News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons. Parent comment

Re:USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons by bordercontrol on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @04:38AM (#50437993)
I was talking about runtime rendering. It's a bit of a hard topic to talk about, as there are a multitude of use cases and approaches.

But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons by jaggederest on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @03:52PM (#50446174)
Well, we did it real time using VML in IE6 of all things, and we used adaptive decimation based on the zoom level, so from a practical perspective there's no point in rendering subpixel detail levels
[ Parent | on HN ]