Top all-time · #2797
Christian S. Perone
Personal blog · blog.christianperone.comaiprogrammingmath
Christian S. Perone writes Terra Incognita, a personal blog at blog.christianperone.com about ai, programming and math. Since 2015, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 76 times, most often “Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-07-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog for its posts on Google's S2 geometry library, which maps the Earth's surface to a 1D Hilbert-curve index. It also has a word2vec analysis of the Voynich manuscript.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
by Christian S. Perone
Most-linked posts?
- Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve (2015)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-12-17
- Voynich Manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-16
- Large language model data pipelines and Common Crawl3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-06-03
- Tutorial on using LLVM to JIT PyTorch graphs to native code (x86/arm/RISC-V)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-09-01
- PyTorch 1.0 Tracing JIT and LibTorch C++ API to Integrate PyTorch into Node.js2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-03
- Using an Arduino MK1310 with the Helium Network (plus cryptochip usage)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-13
- Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-28
- /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/?a=22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-13
- Diffusion Elites: surprisingly good, simple and embarrassingly parallel2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-09
- Convolutional neural networks and feature extraction with Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-14
What Hacker News says?
>You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean. 89c25855b9b That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY. Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and everything can be s…
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “Why Bother with What Three Words?”Submitted PyTorch – Internal Architecture Tour as a story · 193 points
HN discussion- nl · 2016-02-18
TensorFlow: https://www.tensorflow.org/ TensorFlow Serving: https://github.com/tensorflow/serving ReCeption (actually they call in Inception v3. Not sure where I got the ReCeption name - though I'm sure I read it somewhere?): https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.7/tutorials/image_rec... Using a SVN on neural network extracted features: http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/convolutional-neural... If you want a q…
Comment linking /2015/08/convolutional-neural-networks-and-feature-extraction-with-python/
on “Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta” Submitted A sane introduction to maximum likelihood estimation and maximum a posteriori as a story · 174 points
HN discussionInfact someone has run word2vec on the Voynich manuscript: http://blog.christianperone.com/2016/01/voynich-manuscript-w... (web archive while it's down: http://web.archive.org/web/20160205003817/http://blog.christ... ) Such methods could someday completely decode the thing, but for now they just show the relationships between words and different clusters of words, not their meaning. Of course we have no idea how the…
Comment linking /2016/01/voynich-manuscript-word-vectors-and-t-sne-visualization-of-some-patterns/
on “AI’s Language Problem”Submitted Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve as a story · 166 points
HN discussionS2 has a good amount of documentation about it. https://s2geometry.io/ https://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry...
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/?a=2
on “Most books don't sell only a dozen copies”Submitted Systems that no one will test as a story · 155 points
HN discussionI was playing around with s2 a year or two ago, and it was surprisingly difficult to find information on it, so FWIW here are some links I was able to find at the time if you're looking for some historical reading on s2: Google Presentation on S2: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Hl4KapfAENAOf4gv-pSn... Christian Perone's blog post on it: http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-... Google…
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/?a=2
on “S2 Geometry”Submitted Large language model data pipelines and Common Crawl as a story · 139 points
HN discussionI wrote about it in the past if someone is interested in a tutorial: http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “S2 Geometry”Submitted Voynich Manuscript: word vectors and t-SNE visualization of some patterns as a story · 131 points
HN discussionI wrote an article about it and S2 some time ago as well for those interested: https://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry...
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “Space-filling curves, constructively”Submitted Real-time Drone object tracking using Python and OpenCV as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThanks for the info. I'm looking at this from the perspective of designing a backend datastore and query engine for a knowledge system. The idea is to encode a spatial data structure (similar to Google's S2 Geometry Library [0]) that enables content-based addressing of non-spatial data types for data fusion. One idea is to make a lattice of unicode characters that builds up to combination of words a la Formal Concep…
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data”Submitted JIT native code generation for TensorFlow graphs using Python and LLVM as a story · 95 points
HN discussionHere is a writeup on Google's S2 library for considering addressing the surface of the Earth as 1D, using Hilbert Curves. http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-... And 2015 HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066616
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/?a=2
on “Z-order curve usage to decrease dimensionality to 1”Submitted Riemann Zeta function visualizations with Python as a story · 91 points
HN discussionLibrary also available in Java[0] and to an extent in Golang[1], though the latter is incomplete. S2 is fantastic for geofencing. Arbitrary regions can be covered by a set of S2 cells of varying level. A point (lat/lon) can be converted to a S2 cell of the smallest level (around a cm^2 of area on the sphere). Checking to see if one S2 cell is contained in another amounts to searching an integer range, since all chil…
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “How We Built Uber Engineering’s Highest Query per Second Service (2016)”Submitted Convolutional neural networks and feature extraction with Python as a story · 82 points
HN discussionI'm surprised there's no mention of a rather successful and efficient way of doing this in the real world: Google's S2 geometry library [1]. Basically the earth can be covered in almost aquare tiles down to about 1cm^2 with 64 bit integers. [1] http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “Wraparound tile maps with sphere topology”Submitted Privacy-preserving sentence semantic similarity as a story · 68 points
HN discussionI trained a word2vec model in the past using the EVA transcription if someone is interested: http://blog.christianperone.com/2016/01/voynich-manuscript-w...
Comment linking /2016/01/voynich-manuscript-word-vectors-and-t-sne-visualization-of-some-patterns/
on “Computer scientist uncovers clue to deciphering the Voynich manuscript”Submitted The geometry of data: the missing metric tensor and the Stein score [Part II] as a story · 64 points
HN discussionAre you familiar with the S2 library for mapping lat/lon into a 1d space? ( http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-... ) any idea what the tradeoffs would be between this and S2?
Comment linking /2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/
on “Show HN: ProximityHash – Geohashes in Proximity”Submitted PyTorch 1.0 JIT and LibTorch C++ API to Integrate PyTorch into Node.js as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI wrote an article about recent data pipelines as well if anyone is interested: https://blog.christianperone.com/2023/06/appreciating-llms-d...
Comment linking /2023/06/appreciating-llms-data-pipelines/
on “The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling”Submitted Diffusion Elites: surprisingly good, simple and embarrassingly parallel as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted A sane introduction to maximum likelihood estimation and MAP as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
