from Hacker News

Show HN: Map with an LLM

by ata_aman on 12/27/24, 2:50 AM with 59 comments

Christmas project from a personal need to find ideal locations.
  • by CTDOCodebases on 12/27/24, 7:55 AM

    Not that good IMHO.

    I asked it:

    "Show me all the train yards in New York."

    It only identified seven of them when there are many more:

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

    Then when I tried to copy and past my prompt from the history it did not display the full prompt and had no option to copy it to the clipboard.

  • by faebi on 12/27/24, 10:01 AM

    Awesome, I really like it, but you must add the "© OpenStreetMap Contributors" Trademark somewhere on the map. It's usually on the bottom right.
  • by bloomingkales on 12/27/24, 7:54 AM

    What are your api costs from publicly serving this if you don’t mind sharing (especially from HN traffic)?

    I have some ideas I’d like to release, but LLM api pricing and sudden traffic from sites like this one seem scary.

  • by dr_dshiv on 12/27/24, 8:59 AM

    LLMs are notoriously terrible at spatial thinking — if you can solve that with RAG and a database of actual locations, that’s promising. Or was there another approach?
  • by onebitwise on 12/27/24, 10:38 AM

    Really nice idea!

    Sadly in my prompt it replies with absolutely invented data. Same prompt, three times gives 3-4 different results, that era simply not true.

    Prompt: show me the best glass factories in valsassina, italy. (there are no glass factories, so it suggest glass worker that contains wrong coordinates and invented names)

  • by gunalx on 12/27/24, 8:31 AM

    I asked it "show me cityname" and it did not find it. First asking for country did not help at all either.
  • by themanmaran on 12/27/24, 3:39 AM

    This is a really great interface! Tried "wooded hiking trails near [my address]" and got exactly what I was looking for.

    Then threw in some common google maps searches and got fun results.

    "airport" => LAX

    "restaurant" => The Clove Club in London

    "coffee shop" => Philz in SF

    It doesn't seem to take into account the current map location, so I wonder how the randomness works.

  • by throwaway_ocr on 12/27/24, 11:20 AM

    I tried "show me Portugal" and it showed me Madeira, which is an island that is indeed part of Portugal, but I was expecting it to go for the mainland.

    Repeating the prompt alternates between Madeira and Açores which is again, technically correct, but in this case not the best kind of correct.

  • by a10c on 12/27/24, 8:08 AM

    I asked it to find me soccer fields in <insert my suburb> and it showed me results but all 5 of them were misplaced. One of the fields was shown where a train station is, there are no parks nearby.
  • by kgeist on 12/27/24, 7:00 AM

    It seems you can make it hang if you input something that triggers the LLM's guardrails. For example, I entered 'where they sell drugs,' and the API endpoint hung every time I submitted it. However, on a few occasions, it returned a response immediately (with an error in the API response). I suspect there are too many retries if the structured JSON output is not formatted correctly when the guardrails are activated
  • by Sparkyte on 12/27/24, 8:40 AM

    This is kinda neat and far more intuitive than using google maps search. Although I wonder how accurate it is with the data points.
  • by kiddz on 12/27/24, 10:43 AM

    Nice job. . . I looked for kite boarding spots in Puerto Rico and everything showed up. I really like the clean UI too.
  • by sberens on 12/27/24, 7:03 AM

    This is really cool! Though for some reason the lat/long coordinates of places are completely off, despite the addresses being correct.

    I searched "show me 5 parks in SF", and all 5 were in the wrong spot. For example:

    Lafayette Park Lafayette & Gough St, San Francisco, CA 94109 Latitude: 37.7955 Longitutde: -122.4668

  • by Krasnol on 12/27/24, 8:33 AM

    It seems you are using OSM data, could you please add the proper attribution to it?

    Here is a guide: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...

  • by sztanko on 12/27/24, 3:46 AM

    How does it work? Translating free text to overpass? Looks very promising!
  • by devbrianwhite on 12/27/24, 6:37 PM

    Really cool idea and fast response times, nice job! I noticed after a few searches the results seem to get less accurate, however. Pins dropping in the ocean, etc.
  • by ata_aman on 12/27/24, 4:02 AM

    Not sure why this got nuked from the front-page all of a sudden but thanks everyone for checking it out. I'll be sure to incorporate the features mentioned here.
  • by 01jonny01 on 12/27/24, 12:36 PM

    This is cool. Few suggestions:

    Use local storage to save the search history.

    The i icon does nothing.

    Have a open external window icon next to location/landmark title that searches Google for that location

  • by kiney on 12/27/24, 11:34 AM

    nice idea, but it fails completely for me.

    e.g. "show me all IT companies in <suburb where I live>" should show my company (and only my company) - but it shows two other companies that aren't actually in the same city and draws the POI on a sugar beet field near <suburb>

    Is the LLM perhaps only trained on english language geo data?

  • by sr-latch on 12/27/24, 3:29 AM

    Does it have internet access? Looks like a very convenient interface for looking for hotels, planning travels
  • by KTibow on 12/27/24, 8:12 PM

    This has some meme potential, it succeeded at "show me the OpenAI data centers"
  • by zknowledge on 12/27/24, 3:27 AM

    This is so well done. Very interested in new UIs with LLMs. Great work.

    How's it work under the hood?

  • by purple-leafy on 12/27/24, 8:48 AM

    doesn't work, as in, no response at all and full of console errors
  • by koopuluri on 12/27/24, 10:07 AM

    awesome. i can see future iterations of this becoming really useful.

    e.g. "i'm traveling to Tokyo this summer, show me good areas to live in if i want to run 10k every day through nature, as well as work out of highly rated cafes.".

    i want to see good areas highlighted on the map. and even better would be integrating with Airbnb / Yelp / Google business ratings, etc. to show places i can rent in those areas.

    another e.g. "best times to land in XYZ city if i want to avoid traffic getting to ABC". - to check this now i have to toggle some dropdowns in Google maps. natural language is a much better "interface" for most of what i want to do with maps.

  • by Quizzical4230 on 12/27/24, 7:30 AM

    Really cool project!
  • by faebi on 12/27/24, 10:02 AM

    Are you on X? Would love to give a follow. I love OSM projects.
  • by 3willows on 12/27/24, 3:51 AM

    "home of the pope" and "home of mozart" returned good results, but not "home of kant" or "home of newton".
  • by upa1 on 12/27/24, 8:17 AM

    i asked "where the hoes at" and it marked home depot lol