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Comment by KMag | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I know lots of people who will walk 2 sides of a triangle because they know how to get from A to B and A to C, but just don't have a sense that B and C are rather close. I think they feel there's probably a shortcut between B and C, but they just don't have the sense of direction to just walk in the general direction from B toward C until things start looking familiar.

I also can't count the number of times I've argued with someone about the direction to walk because their phone's compass is off in a dense urban environment. They insist on walking the direction they think Google Maps is telling them to walk, only to have the whole map spin after walking half a block when the compass gets its bearings. I've seen the same person dumbfounded several times by this.

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I hate it when map apps spin. Just absolutely hampers any ability to develop a bigger picture idea of how you're navigating, and is terribly confusing when the app gets your heading wrong, as your friend found out.

I don't like self-orienting phone maps, but people who never learned to properly read a map are likely to have trouble with maps that don't self-orient. They're better off with self-orienting maps, even if the self-orienting map sometimes are incorrectly oriented.

Up is always north in my phone, and I’m always amazing how it trips people up

I’ve done that in myself in Manhattan. I always travel there by train and would take a circuitous route by train, only to realize when driving last year that I was like a 10 minute walk away!

When I first got to MIT, some students told me how to get to CambridgeSide Galleria mall: either walk to the Keandall/MIT T (subway) station and wait 20 minutes for the free shuttle bus to the mall, or take the red line, switch to the green line in central Boston, and head out to Lechmere station. The mall is a few minutes' walk from Lechmere station.

I took the free shuttle bus once, and realized the mall is 5 to 10 minutes by foot from the MIT/Kendall T station. I don't know how you make several runs by shuttle bus to get a few things for your dorm/fraternity room and don't realize it's silly to wait for the bus. If the weather is bad, or you're coming back with a lot of things, that's one thing, but it's generally silly to wait for that shuttle bus. I knew more than one MIT student who thought it was a long way to the Galleria because of the long wait for the shuttle bus or the long T ride into Boston and back out. Of course, this was before smart phones, and I'm not even sure Yahoo maps were popular my freshman year, so these students probably never looked up the location of the Galleria a map.

I've had android phones for 11 years. Every single one gets my orientation wrong when driving but stopped. If I'm at an intersection stopped, and open Maps, it thinks I'm pointing in the direction opposite my real orientation EVERY SINGLE TIME. On all the phones I've had, I swear to god there's a flag on my google account that was used 11 years ago and fogotten about that fixed a bad compass or something.

Both my wife's iPhone and my Android phone frequently have their compasses incorrect when woken.

I remember early Android phones showing a short animation when opening Google Maps, showing one how to move the wrist in a figure-eight motion to orient the compass.

I don't think there was a setting. I think they just got rid of the animation showing you how to fix the compass.

I know someone who freezes on trips in other countries when she enters an underground station and the map stops responding. She just doesn't understand why the magic stopped working. She is so dependant on Google maps that she doesn't trust herself anymore. I tried to explain GPS and satellites, but she is dense.

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