11 ms·
World Airports Voronoi
- jzawodn 11y agoHm, appears to be missing a lot of smaller airports in the USA. My home airport (E45) in particular. I'm guessing it's only using airports that have commercial air carrier service of some sort.
- jpatokal 11y agoThey're using OurAirports data, filtered to exclude all but "large" and "medium" airports. Anything smaller than that includes all sorts of cruft like African bush landing strips, heliports, etc. http://ourairports.com/data/ http://ourairports.com/data/
- megablast 11y agoI think there is about 10,000 airports in the US, so I bet it is missing quite a few.
- 13hours 11y agoAs a South African, I never realised we have a few airports that are actually the closest to a large part of the Antarctic coast. I know there are flights from Chile and New Zealand to Antarctica, but none that I'm aware of from South Africa.
- ngoldbaum 11y ago@shitsandwich just in case you see this, you are hellbanned.
- golergka 11y agowat
- vinceguidry 11y agoNot addressed to you, rather to a sibling commenter. Hellbanned users cannot be directly replied to. ngoldbaum, you should check a user's comment history before alerting them to the fact that they're hellbanned. If there's a clear reason then don't. In this case, he was hellbanned because he called someone an idiot on his very first post.
- ngoldbaum 11y agoReally? Even if they continue to comment productively afterwards? I think it's sad to see a hellbanned person contribute productively, since obviously they have no idea they've been banned.
- vinceguidry 11y agoSuch users, if they care to understand the community they want to be a part of, will eventually absorb enough knowledge to understand what a hell ban is, why they exist, what prompts a hell ban, and someone like yourself will alert them to it. Then they can request an unban or just make a new account. It was a lack of recognition of those norms that prompts the ban, it's only right that they have to work harder to arrive at that recognition before they can regain visibility. We don't want it to be too easy to become aware that you're hellbanned, that would defeat the whole point.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoWell, check for sure but it comes down to opinion at that point. Hellbanning is a pretty extreme choice for someone who made a fairly small mistake like that.
- vinceguidry 11y agoI would agree that it comes down to opinion, but I disagree that it is extreme. If the very first post you make exhibits a disregard for community norms, then chances are you're not interested in building harmony. More to the point, it is indicative of someone who has made a new account specifically to be insulting, perhaps trying to evade a hellban on a different account.
- vacri 11y agoI check someone's comment history before alerting them - the previous comments by that handle were all trolls. Hellbanning is meant to block these users; no point telling them.
- tripzilch 11y agoHellbanning (as opposed to the many, many other options available to a moderator) is one of the most disrespectful and passive-aggressive types of moderation. To clarify, a hell-ban is the type of ban where a user's posts are hidden from everybody except themselves (and on HN, those with "showdead" enabled in their profile settings). It ranks right between simply redirecting a login to a browser-bomb page (which is slightly more evil, except for the part where it doesn't potentially waste months of a person's time) and slow-bombing/random timeouts/delays (which is ever so slightly less of a dick move to do to someone's account, yet almost always works better than a hell-ban). Except in the most extreme cases (anything short of a mentally disturbed, obsessive, or dangerous person that otherwise just won't go away), reaching for a hellban is always the wrong choice, because there's always another moderation option that deals with the situation both more effectively, as well with more respect and dignity to one's entire userbase.
- jlarocco 11y agoNeat, but it would be nice if it could zoom out a little more or adjust to the browser window size. I have 2560x1600 display split into four equally sized panes, and it's difficult to use and view in a single pane.
- phkahler 11y agoTwo comments. 1) This appears to be only airports that offer commercial passenger service. 2) Easter Island has an airport! I was under the impression you could only get there by boat.
- ape4 11y agohttps://www.hipmunk.com/flights#f=JFK;t=Easter+Island,+Chile;d=2015-09-02;country=US https://www.hipmunk.com/flights#f=JFK;t=Easter+Island,+Chile...
