YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale

131 points theanonymousone 2 hours ago 50 comments

mehwoot 1 hour ago | parent

I guess the map is the territory

brainwad 42 minutes ago | parent

If you are only interested in 1m scale, maybe. Even the open satellite imagery goes to 20x that resolution, though, and of course there are small features that can't be resolved even at 5cm resolution, like survey marks. And even at the 1m scale, they've done a bad job transforming the source data to Minecraft, there's tons of errors if you look and most of detailed features (like road centrelines) are faked.

4ggr0 1 hour ago | parent

almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.

koziserek 1 hour ago | parent

I assure you will be better served with SweetHome3d

BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!

4ggr0 53 minutes ago | parent

sh3d seems like an actual CAD-like tool to actually plan your furniture. what i find fun about this minecraft map is to make my actual home my base in the game, try to make it looo like my home and then just play minecraft while exploring the surroundings i know already.

then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.

then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)

ShadowOfThePit 1 hour ago | parent

Funky stuff, nice use of government data.

It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O

> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.

Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?

wmanley 1 hour ago | parent

> Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O

Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.

amiga386 1 hour ago | parent

Perhaps the description of its file format is 150 CHF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...

evrimoztamur 1 hour ago | parent

It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.

herbst 1 hour ago | parent

That's the actual data it contains houses and structures

shoobiedoo 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.

Rapzid 34 minutes ago | parent

I never got being bothered too much by this.

Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..

The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.

qbane 1 hour ago | parent

Missing context: in Minecraft.

stabbles 1 hour ago | parent

See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d, which is an excellent resource.

comrade1234 1 hour ago | parent

They also have an execellent iOS app that I use whenever I'm hiking.

abricq 1 hour ago | parent

Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft !

Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!

amiga386 1 hour ago | parent

Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:

https://minecraftdanmark.dk/

https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/

> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.

> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.

> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.

> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.

stavros 47 minutes ago | parent

It's interesting to me how people say "someone did this before it was cheap!" as if it's a slight. I mean, yes, it's much more impressive when it was expensive, but it's good that things are cheaper.

well_ackshually 40 minutes ago | parent

Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data.

This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.

stavros 38 minutes ago | parent

Yeah but that's different from "LLM puffery".

stymaar 8 minutes ago | parent

Interestingly enough the “before it was cheap” version was distributed for free when this one is for sale for half the price of the game this is supposed to run on.

INTPenis 44 minutes ago | parent

I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.

Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?

netsharc 1 hour ago | parent

This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details.

Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".

"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?

Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.

How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!

What an exercise in convolution...

rfgplk 55 minutes ago | parent

> "Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?

A mountain irl is, for instance 783 meters tall (sea level). A block in minecraft is always 1x1x1meters (according to the game engine def). Thus you make a mountain 783 blocks tall. You can also easily raise the sky limit if it becomes a problem.

ricardobeat 17 minutes ago | parent

The point is that this kind of prose is typical of LLMs. It’s like describing a driving game with “each car has four wheels and a suspension just like the real one”.

karel-3d 12 minutes ago | parent

Oh it's Minecraft! I didn't realize what is this about for the longest time. I thought it's their own game named "blocks".

Pirut 1 hour ago | parent

I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world.

https://github.com/pirut/earth-platform

vidarh 45 minutes ago | parent

Sounds worth posting your own ShowHN post for.

rfgplk 25 minutes ago | parent

Please rewrite this in C++/Rust. Java at this point is a pure meme-tier language. I've dabbled with rewriting the JVM and actually properly optimizing but it's a complete waste of time when you can just generate optimal low-level code with inlined asm kernels where needed. You're genuinely leaving tons of performance/efficiency on the table. If you need a high performance minecraft engine there's TONS of rust rewrites on github, or you can generate your own.

echoangle 20 minutes ago | parent

How does this work? You need to somehow flatten the globe into a plane, right? Are you just using a regular map projection? It says that everything is real scale in the description and that can’t really be true at high latitudes, right?

busssard 4 minutes ago | parent

this is amazing! Now we just need a shared server that is accessible by anyone and see where that goes.

A world for anyone. should have more than enough are. it would be interesting to see if wars and terretorial conflicts arise here as well

efilife 51 minutes ago | parent

holy shit why is this ai slop top 1 now?

splatter9859 19 minutes ago | parent

Welcome to life in the 2020s. Enshittification knows no bounds and cannot be contained.

"Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to the Collective." -- Borg Collective, Star Trek TNG

imilev 50 minutes ago | parent

This is cool af.

petterroea 48 minutes ago | parent

Recently I've gotten to a point where I am put off when a clearly vibe coded website asks for money.

I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them.

I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.

gb2d_hn 47 minutes ago | parent

Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself. Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify. Why do we give anyone any money? Why don't we just do everything ourselves?

well_ackshually 37 minutes ago | parent

>Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself.

Because growing fruits is hard.

>Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify.

Because playing music is hard.

This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

rfgplk 31 minutes ago | parent

> This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"

Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work. You have to be insane or severely demented to try doing something like this by hand.

As a follow up I just went and looked at the arnismc project since I haven't heard of it. At least it's written in Rust, which is respectable but it's only ~200k loc of Rust? And most of it is also 100% LLM generated by the looks of it?

petterroea 36 minutes ago | parent

That's not really how it works, because in all your examples there is a pretty reasonable amount of work being put in that you are paying for.

Many AI projects are just a few prompts away, and very little labor intensive - you are mostly just delegating.

A much more accurate example would be "Why would I pay your son to mow my grass when i can get mine to do it"

andybak 33 minutes ago | parent

So do it. Everything AI assisted I've made has involved a ton of work. The only difference AI has made is that I've increased the level of my ambition and avoided a ton of things that were previously blockers.

tiborsaas 32 minutes ago | parent

Why do people go to restaurants and pay significantly more when they can just buy the ingredients and cook at home? Those damn chefs make my food in 15 minutes.

olmo23 27 minutes ago | parent

I disagree. What might be "a few prompts in claude code" for you, could be a lot of work for someone else. Not everyone is comfortable setting up a domain name and hosting etc... and if you provide value, why not ask for something in return?

busssard 6 minutes ago | parent

i only see it when they provide a service and it costs to host that service

Markoff 44 minutes ago | parent

AIDR

dguest 42 minutes ago | parent

How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?

lmpdev 40 minutes ago | parent

Reminds me of the Dufour map of Switzerland

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map

I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate

0x_rs 22 minutes ago | parent

This is a trivial task for any good model provided with all the tools it needs, and excluding the time it takes to download it from swissALTI3D -- which is the source of the data (heightmap, surface map, subsurface, building 3D models with swissBUILDINGS3D) and is a pretty useful resource for lots of terrain work. Other countries have similar datasets from airborne LiDAR, it's just very well published in Switzerland's case. Most European countries have this data available at similar 0.5m resolutions but coverage may not be as good in some cases. Some individual US states also publish them.

barrkel 5 minutes ago | parent

Would the time you spend getting a model subscription, giving it an environment to work in, and figuring out how to enable it to operate safely, be less than 15 francs of your time?

Minimum wage in Zurich city is 23.90 chf/hour. About 37 minutes of time, at most.