Hacker News: carstonh

New comment by carstonh in "Hacking OpenAI"

carstonh — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:26:30 +0000

agreed… why can an ID token for a separate client application be used to read and write to GitHub? that’s the story here.

Show HN: Animated map of US railroad and population growth

carstonh — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:47:33 +0000

This map shows population of each US county over time, from the US census. It also shows the US rail network over time, with data from Jeremy Atack at Vanderbilt. I think it's interesting to see the interdependence between them. And the fact that the US rail network was substantially complete by 1900.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939356

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Bay Area Fog Tracker

carstonh — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 01:31:47 +0000

I recently moved to San Francisco & am fascinated by the microclimates. This tool takes raw data from the GOES satellite, detects areas matching fog, then intersects this with different Bay Area neighborhoods & cities. Delivered via a basic web app, optimized for mobile. Data updates every 5m.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907682

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by carstonh in "Is GitHub Down?"

carstonh — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:47:14 +0000

Seeing the same. Tried to log a support ticket at https://support.github.com/, but that's down too :)

GitHub API Is Down

carstonh — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:45:01 +0000

Started seeing issues when trying to update issues through the GitHub web interface. It appears that the service behind their graphQL endpoint (https://github.com/_graphql) is broken. In addition, their support ticket interface at https://support.github.com/ is not working, returning various 500 status codes.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44303087

Points: 18

# Comments: 5

Show HN: I made a free shapefile to CSV converter that runs in the browser

carstonh — Wed, 07 May 2025 10:19:30 +0000

There are many times I find some government data in shapefile (.shp) format but want to use the attributes inside for analysis in tabular format. It's always a pain to open this in QGIS, convert the CRS correctly, then save as CSV. So I built a tool that will handle this for you, all running within the browser so data doesn't need to be sent anywhere. Under the hood it's using DuckDB built for Wasm + the spatial extension (which links GEOS). And full disclaimer, I'm using this as lead generation for my Honeycomb Maps product, but if you'd prefer not to give your email that's completely fine, just put from@hn.com or something similar :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43913992

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by carstonh in "DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade"

carstonh — Sun, 04 May 2025 14:15:53 +0000

Based on my reading of the GeoParquet spec, the main difference is that geometries are stored as WKB using Parquet's byte array type. Byte arrays can be delta-encoded. There is also some additional metadata stored like CRS and a bounding box.

When using EPSG:4326 lat/lons, I don't think GeoParquet would give you any benefits over just having separate columns (this is what I typically do, and it's plenty fast).

If you are using range requests to fetch only parts of parquet files at a time, you could potentially sort your data using a hilbert curve, which could limit the number of row groups that need to be fetched to execute a query.

New comment by carstonh in "DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade"

carstonh — Sun, 04 May 2025 13:59:58 +0000

Here's an example building on @maxxen's work - because DuckDB (+spatial extension) can compile to Wasm, I built an in-browser Shapefile to CSV converter tool: https://www.honeycombmaps.com/tools/shapefile-to-csv-convert...

Show HN: Honeycomb – Geospatial analysis in the browser with WASM DuckDB

carstonh — Mon, 08 May 2023 15:30:55 +0000

The big idea is to use Uber's H3 spatial index to harmonize spatial data from different sources, then display it on a map and allow for interactive aggregation. Everything is done in the browser on-the-fly. Behind the scenes is DuckDB, Turf.js, and Deck.gl. Very impressed with the DuckDB performance.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35862707

Points: 1

# Comments: 0