Show HN: I mapped every US golf course
- Open Source
- Maps
- Consumer
- Data
- Climate
The post is a launch of Golf Course Browser, a free directory and map of US golf courses. It uses OpenStreetMap as the base, then layers in scorecards, USGA rating and slope, public or private status, and user-submitted corrections. The pitch is simple: Google is bad at basic golf course discovery, commercial datasets go stale, and a focused map can do better if golfers help clean it up.
What came through strongest is that this is exactly the kind of narrow utility people will stress test immediately. Readers found missing courses, bad links, wrong locations, a search limitation, and even a map-wrap bug around Guam. The author fixed at least one bug on the spot and kept steering people to the in-app correction flow, which made the project look more like a living data pipeline than a static side project. That mattered more than the raw launch itself.
A second theme was whether a specialized app like this should remain a private layer on top of OpenStreetMap or push improvements back upstream. Several people pointed out that OSM already has surprisingly deep golf tagging, sometimes down to holes, greens, and bunkers, and may already cover nearly every course worldwide. That shifted the useful framing from "can one person map golf courses" to "what extra facts belong in OSM versus in a golf-specific product." The author said they have already named unnamed courses and want to contribute back eventually, but not yet.
The other big turn was cultural rather than technical. A large chunk of comments stopped talking about the app and started arguing about golf courses themselves: water use, pesticides, public access, tax treatment, and whether courses are elite land grabs or just another recreational amenity. The comments did not land on one moral verdict. They did land on a more concrete point: golf courses are wildly context dependent. In some places they are cheap municipal facilities, flood plains, or reclaimed landfills. In others they are lush private spaces in water-stressed cities. That makes any broad claim about golf course harm or value too blunt to be useful.
Net result: people found the product genuinely useful, but the strongest signal was operational. Niche map products win when they turn enthusiasts into maintainers, use open data without pretending it is enough on its own, and respond fast enough that users believe their corrections will stick.
If you build a vertical directory on top of open data, users will quickly turn it into both a QA pipeline and a governance debate. Plan for fast correction loops, clear data provenance, and a story for how improvements feed back into the commons if you want the project to compound.
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golfcoursebrowser.com
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