Wonders of Street View | Hacker News Reader

Wonders of Street View

neal.fun

439 pointsAmorymeltzer93 comments

Fun fact, the home page shows a few places, these are called Ducks in architecture [0]. When I found out about Ducks, I've been pretty obsessed about them, and call them out anytime I see one. My favorite one that I found was a tooth at Mexico City Dentist [1]

[0] - https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-quirky-endeari...

[1] - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dental+office+%22La+Muelit...

I like the Oracle buildings in California designed to look like UML databases. https://maps.app.goo.gl/U7TWkc5mrQMGzkgY6

Wow, driven by there several times, I never noticed that!

Unrelated but LOL, you really cannot place a bicycle lane better and more inviting.. and it ends just in the nowhere into a giantic crossing.

"Its a trap" comes to mind. (:

And the airport closest to Oracle is SQL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Carlos_Airport_(California...

Look at the right side of that pond. They have a racing yacht on display.

Thanks for teaching me something new today. Wonder if there were a subreddit for these - there should be!

I have never found one

After knowing the term about this I immediately thought of the famous Tea Pot in Sharjah that I visit, here it is https://www.google.com/maps/@25.3361392,55.3870049,3a,75y,22...

Nice! That's a good one!

Here's an office shaped like a huge ship, for a seafood wholesaler.

https://goo.gl/maps/FB6xqEtUFKdpuEze9

https://www.google.com/maps/@25.9848593,-97.1882493,3a,74.99...

Starbase streetview is pretty cool

Not really the same, cool none the less. A duck is a building built in the shape related to the business they are in. If the ships were their offices, then it would be a duck.

If you are a Street View fan, check out GeoGuessr, a game where you try to guess the location of a Street View. Some pros on YouTube can guess with scary accuracy.

https://www.geoguessr.com/

Why does a game like that need an account…

Because it is based on Google Maps so needs to pay for that.

It didn't used to, but Google 10x'd the API costs for street view.

To raise enough money to buy a vowel, and fix the missing "e".

I happen to know the person who first came up with that when Flickr was looking for a name. He feels bad about it, so I try to keep my teasing down to once every few years.

If I Venmoed you $10 would you tease him about it this weekend?

Transfr both of us a fivr and we'll badgr and pestr him in tandm!

You mean Nb? I oftn vx that derangd mothr fuckr furthr than he deservs. ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415473

>I am looking forward to the day that AP starts replacing the missing penultimate "e"'s in the poorly spelled names of companies that were too cheap to buy the correct domain name, like Flickr and Flattr.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11526636

>What really impresses me about Viber is the way they went all out and splurged with an honest to god penultimate "e" before the final "r". Most dot-com companies would have settled for "Vibr", but they went the distance and bought an authentic luxurious vowel, precisely where it was called for, without going overboard and throwing in a sometimes-vowel "y" in place of the "i". Very bold and straightforward spelling, I must say. Color me impressed!

>>Viber is an Israeli company, don't be so judgmental of their poor startup spelling skills.

>>>No, you misunderstand: I am truly and earnestly impressed by their good spelling, not criticizing any bad grammar. If they'd named it "Vybr," it would have come off like Steve Buscemie holding a skateboard over his shoulder wearing a MUSIC BAND t-shirt, desperately trying to appeal to the youth demographic.

>>>>Read that one again with </sarcasm> at the end :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14489564

>The fact that its name is missing the penultimate "e" should have clued people in that it was an over-hyped up sham.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822776

>2004 called. They want their missing penultimate "e" back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19483596

>I dunno -- the name "credder" sounds much more authoritative and trustworthy to me than "spidr", because they didn't leave out the penultimate "e".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29068627

>At least he didn't call it "Canvasr"! The missing-penultimate-e-suffix is so tird, not wird.

I do indeed. Glad to know more people are aware of his crime against humanity.

HN users try not to get mad at a for-profit service that has to pay bills out of their control challenge (impossible)

I got so addicted to this for 3-4 months that I had to stop. It was so fun especially after I started to get the hang of the game and various nuance of local infrastructure.

For those looking to see some pros in action I highly recommend GeoWizard (has a bit of a comedy bent and tends to be regarded as an original pro who relies way less on meta), and Rainbolt, probably one of the single best players when it comes to memory.

I find it absurd it's even possible to do these. His skills have been used to report kidnappings recently.

Never seen any other geoguesser than Rainbolt, but he blows my mind every time.

And also https://geotastic.net for a free alternative

+1 for Geotastic. I play regularly with friends — It's very well developed and he shows you how much your play has cost in Google Maps API usage to reference if you choose to (optionally) pay.