- Erwin 11y agoHipmunk comes up with this amazing itinerary: New York to Los Angeles, then LA to Sydney (!), then back across to Santiago, spend 22 hours in the airport and finally 6 hours to the final destination. The second LA to Sydney flight takes off September 2nd and lands on September 4th! https://www.hipmunk.com/flights#f=JFK;t=Easter+Island,+Chile;d=2015-09-02;fl=f6fc5f5a121819b570ff5d30c7feca82;group=1 https://www.hipmunk.com/flights#f=JFK;t=Easter+Island,+Chile... It reminds of play the amazing retro-future 80days game: http://www.inklestudios.com/80days/ http://www.inklestudios.com/80days/
- nnethercote 11y ago> The second LA to Sydney flight takes off September 2nd and lands on September 4th! But when you fly from Sydney to LA you arrive before you left :) All thanks to the international date line.
- dalke 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down . The upgrade of the runway to support the Shuttle started in May 1986 (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19860423&id=bn0zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aTIHAAAAIBAJ&pg=6565,6718694&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19860423&id=... ) and ended by August 1987 (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19870817&id=YPNYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=H48DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4240,4618788&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19870817&id=Y... ).
- saganus 11y agoThis is awesome!
- golergka 11y agoThis runs slower on my computer than MGSV in ultra settings running on 4k resolution.
- shitsandwich 11y agowell it is rendered via the dom you can't really expect much the information is pretty cool though .. i'd would be neat to see something like this done with cesium
- mizzao 11y agoCPU bottleneck, not graphics card.
- golergka 11y agoOf course. And JS is not a compiled language. And a language that was not created with performance in mind. I mean, I know this stuff, I can think of a lot of reason for it. But the end result is just toooooooooo much for any reasons.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoCompletely unusable on my iPad Air. Damn. It's amazing how fast computers are. And it's amazing how slow we make them with layers and layers of cruft built atop more layers and layers of cruft.
- lincolnq 11y agoHmm, that's not really fair. Programmer time is a major consideration. We live in a time where a complicated, interesting visualization like this can be built in a day or two, and appear as #3 on hacker news. Less than 10 years ago it probably would have taken 10x the time, maybe more, and your iPad Air didn't exist.
- dagw 11y agoWithout those layers of 'cruft' putting together something like this would involve weeks of work by a team of domain experts, rather than a few hours of work by a single person in his free time.
- msrpotus 11y agoCurious if there's any region smaller than that of LaGuardia Airport. A glance doesn't find any.
- Kenji 11y agoI thought that a voronoi partition is not possible with only straight lines on a non-euclidean space like that; this leaves me confused.
- wlievens 11y agoThey must be geodesics, not straight lines
- rspeer 11y agoThe edges are segments of great circles, which are the reasonable equivalent to a straight line on the surface of a sphere.
- teraflop 11y agoOr another way to look at it: if you model the earth as a perfect sphere, there's a one-to-one monotonic relationship between geodesic distance and distance in a straight line through the earth. Points that are equidistant by one metric are also equidistant by the other. So you could get exactly the same diagram by finding the 3D Voronoi diagram of the airports as a collection of points in space, and then taking the intersection of that with the geoid.
- Bedon292 11y agoIt looks like you still just use delaunay triangulation on the points on the surface of the sphere. And then he is connecting the resulting vertices with lines along the surface of the sphere. The lines look straight from head on, but are curved in 3d space.
- VikingCoder 11y agoActually I think you use delaunay tetrahedrization on the points in 3-space. The points HAPPEN to be on the surface of the sphere. Then you intersect the sphere with the polytopes, which result in great arcs.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ghayes 11y agoThis is awesome, and I really wish it would give me information on which airport each tile represents.
- svisser 11y agoYou can hover over a tile to get the airport's name.
- ggchappell 11y agoVery nice!
- idlewords 11y agoWhat a cool project! This is very fun to play with in conjunction with the ETOPS (extended twin-engine operations) settings on the Great Circle Mapper. http://www.gcmap.com http://www.gcmap.com Among other things it drives home how remote the waters MH370 disappeared in are.
- minimax 11y agoI recently did ORD-HKG and spent quite a lot of time thinking about ETOPS diversion airports over Siberia (because honestly what else are you gonna do). Now I'm wondering if you can even land a fully laden 777 at any of them. Most of them don't even seem to have wikipedia pages.
