World Capitals Voronoi
53 points
2 days ago
| 19 comments
| jasondavies.com
| HN
wood_spirit
4 minutes ago
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Related post from same site earlier this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385457
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cperciva
7 minutes ago
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It would be interesting to see a map which was not minimizing [distance to capital] but instead minimized [distance to capital]/sqrt([national population]). The latter would be more robust against Sybil attacks.
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pithon
2 hours ago
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The framerate and latency on this visualization is absolute magic. Hover the mouse around over the sphere: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/
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canyp
2 hours ago
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Indeed. It is rare to encounter a webgl/gpu visualization that doesn't rev up the fans at 100% while sitting idle, let alone to have this low latency handling input. Virtually all web demos I have seen run terribly because literally 0 attention is paid to actual rendering. The other day somebody submitted one here and admitted they didn't know backface culling was a thing. They also almost universally have no sort of frame pacing.
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mlsu
5 minutes ago
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Now the corollary. For each country, given existing borders, place the capital directly in the geographic area centroid? Population centroid? Which capitals move most?
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thadk
2 hours ago
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mattoxic
3 hours ago
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Taipei claiming a big chunk of the PRC. Probably go down as well as Ottawa and Mexico City claiming big chunks of the USA
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yellowapple
2 hours ago
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Funny enough, Mexico's borders on this globe ain't far off from where they were before the Mexican-American War.
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Georgelemental
3 hours ago
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Hmm, looks like it models capital cities as a single point, and therefore assigns much more territory to Vatican City than would a model that took into account Rome's city boundaries
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bensyverson
2 hours ago
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Yes, this is the point, right?
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canyp
2 hours ago
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It is the point, precisely.
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Conscat
4 hours ago
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I find it very funny to imagine Keralam and Tamil Nadu part of Sri Lanka.
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pimlottc
5 hours ago
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I would love to see some stats with this. What countries gain/loss the most? Which countries are the last changed? What areas are the now the most countries away from their original country?
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jcranmer
4 hours ago
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Eyeballing the map:

For largest absolute net gain of land area, I guess Mongolia wins the cake, getting a very large slice of Siberia while losing almost no land. For a percentage net gain of land area, maybe one of the European microstates, or East Timor.

Largest absolute net loss of land area is Russia for sure. Largest percent loss is... probably Russia? Again, losing Siberia is a large fraction of its land, and nobody else seems to be so screwed by the distance.

Excluding overseas territories, there's three borders between Yakutia-cum-Japan and its current capital, Moscow, and another case of that in the far western reaches of Brazil. If you include overseas territories, well, French Polynesia is currently almost literally antipodal from Paris, and I don't really know how you would count 'most countries away' in that case, but you can't really get further than that.

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radpanda
1 hour ago
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I dunno, New Zealand getting a big chunk of Antarctica is a pretty big percentage gain too.
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forthwall
5 hours ago
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Interesting, if a country has multiple capitals, it gets split even more!
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NathanielBaking
3 hours ago
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Madison, Canada. Now I just need to sell this to the Canadians.
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martinclayton
5 hours ago
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Dublin knabs a decent chunk of Great Britain, Copenhagen gets southern Sweden. Seems fair.
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jezzamon
5 hours ago
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I want to see one a diagram which includes the oceans too
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vincnetas
2 days ago
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If country boundaries were Voronoi diagrams with respect to their capitals.
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vulcan01
5 hours ago
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Huh, Canada seems roughly intact (except for BC).
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wk_end
5 hours ago
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BC's intact too, if I'm reading this correctly. We lose some far north to Iceland and the very southern tip of Ontario to the US, and that seems to be it as far as I can tell. And as a trade we get New England, a good chunk of Washington, and the northern Plains and a bit of the Midwest. Not bad, really!
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syats
5 hours ago
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Great work.
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bwestergard
5 hours ago
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Seems right, ship it.
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brunellus
6 hours ago
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I really enjoyed this.
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Svoka
3 hours ago
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Ukraine's capital is misspelled "Kiev". Should be "Kyiv"
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