Ok, today I learned something. This giant teapot in West Virginia has a window for "pop": https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=xMaHmC

Growing up as a Michigander, that's the term I learned for carbonated soft drinks. E.g., redpop: https://heartofmich.com/products/faygo-redpop

But I thought that was a pretty midwestern phenomenon. I thought the rest of the US was in the "soda" camp, except for the south, where I was horrified to learn that "coke" is the generic term.

And an extremely enterprising soul, Alan McConchie, has produced an excellent map confirming this: https://popvssoda.com/

So why is West Virginia talking about pop? It looks like WV is a linguistic battleground, with all three words having influence. But this particular thing is in an area I didn't know existed, WV's "Northern Panhandle", a territorial incursion which creeps up between Columbus and Pittsburgh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Panhandle_of_West_Vir...

And it turns out that goes back to the Revolutionary War, where Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts all tried to claim parts of the Midwest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_County,_Virginia

Having grown up in the northern panhandle, you really have to look at is a tri state area. PA, OH, and WV.

It’s extremely distinct from the rest of WV below the mason dixon line.

The original capital of WV was actually Wheeling, in the northern panhandle, but it was eventually moved south to Charleston because of the disconnect.

In the 19 years I lived there I never heard anyone say anything but “pop” to refer to carbonated soft drinks. It’s also part of my dialect that has stuck around.

I think the most distinctive word used in the region is that shopping carts are referred to as “buggies”. I didn’t even realize that was unusual until I went shopping with friends in college…

Thanks! I really appreciate the direct report.

My dad, who grew up in Milwaukee, was shocked to learn that the thing he knew as a "bubbler" was everywhere else called a "water fountain". Like you, he didn't know until college.

Oddly, "bubbler" is the standard term in Australia as well.

Fun fact: certain parts of the UK , e.g. Devon, say "pop". But no one says soda unless they've been watching too much TV.

We say pop in Liverpool too but only for fizzy lemonade.

Maybe I'm dense (or just American) but what is the connection between 'too much TV' and 'soda'?

If you watch too much TV, you'll adopt more US English terms than from your local dialect.

Ah.

Heh, "coke" is the only one that sounds normal to me (I'm from the southwest). Where I'm from, if you ask for a coke at a drive-through, they'll ask "what kind?". And then you say "Sprite", or whatever you want.

Thanks for talking about it. I have to remind myself that all words are made up.

I get that there Sprite is a coke, but what do you say if you want a Coke?

Then you just say "Coke" again. If you sound confused, we know you're not from here. If you treat this as a perfectly normal and sane interaction, then you're one of us ;)

I created streetviewr.com a few days after Street View launched in 2007 and ended up with some pretty fun images. After a couple of years, it became too much work to update and the domain lapsed. Kind of wished I'd kept it going.

https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=30vag3

This one is known locally as the Magic Roundabout. (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempst... )

Beat me to it! - officially they’re “Ring Junctions” I believe.

The big ones aren’t too hard to navigate (from a drivers POV they’re just a succession of mini roundabouts), but there’s one at Hatton Cross (near Heathrow airport) that’s so small you can see the whole thing so traffic appears to come from all directions and it’s a bit of a nightmare: https://goo.gl/maps/PR4XBTPeEg1YojUeA

If you like this, you may enjoy this old blog of Street View images as art: https://9-eyes.com/

Anyone know how this works? I thought for a while it was picking a random Atlas Obscura location, but sometimes you just get an interesting temporary moment captured by the street view camera, like a bear eating some salmon or a guy riding in the bucket of a loader.

Did Neal actually just spend days browsing street view and manually curate a list?

Folks have linked to interesting finds on Google Street View for just about as long as Google Street View has existed. I'd imagine he probably borrowed locations from listicles like:

Crazy images caught on Google Street View: https://www.cnet.com/pictures/crazy-images-caught-on-google-...

25 funny Google Street View pictures: https://www.techadvisor.com/article/725278/25-funny-google-s...

48 Weird And Funny Images Caught On Google Maps Street View: https://www.journohq.com/blog/48-weird-and-funny-images-caug...

This might be one of my favorite Neal.fun projects yet.

Like GeoGeussr but without the guessing and everywhere is an interesting place. Would be nice if I could click on the location name and it would take to to it’s Wikipedia page.

The top of Mount Everest was incredible.

"Cubist church" is kind of a funny caption because of the grammatical ambiguity between "this is a church constructed in a cubist style" and "this is a church where people go to worship perpendicularity."

https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=3tXgUF

That reminds me of a church in San Francisco:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7851929,-122.4257436,3a,75y,...

It's officially known as Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, but its shape reminds many people, me included, of a washing machine agitator. So it's commonly known as Our Lady of Agitation, or St Mary of Maytag.

They could put a cross on the roof, but that wouldn't actually resolve the ambiguity.

I clicked on a few thinking "huh what weird places" ... then I stumbled upon the "Shark Attack" one (the famous "shark through the roof" in oxford, headington).

