Working at Google: Maps | Hacker News Reader

Working at Google: Maps

albertcory50.substack.com

63 pointsAlbertCory42 comments

I've got to say, I was reading through this article, and I thought all this context introducing characters and databases and competitors and requirements were was going to lead to some big dramatic crescendo tying all those elements together, like the new managers insisting on a database that created a limitation which lead to the crisis response team ending up using ArcGIS, or a lesson about product strategy and why Google isn't trying to compete with ArcGIS.

So I was surprised when article ended up saying user-imported data sometimes can't be parsed so we put a red triangle by it, and that was the end.

You never realise how similarly structured a lot of articles are, until you read one without the same structure :)

> You never realise how similarly structured a lot of articles are, until you read one without the same structure :)

That's because 99% of those articles are hidden ads, submarine articles (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html).

> "Do jeans help you lose weight?"

> 5000 words later... based no information from <<Levi's executive Ala Bala>>... yes, they might help you, but don't forget to eat your salad.

or:

> How we set up a billion dollar processing system by adopting MiracleLang

> 5000 words of challenges successfully overcome. Not a peep 24 months later to find out if the maintenance burden killed the company, because the principal engineer that pushed MiracleLang is not at CompetingCorp, pitching MiracleLang for another project.

This one is an actual unfiltered article, I think, no survivor bias, i.e. not an article only listing wins.

The star is kind of example. It's a half baked and frankly dumb reference no PR-reviewed article would <<ever>> put in there.

Found it more interesting because of that, also quite useful.

I use MyMaps quite extensively, but I import my data using a .kml file that I've created beforehand via a quick Python script. I saw that they had the .csv option for the imports, but never tested it out and never knew that it could do all those cool things.

Also, on the slight chance that a MyMaps developer reads these comments, it would be real nice if the feature would be available on my phone's Safari browser. For some reason you can only access MyMaps through the browser if you're using a PC/laptop (maybe Android, too? I haven't tested in there).

Thank you. I have no idea who works on that nowadays, and, being Google, they're probably going to kill the feature.

wow, interesting. Thanks.

This is a strange article. Why did the author feel the need to include the pictures of two random guys that were put on the project and are not even relevant to any of what he writes about?

One of many strange things about it. The other being the story suddenly turns into a tutorial about some maps feature.

It feels like part diary, part history, part showing off something he built.

We come here expecting an article with a message, some sort of point, a call to action, a moral point, some big issue that needs to be addressed, but instead we just get a sequence of events.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but it does make you think about article structure and how we're driven by expectations.

I was expecting him to say that Igor quashed any possible rebellion by PIPing the malcontents, with Louis providing skip manager cover, thus neatly explaining why My Maps remains so utterly basic. Instead, the article just pivots to some minor feature description.

I use this, and it's amazing.

I like to collect things from places I've been. When I bought my motorcycle they gave my kids some poker chips with the dealership's name on them. I found out that it's very common for Harley dealers to have these poker chips with their name, maybe a logo, and maybe some contact info on them. They're typically sold at the merchandise / cosplay desk.

A couple months later I was in Sydney, had a bit of local currency to get rid of and happened across a dealership there and picked up a couple. It was on. It's been about 7 years and I've collected a little over 400 different dealers. There are about 1400 open dealerships in the world, with about half in America, about 400 have closed since I started tracking that. Obviously I needed a way to track what I had to ensure I didn't get duplicates and identify places I haven't been to.

I track all of it in a Google sheet. I scraped the info for all of the dealers off of the Harley website, which thankfully comes with latitude and longitude. Supplement that with information about what I've collected, and information from the last scrape for dealerships that have closed. From there it takes about a minute to import this into Google maps and use styling to make it pretty.

https://pasteboard.co/iMjSJRbmjOMs.png

Super. You don't really need lat-lng, as the article says. But it's certainly helpful if you have it.

It's particularly useful for the historical places. And the ones in countries with a less... uh... developed address system.

There's a dealership that's closed listed as "Service Point - Costa Rica" where the address is "RUTA 32, KILOMETRO 14" in "San Isidro". Maps does not do very well with that information, and just searching for the address lists a place 50 km away.

Is this written by ai? Its mostly rambling nonsense.

Two things:

First of all,

Having read the article (though with relative attention), I do not see how it could be categorized as «rambling nonsense» - it seems to be a very interesting page of history. You will have to be more detailed.

Then,

It is getting perplexing and a suggestion of careless bad habit to read 'AI' there where _'statistical language models'_ seems to be the right term.

"Artificial Intelligence" is the "problem solver that can replace a professional", and there is no need for encouraging disparaging tints on the whole, and there are good reasons to differentiate "AI proper", made to obtain reliable outputs, from the attempts around it.

What's really perplexing is how you passed off an entirely invented meaning for the term AI so authoritatively...

