Top all-time · #2064
CARTO Blog
Company blog · carto.com/blogdataprogramming
CARTO Blog is the company blog at carto.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2016, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis – Carto Blog”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link CARTO's blog for mapping and spatial-data explainers, such as its vector vs. raster comparison, basemap style posts, and SQL/PostGIS techniques. Mostly cited as sources or product references.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
CARTO is the Agentic GIS Platform. Go beyond traditional GIS. Scalable spatial analysis for all teams with your spatial data never leaving your cloud ecosystem.
Most-linked posts?
- Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis – Carto Blog6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-08-13
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-25
- Introducing CARTO Builder: A new way to analyze and visualize location data2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-07-07
What Hacker News says?
For those interested, carto also has some lovely OSM tiles https://carto.com/blog/positron-dark-matter-new-look/
Comment linking /blog/positron-dark-matter-new-look/
on “Free OpenStreetMap tile library: watercolor, black and white, terrain”Submitted Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019) as a story · 184 points
HN discussionCARTO | NYC + Madrid + Seville | Customer Success, Backend, Project Manager and More | Full-time | ONSITE | https://www.carto.com CARTO (formerly CartoDB) is the world’s leading Location Intelligence platform, enabling organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, better behavioral marketing, strategic store placements, and much more. Data Scientists, Developers and Analysts use…
Comment linking /developers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2020)”Submitted Geospatial processing with Clickhouse as a story · 12 points
HN discussionCarto is using Mapbox technology in the background. This blog posts explains some differentiation on top https://carto.com/blog/partnering-with-mapbox/
Comment linking /blog/partnering-with-mapbox/
on “How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance”Submitted Introducing CARTO Builder: A new way to analyze and visualize location data as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIt's a good question, and unfortunately, the answer is that zipcode does not map well to other kinds of geographical regions, or to day-to-day-reality for that matter. To directly answer your question, it is not uncommon for zipcodes to span county boundaries. And there are even a handful that span more than one state: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/53918/determining-wh... To the broader question of why zip…
Comment linking /blog/zip-codes-spatial-analysis/
on “The New York Times Releases Its Dataset of U.S. Confirmed Coronavirus Cases”Submitted Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis – Carto Blog as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI don't think it's generally possible. The FIPS code just identifies the county (the first two digits are the state, e.g. 06 for California) and the final three identify a county in that state. So technically that column is redundant with the "county" and "state" columns; I suspect they've included it to make joining this dataset to other data that might use different name-formatting of counties/states easier. ZIP/p…
Comment linking /blog/zip-codes-spatial-analysis/
on “The New York Times Releases Its Dataset of U.S. Confirmed Coronavirus Cases”Submitted PostGIS 3.0 just released with major speed improvements as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Next up was the laborious process of determining which bus lines one could actually take to each tennis court. My approach was 100% analog, starting from the top of the alphabetical list of tennis courts (Alamo Square) and marching straight through to the end (Youngblood Coleman), noting all of the bus lines that had a stop within reasonable walking distance to a court. As a cartography nerd myself I was surprised…
Comment linking /academy/
on “A Cartography Nerd's Guide to Custom Map-Making”Submitted Carto Basemaps now requires API key as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'll add it. Carto just released a workflow editor for GIS data: https://carto.com/blog/introducing-carto-workflows/
Comment linking /blog/introducing-carto-workflows/
on “Awesome Node-Based UIs”Submitted Carto raises $61M to lead the way in cloud native spatial analytics as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey probably mean CARTO, formerly known as CartoDB. https://carto.com/
Comment linking /
on “Kepler.gl”Submitted Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionthe basemap is from Carto, which uses a range of sources including OpenStreetMap and is missing required attribution: https://carto.com/attribution/ https://carto.com/help/working-with-data/attribution/#basema...
Comment linking /help/working-with-data/attribution/
on “Show HN: Magic Mushroom Map”Submitted CARTO's Use of Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI definitely think they are used in production though I haven't tried it myself. But I can find ancedots of people using it production on the web[1]. 1: https://carto.com/blog/postgres-fdw/
Comment linking /blog/postgres-fdw/
on “Writing a Postgres Foreign Data Wrapper for Clickhouse in Go”Submitted Lessons Learned from Analyzing Over a Million Points of GPS Data as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhile everyone here is thinking Amtrak implemented the copy protection, this map was actually built using CartoDB. I honestly just think it's something it includes by default. https://carto.com/
Comment linking /
on “Live tracking of Amtrak trains”Submitted Getting Started with CartoCSS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInspecting it shows that D3[0] and CARTO(.js)[1] are being used. [0]: https://d3js.org/ [1]: https://carto.com/docs/carto-engine/carto-js/
Comment linking /docs/carto-engine/carto-js/
on “Pittsburgh Bus Bunching (2016)”Submitted CARTO tech blog: Mapnik vs. PostGIS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLooks like it's using leaflet + map tiles from https://carto.com/ I think Mapbox also provides a similar looking basemap style.
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Is Hormuz Open Yet?”Submitted Pokémon GO Is All About Location Intelligence as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI just keep getting faster at SQL. It's fun. I used CROSS LATERAL JOIN last night to find the nearest regions to points. Super fast and easy: https://carto.com/blog/lateral-joins/ . Right on the data. SQL does change over time, as Postgres adds features, but especially when you use MADlib, Postgis, and other extensions. I mean ... https://postgis.net/docs/reference.html . And everything I learned when I started is s…
Comment linking /blog/lateral-joins/
on “Why you should learn SQL”Submitted Introducing CARTO Builder (fka cartodb.com) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReal life implementations: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/query/over... https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/learn/ex... https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.soql_sosl.... https://carto.com/developers/sql-api/ From an end user standpoint, I preferred working with such API than with the ones creating nested json filters structures to model the filtering logic. It also pr…
Comment linking /developers/sql-api/
on “SQL as API”Submitted Deck.gl v9: WebGPU ready and with TypeScript support as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
