TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Show HN: BlockAtlas – a very detailed interactive map of US Population Density

3 pointsby NameError9 months ago
The US Census publishes block-by-block population &amp; housing data[1], and I couldn&#x27;t find an online map of this, so I built one. It also includes lots (10k+) of other indicators published from the Census&#x27; annual survey, aggregated to larger levels.<p>Some queries that should work:<p>- A zip code (should be fastest, shows block-by-block population density)<p>- An address (block-level population density within the surrounding zip code)<p>- A demographic&#x2F;population&#x2F;housing indicator (e.g. &quot;$500k+ homes&quot;, &quot;percent of people who drive to work&quot; - shows US States and you can double-click to see more detail)<p>- A comparison between two indicators (e.g. &quot;median income vs homeownership rate&quot;) - this shows two maps which zoom &amp; pan together<p>You can also try to search for an indicator and a place, e.g. &quot;population density by zip code in Los Angeles County&quot; - this only works sometimes though, I&#x27;d like to made it more reliable.<p>Searching these demographic indicators is tricky and I haven&#x27;t totally solved it, but I think this works reasonably well. The search backend uses LLMs for query parsing, result selection, &amp; embeddings, and uses postgres full text search + pgvector for retrieval. The app is hosted on CloudFlare Workers and mostly written in TypeScript.<p>I posted this as a Show HN about a month ago, but am posting again because I&#x27;ve made some pretty substantial changes since then (block-by-block data and comparisons are new).<p>[1] Specifically, population and occupied&#x2F;vacant&#x2F;total housing unit counts, with some randomness added by the Census for privacy

no comments

no comments