Top all-time · #13463
Kyle Barron
Personal blog · kylebarron.dev/blog · on HN as kylebarrondataprogramming
Kyle Barron's personal blog at kylebarron.dev covers data and programming. Since 2020, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kyle Barron's posts on geospatial data: a tiled visualization of 40M cell towers, GeoTIFF internals, and cloud-optimized GeoTIFF (COG) mosaics using HTTP range requests.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Kyle Barron's blog
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/cog-mosaic/overview2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-05
What Hacker News says?
This is an incredible visualization! Thanks for detailing how you tiled their huge dataset too. Packing the data into RGB channels as you did is really powerful - I've only seen this done for elevation tiles. Do you have a code link to how you're performing the cursor-brush aggregations? This seems like it could be an awesome application of an cloud-optimized geotiff (COGs) for serverless tiling. I'm curious if you…
Comment linking /deck.gl-raster/overview/
on “Visualization of 40M Cell Towers”Submitted Show HN: Serverless USGS historical topographic map tiles as a story · 134 points
HN discussionI personally really love looking at old maps of cities like LA [0] to see to what extent the urban structure has changed in the last ~100 years. [0]: https://kylebarron.dev/usgs-topo-mosaic/#13.02/34.03937/-118...
Comment linking /usgs-topo-mosaic/
on “Show HN: Serverless USGS historical topographic map tiles”Submitted Making performant Python bindings to compiled code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHi all, I was invited to repost this (originally posted last year) to be included in the second chance pool! The USGS created topographic maps by hand from 1884 to 2006 (when they started making their topographic map series digitally). I stumbled upon the fact that all 183,000 of their hand-drawn maps were digitized and uploaded to a public S3 bucket [0] in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF format [1]. Because they're in this…
Comment linking /blog/cog-mosaic/overview
on “Show HN: Serverless USGS historical topographic map tiles”Submitted Show HN: Serverless USGS Historical Topographic map tiles as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSad to say it but these days loading a few MB to a client is par for the course. I don't think it's a reason not to try and get this working - the range header trick does sound particularly relevant to this format. UPDATE: Just read https://kylebarron.dev/blog/cog-mosaic/overview which is excellent and clearly you're already very on top of the range request mechanism!
Comment linking /blog/cog-mosaic/overview
on “Learning About the GeoTIFF File Format with a Hex Editor (2018)”Submitted Literate Flatbush: Understanding a fast, elegant RTree implementation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe posts on this topic on your site are really fascinating! https://kylebarron.dev/blog/cog-mosaic/overview https://kylebarron.dev/blog/cog-mosaic/naip
Comment linking /blog/cog-mosaic/naip
on “Learning About the GeoTIFF File Format with a Hex Editor (2018)”Submitted USGS Historical Topographic Maps as a story · 1 points
HN discussion