Hacker News: zylepe

New comment by zylepe in "Claude Fable 5"

zylepe — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:39:10 +0000

Vibes are all that matter. As soon as you start measuring it, that measurement becomes a target and vendors start optimizing for it at expense of the general usefulness of the model. We’ve seen plenty of models with great benchmark scores flop when people start using it.

New comment by zylepe in "Hardwood: A New Parser for Apache Parquet"

zylepe — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:30:56 +0000

Cool! I definitely felt the pain of current options when I added parquet support to Planetiler to process overture data. I ended up using parquet-floor to trim the dependencies but it’s a bit of a hacky approach. If there’s a way to use the lower level utilities from my own threads without hardwood spawning it’s own then I’ll have to give it a shot.

New comment by zylepe in "MapLibre Tile: a modern and efficient vector tile format"

zylepe — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:22:25 +0000

Planetiler currently supports generating MLT by adding —-tile-format=mlt cli argument. It’s only on latest main right now but I should be able to get a release out in the next few days. In my testing I’ve seen ~10% reduction in overall OpenMapTiles archive size with default settings but there are some more optimizations the team is working on that should bring it down even further.

New comment by zylepe in "Pole of Inaccessibility"

zylepe — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 01:13:16 +0000

Pole of Inaccessibility is also a useful technique for placing the label for a polygon at a visually pleasing location on a map. @mourner came up with a more efficient algorithm for computing the point https://blog.mapbox.com/a-new-algorithm-for-finding-a-visual... (https://github.com/mapbox/polylabel) which JTS's MaximumInscribedCircle utility is based on, which I use for "innermost point" label placement in planetiler.

New comment by zylepe in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

zylepe — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 20:35:32 +0000

I haven’t used markdown in javadoc yet but this seems like at least 3/10? I often want to put paragraphs or bulleted lists in javadoc and find myself wanting to use markdown syntax for readability in the code but need to switch to less readable html tags for tooling to render it properly.

New comment by zylepe in "Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized"

zylepe — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 01:16:42 +0000

A friend of mine is on a 25 year running every day streak. He flew to Australia and landed 2 days after taking off and said that day “never existed for him” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New comment by zylepe in "A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's"

zylepe — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:32:13 +0000

I’ve stopped at that Lee McDonald’s and remember thinking the price seemed kind of high. Little did I know it was the most expensive in the country. Even the eastbound one across I-90 is $1.40 cheaper!

New comment by zylepe in "FFM (Foreign Function and Memory API) Goes Final"

zylepe — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 22:29:00 +0000

I’m looking forward to be able to memory-map an entire large file without having to split it up into 2gb segments, and to be able to reliably unmap it when done. So many hacks to work around this lack of functionality today…

New comment by zylepe in "15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps"

zylepe — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 12:00:21 +0000

I came up with an approach for placing labels where each gets a min zoom to show up at such that there are no collisions and always appears beyond that. Personally I like the feel of it a lot better, but the downside is that at a given zoom labels are less dense than if they could show/hide to fill in empty spaces. Also, it makes it impossible to dynamically style the labels, or rotate/tilt.

Demo: https://msbarry.github.io/maplibre-minzoom-demo/world

New comment by zylepe in "Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world"

zylepe — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 22:00:27 +0000

The protomaps basemap is also built on planetiler: https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps - and Brandon is one of the main contributors a to planetiler!

Explorable Overture Map Tiles

zylepe — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 13:22:59 +0000

Article URL: https://msbarry.github.io/planetiler-overture-demo/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36985534

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by zylepe in "SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s"

zylepe — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 12:37:08 +0000

Exactly, this use case is write-once then read-only after that. Random updates to the sqlite file after that would need more “normal” settings, but they wouldn’t also need as much throughput.

New comment by zylepe in "SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s"

zylepe — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 11:37:55 +0000

I spent a while optimizing sqlite inserts for planetiler, this is what I came up with:

https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/blob/db0ab02263baaa...

It batches inserts into bulk statements and is able to do writes in the 500k+ per second range, and reads are 300-400k/s using those settings.

New comment by zylepe in "Self-hosted vector tiles"

zylepe — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 11:27:58 +0000

I built planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) for this purpose. The output up to z14 is ~80gb and depending on how big of a machine you have it takes from 30 minutes up to a few hours - no DB required, just java or docker. If you are only going to z11-12, it should be quite a bit faster/smaller.

Brandon from Protomaps is also helping add pmtiles output natively to planetiler, so you won't need a conversion step afterwards!

New comment by zylepe in "Maps.earth – free and open-source web maps"

zylepe — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 18:03:41 +0000

You may have chosen Valhalla for other reasons, but FWIW I’ve found Graphhopper can handle 1-2 orders of magnitude more qps than Valhalla on the same hardware.

New comment by zylepe in "Show HN: mbtiles-s3-server – serve vector map tiles directly from mbtiles on S3"

zylepe — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 15:15:36 +0000

We’ve been experimenting with R2 for serving tiles from an 80gb pmtiles archive, unfortunately the latency on up to 3 byte range requests from a worker is 5-10 seconds so it’s not practical for real usage yet. Can we expect that to improve as R2 gets closer to general availability?

New comment by zylepe in "Show HN: mbtiles-s3-server – serve vector map tiles directly from mbtiles on S3"

zylepe — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 15:09:36 +0000

You can track progress for planetiler producing pmtiles output here: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/98.

Another bonus of writing pmtiles directly is that it will cut the time to generate vector tiles for the planet from ~40 to ~30 minutes on a 64-core ec2 instance since pmtiles format is much simpler and more efficient to write than SQLite. It should also cut the output file size a bit from the 80gb that mbtiles uses.

New comment by zylepe in "Show HN: Self-Hosted Maps Stack"

zylepe — Sat, 28 May 2022 09:09:33 +0000

Another option if you want to offload the tiles from embedded in your docker image to static file hosting would be to convert the mbtiles output to pmtiles [1]. Then just upload the pmtiles file to s3 or similar and use the maplibre plug-in to read tiles directly from that large file using byte range requests without a tile server.

There’s a python utility to convert mbtiles to pmtiles, but I’m also planning to add native pmtiles output to planetiler soon [2].

[1] https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

[2] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/98

New comment by zylepe in "Show HN: Self-Hosted Maps Stack"

zylepe — Sat, 28 May 2022 02:02:38 +0000

Nice! I was going to point out the project I’ve been working on [1] to reduce the cost but I see you’ve already found it :-) Feel free to reach out it you run into any issues!

[1] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

New comment by zylepe in "JEP 419: Foreign Function and Memory API"

zylepe — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 12:34:21 +0000

I recently found this approach: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/blob/main/planetile... but I’m hoping this api will eventually let you do that without an external dependency or writing/compiling C connectors.