Hacker News Reader

Comment by huebnerob | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up' but fails to provide any evidence of that actually happening. Instead, all the other odd names they call out actually originated somewhere in the community, albeit perhaps from esoteric sources.

What's more, NYT seems to willfully ignore that place names change and evolve constantly through natural social processes just like these. That Google is indexing this makes them no more the arbiter of it than a library is the arbiter of all knowledge.

View on HN

>Indeed, the article complains about names 'just being made up'

Unlike all those other placenames like "South of Market" which were decreed by god when he created San Fransisco :P

What they're really getting at is that it was made up by the wrong people. Like anything else that once happened organically among groups of people, you can now wrangle up an advertising budget and push it along.

My neighborhood has a "real" neighborhood name and a silly sub-neighborhood name that gets brought up once a year for a block party. If real estate developers thought the name was valuable, I bet it would mysteriously become a lot more popular.

That's more an issue of how US society is presently structured.

Money (spent) IS speech.

Want to speak more or louder? Spend more money.

True, community efforts to agree socially on something also matter, but it takes much more social capital than it does cash capital to affect such changes.

From the article:

> In San Francisco, the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area.

How are these the "wrong" people to be naming the neighborhood?

One of the cities I’m most familiar with (Cambridge) has a set of neighborhood names and boundaries that a lot of people would more or less agree with. But they’re by no means canonical and not all the boundaries are especially rigid.

Plus there are plenty of sub-neighborhood names that do get used but don’t really define any meaningful community or other enclave.

Some cities do seem to take a more active role in defining official neighborhoods but many don’t.

It's funny how the article simultaneously complains about using the "wrong" name for East Cut while also saying that the same area has three other names the locals know it by. It seems like no one agrees on the official name

Even if it wasn't Google they wouldn't be the first to influence the naming of neighbourhoods. Telephone companies used to have a similar authoritative role:

> Barry F. Hersh, a professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University, said online maps were only the latest tool in a long line of technology influencing geography. “The telephone company once decided which neighborhood you were in,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/nyregion/amateur-mapmaker...

> names 'just being made up'

Ultimately, is there any other possible source of names?

Yes, another article from the Times complaining that they don't get to make up neighbourhood names anymore ("newspapers used to disseminate new names") but Google does.

Can you point me to the other articles where the NYT complains that they don't get to make up neighborhood names anymore but Google does?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/opinion/new-york-neighbor...

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/procro-sobro-fid...

What I'm noting in these articles is an absence of mentions of Google or newspapers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com