- lucaspiller 11y agoA few years ago I flew to the north of Sweden in January and as expected the ground was covered in snow. What surprised me was that the runway wasn't cleared - we actually landed on the snow. This was in a Boeing 737 so not exactly a small aircraft.
- idlewords 11y agoI suspect there's a lot of places in Siberia where you can land a 777 just fine. It's the amenities in the terminal building (if there is one) that won't be too appealing. In Soviet times, a lot of civil infrastructrure was built with an eye to military use, so you get some suspiciously long runways at rinky-dink airports.
- trose 11y agoThere's definitely a handful of airports in Antarctica. Are they not "official"?
- tacticus 11y agoWell they certainly have iata codes and serve larger aircraft than places like albany wa. Wilkins supports normal commercial aircraft like the a319
- Faint 11y agoLooks cool, but would have been a lot smoother in webGL
- teraflop 11y agoPretty soon there's going to be a nice big new polygon added in the middle of the South Atlantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena_Airport
- Xophmeister 11y agoLooking at the map, I am liking some of the place names on St. Helena; "The Gates of Chaos" is a particular favourite.
- Arnt 11y agoSomething tells me you'll like the noun the inhabitants use for themselves. Hint: They don't call themselves "helens".
- HNLogInsSuckAss 11y agoAdding an airport will SHRINK a polygon. A bigger polygon means a greater distance to the nearest airport. Edit: Never mind, on thinking about your comment some more, you probably know that. Where you will see larger polygons is across the United States, as corrupt local governments get paid by land developers to close airports and sell off the land. Often these kangaroo councils operate under the guise of pandering to local residents, who moved next door to an airport and then started bitching about it in hopes of having it closed and boosting their property values once. Make no mistake: These people are stealing from all of us. Once an airport is closed, we'll never get it back, and part of our national transportation infrastructure is destroyed. Not to mention the damage to the future of aviation, which can't fund innovation and invention if there's no place to land. See the current scam that's threatening the Santa Monica airport for an example. This is what happens when clowns and criminals run a city government: We can laugh at them, but they cause real and permanent damage.
- lkrubner 11y agoOff-topic, but if you want to see a great talk about working with Voronoi in Clojure, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=627&v=hzLAX_pr-Wc https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=627&v=hzLAX_pr-Wc
- ahh 11y agoThis badly wants labels.
- exupero 11y agoIt looks like the furthest point from any airport is (not surprisingly) about the same place as Point Nemo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceanic_pole_of_inaccessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceani...), the furthest point from land.
- slake 11y agoThis is really cool. If I remember right international passenger flight regulations insist that there be atleast one airport that can handle your class of aircraft within 180 minutes of flying time at one engine operative speeds at all times. If we assume a passenger jet flies at roughly 0.8 Mach or ~960 kph, and one-engine operative speed is roughly 40% of that or ~384 KPH. That means an airport needs to be within a circle of radius 1152 kms. That's an area of ~4.16M km-squared. Simplifying that all airports can handle all passenger jets, not one of those voronoi cells can have an area greater than 4.16M km-squared. Is there an easy way to calculate the area of each cell? Did I mention this is really cool!!
- oostevo 11y agoThe regulations you're thinking of are ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards or, alternatively, Engines Turn or Passengers Swim).
- danielschonfeld 11y agoAnd those only pertain when you fly out of reach of a suitable airport to land on, in the case of flying on one engine, in still air for > 60 minutes.
- slake 11y agoLol! Engines Turn or Passengers Swim! Excellent.
- simonbyrne 11y agoI believe that's only true for 2 engine aircraft. Virgin Australia briefly ran a service from Melbourne to Johannesburg using 777s, which was 2 hours longer than it needed to be for this reason. Looking at this map, it's clear why: the great circle path almost goes over Antarctica, and the closest airports over the path are in Australia and South Africa.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- naz 11y agoSo cool (though it includes Plymouth City Airport, which is sadly closed)
- vpontis 11y agoThis is the type of thing that's so simple and rewarding that it makes me annoyed that I hadn't thought of it and made it first! Really cool, good work!