from Hacker News

Foursquare's 104M Points of Interest

by marklit on 11/23/24, 6:57 AM with 30 comments

  • by qwertox on 11/24/24, 9:28 AM

    What's the licensing of this? I wonder if it could be used to improve OSM.

    --

    To answer my own question

    > This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest ("POI") includes 22 core attributes (see schema here) that will be updated monthly and available for commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license framework.

    Found on Simon Willison’s Weblog [0], quoting the official announcement [1]. His page also shows how to use it with Datasette.

    [0] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source...

    [1] https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/four...

  • by eichin on 11/24/24, 8:53 AM

    Ooh, I have an "all ice cream shops in Massachusetts" project for which this would be at least an interesting cross-reference for (the "places humans show up at" bias in foursquare's business works in my favor here.)

    Or rather, their former business? https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/22/farewell-to-foursquares-ap... says the user apps go away in less than a month...

  • by wslh on 11/24/24, 12:24 PM

    Am I mistaken, or are we now at a data inflection point? As a frustrated consumer of POIs (e.g. Google Maps), I suspect that Foursquare understands their real position of power is no longer in the data itself (since many businesses are now doing the same) but in owning the last mile of the user experience. From a business perspective, we can create countless sites using this data, but that alone won’t significantly move the needle.

  • by dzogchen on 11/24/24, 11:11 AM

    Someone already packaged them up in PMTiles format, if you want to explore the dataset (uses MapLibre): https://wipfli.github.io/foursquare-os-places-pmtiles/

    https://github.com/wipfli/foursquare-os-places-pmtiles

  • by FollowingTheDao on 11/24/24, 12:58 PM

    I started reading the article but stopped out of sheer jealousy of that guys PC rig:

    "I'm using a 6 GHz Intel Core i9-14900K CPU. It has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores with a total of 32 threads and 32 MB of L2 cache. It has a liquid cooler attached and is housed in a spacious, full-sized, Cooler Master HAF 700 computer case. I've come across videos on YouTube where people have managed to overclock the i9-14900KF to 9.1 GHz.

    The system has 96 GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 6,000 MT/s and a 5th-generation, Crucial T700 4 TB NVMe M.2 SSD which can read at speeds up to 12,400 MB/s. There is a heatsink on the SSD to help keep its temperature down. This is my system's C drive."

  • by tra3 on 11/24/24, 7:35 AM

    Why would foursquare release this dataset? I can't help but try to think of an angle..

  • by BrandiATMuhkuh on 11/24/24, 12:56 PM

    About 10 years ago there was a project called "Sightsmap". It was a heatmap of the most photographed sights in the world.

    I really loved the map for planning road trips and city trips.

    I would love such a service again. I think OPs data/maps represent basically the same information.

  • by xnx on 11/25/24, 6:36 PM

    > The following will download 11 GB of Parquet files. > ... > This dataset will be refreshed monthly so expect the disk space requirements to grow by ~11 GB each month as time goes on.

    I'm not sure I understand. What's the structure of the data that there isn't a delta file or a way to retrieve only the latest?

  • by junto on 11/24/24, 9:37 AM

    These are mostly way out of date now right?

  • by tech234a on 11/24/24, 7:04 AM

    Article has a minor typo: it reads "The US has ~23.5M records followed by Indonesia and Turkey with over 80M each" but the second figure should be 8M.

  • by tipiirai on 11/24/24, 9:32 AM

    I thought Foursquare no longer exists