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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Nice effort, but still needs a lot of work. This view of the western US picks out four coastal cities worthy of mention: "Tijuana" (fine), "Los Angele" (sic!), "San Jose" (err..) and "Calgary" (wat). No San Francisco, no Seattle, no Vancouver...

https://maps.wikimedia.org/#4/40.15/-93.38

Scripts are also all over the place. Japan is Japanese only, China is Chinese only, India is English, Bangladesh is Bengali, Pakistan is partly Urdu and English, the Arab countries are totally inconsistent...

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If you're going on population, San Jose is the biggest city in the Bay Area; in that sense, it makes sense to pick it as the "one that wins" in a very dense area. Calgary is around 1M people and Tijuana is 1.3M, while Seattle and Vancouver are each around 600k. Those choices seem pretty reasonable to me.

San Jose is bigger than San Francisco only because its city limits occupy far more area. San Francisco is a bigger population center.

…do you live in San Francisco?

I do. How can I help you? :)

>San Francisco

>Population

>City and county 852,469

>Metro 4,594,060

>CSA 8,607,423

>San Jose

>Population

>City 1,015,785

>Metro 1,952,872

>CSA 8,607,423

Colloquially, "population" refers to either the metropolitan area population or the CSA population, or something in between. But since different countries have different concepts and definitions for "metro area", it can't be relied on for a global map. The only thing remotely portable in this case is "how many people live within the city limits". And by that measure, San Jose is indeed bigger than San Francisco. San Francisco doesn't even get a mention because its population within city limits is below one million - the cut-off line.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California

It sounds like you argue that because San Jose is bigger both by territory and by population, somehow that makes San Francisco truly bigger. However, if it's bigger in both, it only makes sense the map algorithm chooses it to display on lower resolutions. I don't think going by population density is that common.

Is the e in San Jose, California really accented? (It shows up as San José for me.)

It's optional I suppose. I'm not aware of any official city documents that use it, but it has historical roots.

> California Governor Felipe de Neve established the first civilian town or pueblo in California on November 29, 1777. Founded near the southern end of San Francisco Bay, it was christened El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080218051828/http://www.califor...

The official website seems to use the accent when the city name's is written in regular running text, but not when it's in all-caps or small-caps (as in the logo): http://www.sanjoseca.gov/

That used to be an unofficial convention of the Spanish language regarding accented letters: only in minuscule text but not on majuscule (capital) text. The Royal Academy has always supported (since at least 1792) that majuscules should be accented, but it was difficult to do so since movable types and typewriters didn't allow room for them: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Acento_e...

In the context of a zoomed out global map it would seem to make more sense to approach it by Metro area. Vancouver metro area is 2.5M vs Calgary's 1.2M. Seattle is 3.6M

Also, I would think national capitals should be included where possible.

Alas, it's an early beta.

But you shouldn't just pick it based on some statistical measure only. Maps are supposed to be a useful tool, and that should consider the cultural importance of a place.

I'm guessing it's because San Jose and Calgary have over 1M population -- the cities of SFO and Seattle proper do not.

Seems worth noting, it does have the right name for Los Angeles — the label is just running into Phoenix.

Looks like a boundary between tiles there:

https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/4/2/6.png

https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/4/3/6.png

Placing labels on a map is quite a hard problem, especially when certain tiles are refreshed.

Milwaukee loses the last letter too at certain zooms. Oddly nothing but the lake to its right though.

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