Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?

That seems like the distance to go from having 100k people in front of you to having 100k people behind you. The distance you'd have to go to run into them properly would depend critically on the width of the vehicle you're in. With about 30k people running the Boston marathon and 60k people running the NY marathon, if you can source a vehicle wide enough to cover the course, it seems like you could pull it off in just a bit over 52.4 miles... assuming that the bodies didn't produce enough drag to slow you down so much that runners were managing to stay ahead of you on the course. (And assuming that marathon runners prioritize completion of the course over running sideways away from obvious danger, but they're marathon runners, that seems like a safe assumption.)

I must be slightly confused about what claims this visualization is making. Are these 5 degree rays supposed to be indicating non-overlapping triangles where each triangle contains 100k population? If so, a full circle (with no triangles missing) would be a population of 7.2 million. And yet, clicking around Los Angeles County you can easily find multiple completely non-overlapping full circles, despite the county population being under 10 million.

Is this resident population or ambient?

I've been building a UK-wide 24-hour population dataset lately, and it's really opened my eyes to how much population data is best-guess-estimate - including census figures - and quite how difficult it is to say with any certainly how many people "touched" a location on any given day.

It's rough not having Canada's population in here. There's way more than 100k people in all directions north from Buffalo and it doesn't feel accurate.

Cities on the water make fun shapes for obvious reasons. Atlantic City, Seattle, Chicago, Galveston, New Orleans. The slices can go very far or even be omitted due to not hitting the contiguous US. Chicago's is probably the most interesting, they cross Lake Michigan before getting sufficient density to stop.

I live in the one of the densest parts of lower Manhattan, and often explain that when I take a walk around the neighborhood, I pass 100,000+ people.

This map pretty much proves it!

Neat! I've got a slice that's under 10 miles long going south into town, but I've also got 14 slices to the north (the ones that don't intersect with a couple up-state cities) that are over 3000 miles long.

Vancouver is similarly interesting, a lot of great-circle 2000+ mile segments that reach over towards New England, but everything west or north is invalid.

Would be neat if instead of a single yellow petal to 100k, each petal was a color gradient to 1k, 2k, 10k, 20k, 100k, 200k, or 1M people!

Even if you are colliding with 20 people a minute thats still 3.5 straight days of running into people. Even if gentle thats probably heavy bruising, and any conflict or discourse is gonna slow down that 20-people rate.

I imagine theres probably only a few cities where you could pull this off.

Anyways I know the article isnt this literal, this was just my first thought from the title and I had a chuckle lol.

heh, from my address in downtown Chicago, I get 2.34 miles in the shortest direction and > 3000 miles (aka don't reach 100k within the US) in the longest direction (slices of lake michigan passing through unpopulated stretches of the UP. Canada is not included, but not sure it would help much...

I got 1419 miles by putting the pin just east of Presidio, TX. The Gulf of Mexico doesn't have many Americans in it on the way out to the Florida Keys.

1,570 miles by pinning the lower Keweenaw Peninsula which null-counts a great circle route through Canada.

> Pin stays in the contiguous US — Alaska, Hawaii, and abroad aren’t covered.

It's kinda funny to hear an LLM use such americentric language, I suppose it didn't "know" it was working on something that would be public.

Doesn't work outside the US sadly.

Just a note: using the noir plugin for safari i had to disable it as the map is dark and invisible. Maybe its a layer thing.

This is really neat. Could this data be linked to quality of life indexes and see if there’s any correlation?

This is very cool - I really want to see it in other places outside of the US - I imagine the centre of Australia only has like 4 potential lines. Do you plan on expanding it beyond the US?

I don't fully understand what this is supposed to visualize, but at least for my location it tells me I'd have to run considerably far into golden gate park, which I imagine is negligible in terms of people.

Pretty cool, took me a few minutes to figure it out, there was a nice stretch of Florida that had no rays, clear cut wilderness

Is this supposed to mean that 100k people live in each slice of the pie? Counting up slices and comparing to my metro statistical area population, that about works out.

That is a cool visualization.

Punched in my grandparents' town and a bunch of the slices stretched 1500km over three states away. A lot of the US is big and empty.

I was hoping this would estimate the mean free path from population density. Still fun though.

Fun! If you click in the center of Nebraska, US - there are some angles for which you will never find 100k people.

This is a killer app for Vancouver drivers.

Havre, MT has curved rays going east. Is that intentional?

Really cool. Makes me wonder where the most remote point in the contiguous U.S. is by this metric.

Would be cool to be able to change the width/angle of the petal

This is cool and useful. I would love to see the drive time version.

The SF Bay Area is suddenly not so dense when you realize how much is water.

From Union Square, you'd need to scan the city plus the entire East Bay.

Waiting for rest of the world

nicely done.