<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: dfworks</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dfworks</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:06:39 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=dfworks" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We were actually considering doing some object detection in a next run.<p>It feels like there could potentially be some town planning applications like finding the distribution of rubbish bins vs litter on the floor</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:58:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013539</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013539</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46013539</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are around 50 results for Crystal Palace, Ill have a look through the logs to see what might have gone wrong<p>Sadly no R Soles though (A shoe shop formerly in Chelsea but now online) - however, just searching for profanities does bring back some graffiti</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:05:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003731</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi Author here,<p>This doesnt really answer your question but hopefully gives some insight into our process.<p>The main bottlenecks were breaking the fisheye-style panoramas into different perspectives (so text was more readable), passing it to OCR and acquiring the panoramas as there isn't an official API.<p>Because of the above, we constrained ourselves from the outset. For example, the spacings between panoramas was 50m, we didnt traverse residential roads that were less likely to have signage, we only used the most recent panorama for a location etc<p>If I interpret global as without those constraints (5m spacings, every road, all historic panoramas) then I think the first problem you'll run into is being rate limited by Google. Compute may be able to solve the other problems but it would be very expensive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 07:39:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002123</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002123</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002123</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Inspired by All Text in NYC (<a href="https://alltext.nyc" rel="nofollow">https://alltext.nyc</a>) by Yufeng Zhang I thought I would replicate something similar for London.<p>A searchable tool that lets you explore text captured across Google Street View imagery in London; shop signs, posters, graffiti, van numbers etc</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995913">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995913</a></p>
<p>Points: 39</p>
<p># Comments: 14</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:27:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://london.publicinsights.uk</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995913</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995913</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s perhaps a bit better now, but back when trip-sharing features were first added to third-party mapping and delivery platforms, there was a real tendency to overshare. Many early implementations generated public URLs with sequential or low-entropy IDs that could be guessed or brute-forced. Anyone who knew the pattern could enumerate live or historical “shared trips,” exposing routes, addresses, and other metadata that were never meant to be public.<p>I documented a few examples of this a while ago, which demonstrate how easily these systems could leak journey data.<p><a href="https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/" rel="nofollow">https://dfworks.xyz/blog/online_stalking_citymapper/</a>
<a href="https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/" rel="nofollow">https://dfworks.xyz/blog/pizza_order/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:10:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492898</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492898</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492898</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Search all text in New York City"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I made this - https://london publicinsights.uk as well as operate a public records aggregator that has indexed, amongst other things, planning applications. I wonder if it could be of use?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:42:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887261</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887261</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887261</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Search all text in New York City"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a London one also if anyone is interested!<p><a href="https://london.publicinsights.uk" rel="nofollow">https://london.publicinsights.uk</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:37:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887209</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887209</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887209</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Winning Elections with MAID Data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>After recently reading several concerning articles about MAID data, I decided to simulate some device activity (because buying it is too expensive!).<p>I then modelled how these fictional devices might vote to demonstrate how harmful/useful aggregated and analysed MAID data can be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2025 07:53:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192254</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192254</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192254</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Winning Elections with MAID Data]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://dfworks.xyz/blog/win_election_with_maid_data/">https://dfworks.xyz/blog/win_election_with_maid_data/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192253">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192253</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2025 07:53:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://dfworks.xyz/blog/win_election_with_maid_data/</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Calibrating a 3D Printed Delta Arm for Screen Interaction]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://dfworks.xyz/blog/delta_arm/">https://dfworks.xyz/blog/delta_arm/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939089">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939089</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Oct 2024 19:53:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://dfworks.xyz/blog/delta_arm/</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939089</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939089</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If anybody found this interesting and would like some further reading, the paper below employed a similar strategy to analyse inauthentic content/disinformation on Twitter.