Nicheloom

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How many people live within an hour walk of you?

Details

External ID
49082574
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
How many people live within an hour walk of you?
Website domain
blockatlas.com
Launched
July 28, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
9
Upvotes percentile
0.505973715651135
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I've been building a bunch of US geography tools/games/visualizations and thought folks on HN might like this one. There are also drive-time and bike-time tools available on the same page.For folks interested, all of the data comes from OpenStreetMap and the US Census at the moment - OSM for routing and points interest and the US Census for population data.Anonymous users can use it 5x/day. I put up a waitlist page to gauge interest in a paid version but there's no way for the public to make an account - feel free to bypass the limits in an incognito tab.The site is US-only for the time being - sorry for international folks!

Enrichment

Theme
interactive maps and geospatial visualizations
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
walkability analysis tool
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial A front-end mapping interface is easy to vibe-code, but calculating accurate real-time isochrones and intersecting them with high-resolution US Census block population data requires a dedicated geospatial routing engine.

What it would actually take: The backend requires an OpenStreetMap routing engine (such as Valhalla or OSRM) to generate accurate pedestrian isochrone polygons. These dynamic polygons must then be spatially queried against indexed US Census block-level population polygons using PostGIS or specialized in-memory spatial indexers (H3/S2/GDAL) to aggregate population counts under interactive response times.

Discussion

6 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Unclear what the practical use cases are, Limited to US data only currently

Feature requests: Expand to global/Europe coverage, Add demographic data beyond US Census boundaries

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 141 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #74 of 142 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 247 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.