You're definitely in a minority if you really think LMs don't qualify as

> the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages

This is HN - you MUST question any article painting Google in a good light and SHOULD question articles that portray any other company well but MAY just ignore them.

Any other text such as definitions for the term AI is valid as long as it complies with RFC101HN.

I hate this comment and don't wanna upvote it. But I'm fucken gonna.

Mad props for correct usage of requirement level keywords sufficient to cause an amused snort.

> how

Yes, it's what thinkers do :)

Statements come from their own processing.

> LMs

I am afraid the term 'Language Model' does not fit the category; 'Statistical Language Model' is required to define (after interpretation) what they do. Not all Language Models need to be based on relational frequencies of term occurrence.

(Hopefully, some will be even based on mechanisms of Intelligence - the opposite.)

> «the theory and development [...]»

If you wanted to quote John McCarthy (project proposal for the Dartmouth summer seminar, 1955), the actual words were «An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves».

I reckon the letter of what you quoted seems to be a "merriamwebsterism" - inherently with limited authority, because dictionaries typically express use, not meaning.

> qualify

The output of text must be an intelligent composition to fit into the context of a «task» that «require[s] human intelligence», as per the definition you proposed - because you do not need «human intelligence» to delirate (as in, outputting text not filtered by intelligence).

> minority

If that ever were an indicator, it would suggest the possibility of a promising stance, given that in Paretian distributions (what you actually find outside of selected groups) the function of the majority is poor.

> Yes, it's what thinkers do :)

You're proving that thinking and knowing are wholly uncorrelated.

> Not all Language Models need to be based on relational frequencies of term occurrence.

"A language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words"

If you don't even know what an LM is, I don't feel like reading the rest of this.

> proving

Whereas your contribution is?

> know

An interview with Yann LeCun came out yesterday: he defined (S)LMs along those lines. Maybe discuss the matter with him. Does YLC represent an authoritative part enough for you?

> don't feel

"Outstanding". Does not make much sense here

I do wonder if the people who wring their hands over big-tech employee class-systems have ever had a 'real' job or if they think they get fancy perks simply because their employers are kind.

  They had yellow badges (at Google, regular employees had badges with no color, contractors had red, and interns had blue). The symbolism of yellow apparently was lost on the HR people who chose that color.

  <holocaust yellow star of david jpeg>

  The Yellow Badges were not permitted to go anywhere else on the Google campus, and they couldn’t even get into the microkitchens in their own building.

Is this real life or is the proportion of googlers with severe brain damage on the increase again?

The Jew star in your article Is very not cool.

The yellow badge they make low paid google temps use is also Not Cool either.

There is a difference in degree, and that distinction is important.

Someone being paid only $60k or whatever temps instead of $180k is not great, but it's not the same as being the target of a genocide.

Remember that, it's very insensitive to make these comparisons.

You're trivializing some of the worst events in human history by doing that.

Google temps woke up and the previous comment is being down voted :-))

If you say so.

Fuck you for comparing them though.

Comparing Google's yellow contractor badges to the "Jude" star that the Nazis made Jews wear is tasteless, and pointless at best. Please consider a revision.

why they are literally the same thing? As the US minimum wage is proved "unlivabley low", it is exactly equivalent to genocide! I also cannot believe that Google would sink so low as to employ non-tech people, like a fast food chain!!

Google doesn't, they are hired through temp agencies that do the unpleasant work of slave-driving.

my comment was sarcasm if not obvious btw

I was thinking about this. You're right that they do use temp agencies for most things, but the fact that these people had ANY badge probably indicates they were hired directly by Google. This was 2011, remember.

I have no clue who hired them, but I heard that the special badge was only ever used for that project and for a number of specific reasons that had more to do with lawyers than finances. (A bunch of us tailgated into that building once, but we didn't manage to stay past a minute or two.)

It's made in a tasteless and brutal manner in the article, but the comparison is far from irrelevant.

"Badging" low-wage and low-skill labor with a yellow color, for the sole purpose of making sure they don't go "anywhere else on the Google campus", including "the microkitchens in their own building" is segregation.

That doesn't mean the author is accusing Google of being a bunch of Nazis. But IMHO they're right to point out that segregation is segregation.

I wonder how My Maps is going to evolve, or not for that matter. The ability to customize the maps, and edit existing data is really painful. That makes me wonder, what was the goal of it all? Started out as a competitor to ArcGIS, but has now evolved to be something in between of a lot of existing software, but not a complete replacement of any.

They'd probably like to kill it, but it IS useful. In fact, you can see from the illustrations that I use it myself.

Did Mr. Cory get authorization from his employer to substack his ongoing work? Did he also get permission of the five or six names mentioned to substack their roles, likenesses, and detailed accounts of their political jockeying? If so, I'd like to hire Cory as a honeypot for some corporate espionage work.

You've got a great future at 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑡𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑐 if you're looking to become a professional at this.

Wow, you really know how to hurt a guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

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