All the linked blog post tells us is that the author enjoyed playing Sim City 2000. Not Hacker News :)
It was more from a meta perspective, I would like more HN folks to know about the excellent flowingdata.com website.
As a map dev, I'd like to see a lot more competition to Google/MS/Yahoo from hand-painted maps. It's an under-explored niche. Another example: hand-painted, interactive road intersections at Yandex Maps - http://maps.yandex.ru/map.xml?mapID=2000&mapX=4159769...
Do you have any recommendations for other resources for getting high-quality maps?