<p><a href="https://files.casmconsulting.co.uk/message-based-community-detection-on-twitter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://files.casmconsulting.co.uk/message-based-community-d...</a><p>If you would like to read about my largely unsuccessful recreation of the paper, you can do so here - <a href="https://dfworks.xyz/blog/partygate/" rel="nofollow">https://dfworks.xyz/blog/partygate/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 17:08:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310345</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There was a very recent "bug" in Search where the site: operator stopped working for a little bit and everybody in the OSINT community had a bit of a meltdown - <a href="https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/search-alert-google-filetype-search" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/search-alert-google-filetyp...</a><p>The date operators from: to: I think have been unsupported for a while and replaced with a dropdown in the UI<p>filetype: is a fave and has been working for as long as I can remember<p>AROUND(number) is pretty useful too although I find that might be a bit buggy sometimes<p>There is a good list here <a href="https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database" rel="nofollow">https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database</a> showing how dorks can be used for pentesting and/or generally finding insecure stuff</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 08:35:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776067</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776067</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776067</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yep, British for my sins, as a US soldier once described to me, we are your least worst enemy</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 08:19:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775965</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775965</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Every day is a learning day!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 08:14:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775934</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39775934</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Flightradar24's new GPS jamming map"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If anyone found the above interesting, I wrote a short article mapping plane activity on FlightRadar's 'blocked' list (i.e FlightRadar had agreed to remove the ADBS data from their dataset following probable legal pressure).<p><a href="https://dfworks.xyz/blog/hnwi-osint-private-jet/" rel="nofollow">https://dfworks.xyz/blog/hnwi-osint-private-jet/</a><p>Slightly tangential so feel free to remove if irrelevant</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:45:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39769839</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39769839</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39769839</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Ask HN: Where to find open-source house plans?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Planning applications in the UK are publicly available and many have architectural drawings/site plans attached with varying degrees of detail.<p>There are millions of applications and each local authority has a different database so it may take a bit of digging to find what you are searching for.<p>Application example - <a href="https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=summary&keyVal=L8QSEJQDD2000" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/a...</a><p>Drawings example - <a href="https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/files/3AD8D46CE508BF6795FF656D2D2C905B/pdf/10_00986_CAC-SITE_PLAN___EXISTING_PLAN___ELEVATIONS___A1-251478.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/f...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Aug 2023 12:00:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37234569</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37234569</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37234569</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://blog.reversepp.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.reversepp.com/</a> for an incredibly niche blog about UK planning application data</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Jul 2023 16:20:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588765</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588765</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588765</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://dfworks.xyz/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dfworks.xyz/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Jul 2023 16:16:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588678</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: ReversePP lets you search UK Planning Application Data nationally]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ReversePP is a tool I developed to help with OSINT investigations in the UK by indexing planning application/permission data from local authorities nationally.<p>The link is to the search tool but you can learn more about the project at <a href="https://blog.reversepp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.reversepp.com/</a><p>The bit that is the most fun and perhaps of most interest here is that if you flick the "General Search Toggle" you can search applications by key word. A general search for "nuclear shelter" will take you to a planning application submitted to Bexley council in 1933 which apparently just confused them for 47 years.<p>Have fun and let me know what you think!</p>
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<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35817132">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35817132</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 May 2023 15:38:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://search.reversepp.com</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35817132</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35817132</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dfworks in "West London faces new home ban as electric grid at capacity due to data centres"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As I understand Slough and West London more broadly are a sweet spot for both connectivity to international fibre cables as they come out of the ground and available electricity at a reasonable rate (although they might have saturated that particular aspect if the article is true). Slough trading estate has a dedicated Biomass Power Station.<p>With less confidence, I vaguely remember a discussion with a datacentre technician at one of these sites who said something about the curvature of the cabling which can impact latency/speed for high frequency trading outfits located in the datacentres. I'm not sure in which direction this would worsen but perhaps another factor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Jul 2022 09:20:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262106</link><dc:creator>dfworks</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262106</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262106</guid></item></channel></rss>