I used to live close by, literally two streets down. Small world ...

The Headington Shark has its own tag on Google maps

https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Headington+Shark/@51.7...

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7589771,-1.2131488,3a,75y,...

Camera trick or super powers? https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=b2wMrU

"Wild rabbits can jump up to 15 feet up and across" - https://thebunnyhub.com/how-high-can-rabbits-jump/

Good lord.

Stranded - https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=Vq3hmi

i don't think the street-view camera was meant to be taken here:

https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=rV6nxo

it's pretty funny the person went a decent way down the slide before the camera cuts off

Sometimes I just get on street view and find a place I've been before that's far away and just cruise around clicking carets.

If you've never done it, revisiting places you've been before in Google Earth VR is a kind of surreal experience. Whenever I've introduced friends to VR, letting them visit their old homes is always a hit.

One of my first hits was the Costa Concordia shipwreck in Italy. https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=wCvaAE

While playing with this, I landed inside a tardis [1] in England. Pure awesome.

[1] https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=QHW86N

It just fills me with joy that Neal Fun exists and makes these pages, this is just delightful, like all his stuff.

Also a great example of nominative determinism with is name, doubly so if he codes them all kneeling.

Street View free solos: https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=Scov79

Note this isn't the same climb as the "Free Solo" movie, and while Alex Honnold climbed much of the street view climb without ropes he (and the other climbers he was with) did use ropes in part. See eg https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7297919,-119.6368427,2a,75y,... (and you can follow his beta up the climb!)

Also the stories of these climbs are great: https://blog.google/products/maps/vertical-street-view-of-wo... and https://www.google.com.au/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/stree...

My favorite bit is the picture of Lynn Hill on the Jardine Traverse: https://www.google.com.au/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/stree...

Reminds of of the "Nine Eyes" project by Jon Rafman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKtY943F_Qg

Neat.

This one[0], "Pink Moss", is not moss. 芝桜 is Phlox subulata[1], which has common names including the word "moss", but it is not moss.

[0]: https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=ZYorsh

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlox_subulata

Did this make anyone else sad becomes it reminds you of how magical and cool Google when it was young?

What’s the last Street View Google did?

Related: https://randomstreetview.com

Best one so far: https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=AbCwoW

Walking in the snow to get a perfect Aurora picture.

https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=hpkvgy

ok this is really nice

I came across Scott's Hut in Antarctica

Really Cool!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott%27s_Hut

Scott's Hut:

https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=b2wMrU

Wow this made my day. Thank you

what's up with these pipes/handrails on this one?

https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=5i0Gvy

Looks like the image was stitched from multiple images taken by a single camera, but the camera moved around instead of panning/tilting in place. Closer objects (the rail) move more due to parallax and it becomes impossible to stitch perfectly

Cool! Would be nice if you could permalink to specific photos.

Click the share button on the bottom right and it gives you a link to copy.

neal.fun is never not entertaining. Amazing work!

Nice one, but I don’t like the history/back button “hijack”.

This is so much fun. Hope to remember to visit more often

I don't always read the link before the comments, but when I do, it's because "neal.fun"

This one is fun [1]. Don't look at the name! Cover or avoid the top-right corner and see if you spot the reason this image made the list.

[1]: https://neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view/?v=ZypGqK

Neal.fun is the only blog I have subscribed to get new post notifications from in 10 years.

If you do hit his subscribe button, there is a really cool animation too.

I think Google could improve street view with these points:

- allow the user to drag little pawn to a different point, while in street view

- when the user asks for directions, allow the user to follow the path of the route in street view (let the user click "next" to move to the next important intersection, but still maintain streetview controls)

- when the user asks for directions, show an overlay on the streetview with an arrow pointing into the direction where you're going

The first feature is available both on the browser version and mobile (click maximize button to enter a split view).

The second is more or less possible on the mobile app since recent versions, if you access the street view from the route steps. They have worked in improving this UI very recently, a few months ago it was unusable and now it's pretty intuitive.

The third one is also available on mobile, with the Live view feature that appears during walking routes.

hmm, I get a splash screen then a mostly empty screen with a few icons around the edge, but nothing else. What is supposed to happen? If I click "Random" it just spins, and nothing else changes. (firefox, ublock origin)

It's embedding Google Maps stuff. Possibly you have Google blocked in some manner or another?

Pedantic: Several of these are not street views.

One was a 360 view of a water fall (Bolivia), and another an aerial view of the PAC Man building. What are the inputs here?

Click the share button on the side and it’ll give you the Street View link.

i dont know the nuances of what is and isnt "street view" but google maps does incorporate user uploaded static 360 images, maybe some of the ones you mention are in that category

They are all photospheres. Some are created by Google themselves while others are user contributions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com