Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

(lax-skyline.parcelscope.net)

47 points | by rustywasm 51 minutes ago

10 comments

  • ZeWaka 33 minutes ago
    Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.
  • ericzawo 23 minutes ago
    Having moved to LA this february, the sprawl is really something I had no true appreciation for until I moved here for real, and tried to run errands across town. It's a gigantic, beautiful, complicated place.
  • djmips 31 minutes ago
    I noticed most of the tall buildings are sixties to eighties. Some more info about that here. https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/a-brief-history-of-l...
  • tcdent 35 minutes ago
    I did a project recently where I extracted every Los Angeles building permit record for a property and was able to look at the evolution of its infrastructure and tenancy over time by embedding the permit documents into an image-based embedding model. Could be an interesting way to incorporate more granularity of the history of properties over time, although it dramatically increases the scope of data processed.
  • enjoyyourlife 47 minutes ago
    Nice! Would be better if it shows the difference between the ocean and other land
    • suncemoje 7 minutes ago
      Agree, I personally also think dark mode never goes well with a map-based app...
    • rustywasm 44 minutes ago
      Good idea! Let me work on that...
  • ck2 14 minutes ago
    wild to see that, reminds me vaguely of the amazing ariel photos by kite of San Francisco after the earthquakes in 1906

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edi...

    early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity

    when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour

    but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying

    and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)

  • rustywasm 51 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • entelechy0 30 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • losteric 41 minutes ago
    Yey yet another vibe coded viz. these are the “hello world” of LLM projects.

    nifty. what about this makes it HN worth? What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve? What did you do beyond prompting it, is there anything for others to learn from? Was the data difficult to acquire, clean up, or is this just an obvious viz on a public dataset anyone could get? Did you glean insights from having this viz, does the graphic serve a narrative or distilling information not otherwise apparent, or is it just pretty?

    I ask these genuinely. It’s the difference between “oh I figured out how to print ‘hello world’” vs “I built something

    • oijkuij 26 minutes ago
      If you want to encourage folks to continue their efforts and really "build something", I think you'd want to ask your questions in a way that shows genuine interest and support, rather than ridiculing and questioning the level of effort involved.

      I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.

    • dvt 10 minutes ago
      > What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve?

      Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc.

      > or is it just pretty?

      People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.