Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?

I must be slightly confused about what claims this visualization is making. Are these 5 degree rays supposed to be indicating non-overlapping triangles where each triangle contains 100k population? If so, a full circle (with no triangles missing) would be a population of 7.2 million. And yet, clicking around Los Angeles County you can easily find multiple completely non-overlapping full circles, despite the county population being under 10 million.

That seems like the distance to go from having 100k people in front of you to having 100k people behind you. The distance you'd have to go to run into them properly would depend critically on the width of the vehicle you're in. With about 30k people running the Boston marathon and 60k people running the NY marathon, if you can source a vehicle wide enough to cover the course, it seems like you could pull it off in just a bit over 52.4 miles... assuming that the bodies didn't produce enough drag to slow you down so much that runners were managing to stay ahead of you on the course. (And assuming that marathon runners prioritize completion of the course over running sideways away from obvious danger, but they're marathon runners, that seems like a safe assumption.)

Is this resident population or ambient?

I've been building a UK-wide 24-hour population dataset lately, and it's really opened my eyes to how much population data is best-guess-estimate - including census figures - and quite how difficult it is to say with any certainly how many people "touched" a location on any given day.

The SF Bay Area is suddenly not so dense when you realize how much is water.

From Union Square, you'd need to scan the city plus the entire East Bay.

Would be cool to be able to change the width/angle of the petal

I live in the one of the densest parts of lower Manhattan, and often explain that when I take a walk around the neighborhood, I pass 100,000+ people.

This map pretty much proves it!

Really cool. Makes me wonder where the most remote point in the contiguous U.S. is by this metric.

That is a cool visualization.

Punched in my grandparents' town and a bunch of the slices stretched 1500km over three states away. A lot of the US is big and empty.

Is this supposed to mean that 100k people live in each slice of the pie? Counting up slices and comparing to my metro statistical area population, that about works out.

Doesn't work outside the US sadly.

I don't fully understand what this is supposed to visualize, but at least for my location it tells me I'd have to run considerably far into golden gate park, which I imagine is negligible in terms of people.

Fun! If you click in the center of Nebraska, US - there are some angles for which you will never find 100k people.

This is a killer app for Vancouver drivers.

This is cool and useful. I would love to see the drive time version.

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