jamessb

Joined 14 years ago

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Comment · 7 days ago

Yes, the European honey buzzard would: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_honey_buzzard#Feeding

Comment · 24 days ago

The "Behaviour over time" graphs don't seem to render for the hunger/chicken & egg/burnout/predator & prey examples.

Comment · 29 days ago

Another lighthouse map [1] was discussed on HN in 2022 [2]. It also has some data-quality/completeness issues due to being based on OpenStreetMap data, but avoids the AI slop aesthetic of this one.

[1]: https://geodienst.github.io/lighthousemap/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066026

Comment · 1 month ago

This reminds me of "Human Atlas" [1] (created by GPT-6 Astra) - there's a video in the tweet announcing it [2].

There was a live deploy, but it is currently unavailable: https://human-atlas-seven.vercel.app/

[1]: https://github.com/ashemag/human-atlas

[2]: https://x.com/ashebytes/status/2096221988763173186?lang=ar-x...

Comment · 1 month ago

It was probably one of the Turtle robots or a derivative of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot)

One later variant is the Valiant Roamer https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/30545/Valiant-Roamer...

Comment · 1 month ago

For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229

Comment · 3 months ago

Possibly grist https://www.getgrist.com/blog/grist-v-airtable/ ?

Comment · 3 months ago

I agree that the text is unpleasant to read.

I also dislike the title ("What we learned when a user tried to load a massive GML file in a browser") - it's hard to imagine that someone who had tried to build a viewer for geospatial data would not already know the answer (paraphrasing, "tiling the data will be necessary to achieve acceptable performance, and there are standard methods to do this")

Comment · 4 months ago

This one's website (and a dead comment replying to you) suggests that processing the PDF in the browser, rather than uploading to a server, is a point of differentiation.

However, there are older tools that do this, such as BentoPDF (which is also open source) [1].

[1]: https://www.bentopdf.com/

Comment · 4 months ago

It makes API requests to api.soot.com (and the rendered page includes a div with id "soot-publication").

The soot site is a bit vague about their product: https://spiral.soot.com/

I've previously encountered a similar product with much clearer marketing and documentation pages called Zegami: https://zegami.com/

Comment · 4 months ago

I was about to link to the same "What's on the Menu" site, which I remembered being an impressive site for library digitization project years ago, but it was apparently retired in January 2025.

Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data.

[1]: https://menus.nypl.org

[2]: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus.nyp...

Comment · 4 months ago

I think this is a joke referencing Franz Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis

Comment · 4 months ago

> a new python plotting library

Whilst it's still not yet at 1.0.0, it's not that new: the first (0.1.0) release was in 2017: https://pypi.org/project/plotnine/#history

Comment · 4 months ago

Plotnine is heavily inspired by the ggplot2 library, which uses the + operator in the same way: https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/#usage