Yep I wouldn't be surprised! The routes are statically generated so if there are updates (I'm not sure how often that happens) the progress lines won't be correct.

Thanks for the report though, I'll try looking into it when I have time.

jakecoppon Show HN: Visualising real-time Sydney bus congestion with Marey charts

Yep definitely better! The 370 isn't anywhere as bad as it was for example. I don't think you'll wait for more than 30 mins unless you're deep in suburbia.

> The buses were constantly late

Yep still happens, though the frequency is quite high so it's not too frustrating

> Unbelievable noisy. Walking through the CBD on a workday morning was deafening.

Yep still very loud on the hills, though electric buses are being rolled out. George St is now pedestrianised with the tram so it's less noisy.

> Gave up trying to ride a bike. Just too dangerous and aggressive bus and car drivers :(

Cycling infrastructure is getting a lot better! BikeEast (https://www.bikeast.org.au/) do a lot of advocacy in the eastern suburbs. Clover Moore has done amazing things for the CBD.

jakecoppon Show HN: Visualising real-time Sydney bus congestion with Marey charts

I built this side project to graph bus congestion in Sydney. Each line on the graph (a Marey chart) represents a bus completing its route (percentage) over time.

jakecoppon Tell HN: Facebook Messenger is testing in-call video ads

If they did, you wouldn't be able to use a fork or another client because it isn't federated unfortunately.

jakecoppon Ask HN: What are your favorite sub stacks?

I would pay for Substack feeds if I was able to read the paid feed via RSS - unfortunately it doesn't support this feature.

jakecoppon Signal Introduces Stories

Well, I suppose the ecosystem is moving [1], and now the ecosystem has moved to stories.

If you had asked your friends to get a Matrix client instead (eg. Element), at least you'd be able to move to a new client [2] if you didn't like the direction it moved in - and you'd still have your group chats and keep your contacts because it's federated.

Unfortunately you're now stuck with stories (or maybe crypto payments one day [3]) because Signal doesn't federate, and likely never will, and the amount of effort to ask your friends to move _again_ is just too big.

This is _exactly_ the argument I make when friends ask why Matrix over Signal. I'm exhausted of picking up and moving again.

[1]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [2]: https://matrix.org/clients/ [3]: https://www.xda-developers.com/signal-crypto-payments-featur...

jakecoppon Signal Introduces Stories

> Just such a shame that after years of trying to convince friends and family to use signal, I now have to convince them to use something else.

This is the beauty of Matrix - you can change your client, or even your server and keep all your contacts!

jakecoppon TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

What is the involvement of OpenStreetMap in this ecosystem?

From the FAQs at https://www.tomtom.com/tomtom-maps-platform/:

> I don’t want to use the new maps with OSM, will my application continue to work if I use an older library version?

> Yes. Although we encourage you to switch to the new enhanced map to take full advantage of the new map features integrated by the OSM community.

This update is light on details around licensing of the new map.

jakecoppon Mapping every QMS ad billboard in Sydney with OpenStreetMap

This is a side project I've worked on the last few months - surveying and taking photos of advertising panels popping up in the Sydney CBD. I've surveyed them on OpenStreetMap and linked Mapillary imagery.

The map is open source on Github: https://github.com/jakecoppinger/sydney-advertising-map

There's a fair bit of backlash in the community, here's some reporting by the Sydney Morning Herald: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/balance-isn-t-right-clov...

jakecoppon Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

Yep, it's definitely been frustrating in the past. The number of iOS Element bugs was overwhelming at times too. It's a lot more stable now, but the bubble layout still isn't the default - I think that's what most people expect from a personal messenger. I'm looking forward to seeing what the Rust rewrite [1] brings for performance/stability.

FluffyChat also has quite nice UX and a bubble layout by default, but threads are still a while off [2]. On iOS it worked flawlessly through the iOS 16 betas while Element had some show stopping bugs, a couple of my friends moved over if they were on the beta.

I haven't had any friends ask me about the verify session buttons. I don't see any prompts on latest iOS Element but it's still too prominent on Element desktop for my liking.

SchildiChat [3] is my daily driver and feels more friendly than Element on desktop (unified DMs & group chats, no verify UX, chat bubbles), but it doesn't have any update mechanism built in, so I'm wary to recommend it to non-technical friends. It was also my goto recommendation on Android before the Element redesign.

I'm confident the ecosystem is moving in the right direction though, and so thankful for the amount of choice.

[1]: https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-ios [2]: https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat/-/issues/881 [3]: https://schildi.chat/

jakecoppon Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

It's easy to use the free server at matrix.org. For $5/month you can get a hosted server from EMS with optional bridges to Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp.

Or another paid provider: https://matrix.org/hosting/

jakecoppon Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

> The solutions for the most of the issues you are describing comes with great usability costs.

What costs? Element (a popular Matrix client) has recently improved their onboarding greatly!

https://element.io/blog/all-aboard-better-ftue-for-less-wtf/

It really is just as easy to onboard to Element as Signal these days, the UX has come a long way. And you'll never have the move them again, because you can choose any client you like.

jakecoppon Jack Dorsey Unveils Bluesky Social

https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#matrix-...

> our friends at Bluesky announced their application protocol for building decentralised social media called AT. While not based on Matrix, there are some parallels, and some stuff we may be able to get inspiration from around portable identity :) https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol

Sounds like some there are some parallels, and the protocol might inspire portable account identities in Matrix!

The only account migration tool I know of at the moment is proprietary [1], I'd love to see portable identity in Matrix come to life.

[1]: https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration

jakecoppon My next Mac might be the last

You can drag the folder into the Terminal!

jakecoppon Show HN: Linen – Open-source Slack for communities

> Mattermost and most open source chat tools not Google searchable.

This seems like a good idea for a bot built with https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk (which is very easy, I've used it for a few small projects).

The SDK has a callback for each new message - you could just put it into a DB and then render to static text.