Alternatives
Products that do what A map of cafes that are in the sun does
I wanted to sit outside for coffee but there was no way to see which cafes are in the sun right now. So I built a map that shows which cafes, benches, and outdoor seats are in the sun vs. shade at any time of day. It ray-marches building shadows live in a WebGL shader over a MapLibre map. I also pre-index all places from OpenStreetMap into H3 hex cells and serve them as static JSON on Cloudflare R2, so the client just fetches the cells in view and no backend is needed. Feedback welcome, especially on shadow accuracy in your city. Currently only buildings and trees are taken into account when…
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I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer…
2024 · shademap.app
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For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions: - Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about? - Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about? Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places. I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a…
2025 · theretowhere.com
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Sup HN, So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker. I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance. Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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I am slowly adding more locations now. This is intended to be a crowdsourced map. Everyone is welcome to add more locations and provide comments/votes here. Free people from going to a cafe for work only to leave because there's no wifi, restroom, or outlet!! Demo: https://x.com/KSeisai/status/1708273554041504028?s=20
2023 · octobrain.one
- 8TCtextshader.com▲260
TLDR: Click the link to see some cool visualizations, refresh a few times for random examples, and try editing some of the code yourself. This is a small weekend project of mine inspired by shadertoy.com It's a static single-page site hosted on GitHub pages so the website design is pretty barebones. I'm not a web developer so I mainly wanted to create a Cool Thing with my free time and not have to learn tons of front-end to do it. I'd love to hear what people think about it and please post or send me any shaders you make! You can use the link button in the bottom right to share. I hope that…
2022 · textshader.com
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This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.
2023 · github.com
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Last year, I went to a game at a stadium I had never visited (Arrowhead). Ended up baking in the sun for the entire second half. Afterwards, was surprised I couldn't find a tool that told me where the sun would actually be during games. So for WC2026 I built SeatSun: a free tool (no sign up needed) that calculates sun/shade exposure for every section at the World Cup 2026 stadiums depending on date and match time. The technical core: solar azimuth and altitude calculations (based on Meeus astronomical algorithms, ~0.3 degree accuracy) tied to each stadium's orientation and GPS…
Mar 2026 · seatsun.com
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2019 · sunlight.live
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Hi HN, I made a web game to practice country locations a while ago and HN liked it, so I thought I'd post my updated version as well. As for how the game works and feels, I'd really recommend you checking it out for yourself, it's free, no signup, no ads. The tech stack is Vue + ts + Tailwind/Daisy for the looks. The learning algorithm is a slight modification of the ts version of FSRS. If you have anything to add, it's open source as well (https://github.com/koljapluemer/learn-worldmap), although not well documented yet. In the end it's just a little sideproject,…
2025 · map.koljapluemer.com
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Technologies used: Leaflet (frontend) Turf (Geojson generation and Voronoi generation) I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons, so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis to see if these pockets of brand territory are common. I haven't worked much with web frontends before, so feedback is welcomed. I also have some ideas to maybe expand upon, like making the territory calculations based on streets and other geographical features rather than just beeline distance. The site isn't tested too much on mobile yet, but should be ok. Currently the frontend code and…
2024 · conbini.kikkia.dev
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This is a little hobby project that I hope you enjoy. You can see where the International Space Station is now, with live HD video from NASA, on a realistic 3D globe. The positions of the sun and moon are also accurate, though distances aren't to scale. The clouds are also near-realtime; I span that out into a separate project at https://clouds.matteason.co.uk, where the cloud images I create from EUMETSAT data are freely available. I've got more features almost ready to go, like the ability to turn off all UI, toggleable clouds and turning off the day/night cycle I'd love for…
2024 · iss.matteason.co.uk
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2022 · shadowcalculator.eu
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Hi all, This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org). You can also join our mailing list or…
2023 · sandstorm.org
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Just a fun hack I did while bored over the weekend. My wife was busy shopping, it got me thinking that can VLMs solve the indoor location problem in a mall? Can I just show a VLM a map and an image and have it doa good enough job locating me? I hacked this P.O.C and it seems to work.
2025 · arjo129.github.io
- 22IM
Hi HN, I built a little tool to help me get better at remembering country locations on the map: https://learn-worldmap.netlify.app/ It's made from plain HTML/CSS/JS, and not intended to make any money or anything. Just thought that maybe someone else may enjoy it. Also of course happy about any feedback! Cheerz.
2023 · learn-worldmap.netlify.app
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I made this to focus on places that are genuinely good to work for the day, not just co-working spaces or random coffee shops. I'm trying to make it simple, fast, and containing the same good data that a place like Hacker News does. I'd love any feedback on how to make it helpful for you. Thanks.
2025 · spots-9a3a718d1c74.herokuapp.com
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Paper is a new design tool. We launched into open alpha today. Anyone can now sign up and use Paper. We started Paper about 1 year ago with the goal to bring more creativity back into design tools. It feels like the existing options are becoming increasingly corporate. To celebrate to launch, we published a new shader that lets anyone see their logo in Apple's new heat map animation style. There is no sign-up needed at heat.paper.design. We're always looking for feedback from anyone who uses Sketch, Figma, Photoshop, or Illustrator, about what they most need in their professional design…
Sep 2025 · app.paper.design
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