A Map of Places in the US with the Same Name | Hacker News Reader

A Map of Places in the US with the Same Name

pudding.cool

56 pointsheadalgorithm57 comments

I tried looking up "Hollywood" and apparently the entire country assumes this to mean Hollywood, FL.

I assume this means that intra-city place names aren't considered?

Another anomly is comparing "Moscow" and "Cambridge". Most places consider "Moscow" to refer to the Russian capital, but consider "Cambridge" to refer to the city in Kentucky. I would have assumed the UK city would get the win here, but the nuance is that when people use this name, they're almost always referring to the university, and not the town it's located in.

For the dozen or so other cities I tried, it all seemed right to me. "Springfield" and "Portland" in particular.

This is neat!

When I lived in California, MD I went to Hollywood Elementary School a few miles down the road in Hollywood, MD which is also home to Middle Earth, MD.

I can't make this stuff up.

Western Maryland has an Accident.

Funny, I grew up in Hollywood, FL, and have always had to tell people I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, lest they though I meant California. Unless, of course, they're Canadian, in which case they all seem to know the Florida city very well.

Also noticed the "Every place named Hollywood, ranked" section doesn't even mention Hollywood, CA, so that may be why the map is skewed.

Upon further investigation, it turns out Hollywood, CA isn't a city, but a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles, so it's all starting to make sense now.

https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/

They list their main data sets, which looks to go down to Wikipedia’s lists of incorporated and unincorporated communities. Hollywood, being only a neighborhood, doesn’t make this list. That said, they are also routinely adding new places manually.

> Most places consider... "Cambridge" to refer to the city in Kentucky

By "most places" I feel like we mean the USA? I live in the university town of Cambridge, England and have never heard anyone in Europe talk about Cambridge, Kentucky. I never knew Cambridge, KY existed until today, despite encountering all the lost waifs in /r/cambridge trying to talk about Cambridge, MA or Cambridge, Ontario.

I think this is wrong.

When I hear Cambridge I think Harvard/MIT. I know Cambridge England exists, but don't really know anything about it. I had no idea Cambridge Kentucky existed and I live much closer to Kentucky than I do Massachusetts of England.

I’m in the USA and this is my first time hearing of the Kentucky city. For me “Cambridge” refers 50/50 to either the Massachusetts town or the English university.

There’s also a Cambridge in Ontario Canada. Population 140k.

> I tried looking up "Hollywood" and apparently the entire country assumes this to mean Hollywood, FL.

Also, take a look at "Springfield" (unfortunately, I can't figure out to link to a result). It says most of the country thinks it's Springfield, MA, which I frankly don't believe. IMHO, the correct answer is most likely Springfield, IL, because that's the capital of Illinois and you'd learn that while learning states and capitals in elementary school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Illinois

Similarly, I think most of the other Springfields have "catchment areas" (for lack of a better term) that are far too large. They should shrink because of the particular "fame" of Springfield, IL.

Edit: After reading https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/, I think their "usually refers to" ratings are actually disinformative. It might be OK for places no one ever hears about except through proximity, but "Wikipedia article length" is not a good-enough proxy for cultural knowledge. They really should base this map on some kind of survey data (even a non-scientific internet survey would be far better and probably get pretty close to the truth).

Springfield, MA is quite a bit bigger, though. In fact, Springfield, MO is also larger (at least comparing metropolitan areas) than the capital of Illinois.

This situation happens again between Augusta, GA (where the PGA Masters are held) and Augusta, ME (the capital), and perhaps most confusingly for students, between Salem, OR (the capital) and tiny Salem, MA, which owes its outsized reputation to the infamous witch trials.

But for me as a child, the winner was surely Juno Beach, FL, colloquially "Juno", which was where the snowball shack and the pier were (with its overcrowded surf break), while for most people the syllables in "Juneau" probably refer to somewhere much colder.

> (unfortunately, I can't figure out to link to a result)

HN doesn't do Markdown hyperlinks to prevent scam / fake links. It also doesn't allow bolding. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I had the same example. It is cool when you try Paris, Paris still means Paris, FR

surprisingly, it gets Vancouver, WA vs Vancouver, CA and Georgia correct.

It said the 2nd ranked "Portland" in NYC is Portland, CT (??) when it should almost certainly be Portland, MA

Hollywood, California isn't really a town, it's more of a district/neighborhood of Los Angeles.

My wording was clumsy (“intra-city place name”) but yeah that appears to be the reason it’s ignored.

I’m thinking the ZCTA database would be a good source of place names that doesn’t restrict itself to cities and towns.

Definitely it would be cool if this handled unofficial names/nicknames. "The City" would be particularly interesting, or "Chinatown".

Also the inverse: what are the most popular names for the same location. "San Francisco" vs "SF" vs "San Fran", for example, or "DC" vs "Washington".

The Cambridge results are clearly a big of some sort. By their own metrics Cambridge MA should rank much higher.

To me, Cambridge means "Cambridge, MA" first (which is a major part of Boston metropolitan area), or "Cambridge, UK" second. I wasn't aware of other Cambridges.

Let the explainer[1] explain why this really doesn't make all that much sense:

    "We chose to blend three properties to match our perception of how this plays out in reality:

    Distance: the proximity to a place.

    Population: the size of a place is a pretty good indicator of its importance.

    Wikipedia article length: an extra layer of nuance for the cultural importance/awareness of places that may not have a large population."

[1] https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/method/

I tried Carthage and Troy. Neither are handled well, despite lengthy Wikipedia articles and calculable distances. Maybe a current population of zero results in exclusion.

“Every county on the map above gets a score for each place based on a combination of proximity, population, and Wikipedia article length, then normalized by share.”

This score does not tell you “what place someone is most likely referring to, depending on where they are.”

Yep. Love the idea, but the score is pretty wrong.

E.g. Fremont. According to the map, there is a large area north of Sacramento for whom "Fremont" refers to an unpopulated place in Yolo County[1] rather than the city of a quarter million a in the Bay Area. That seems.... unlikely.

[1] Railroad sidings have names and end up in geographic place lists. Looks to me like Wikipedia has filtered out many siding names but not all of them. I suspect this particular "Fremont" is a siding name.

Also, in the Seattle area, "Fremont" likely refers to its Fremont neighborhood, and not, as the map claims, a place in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont,_Seattle

Place name ambiguity was my Ph.D. dissertation topic (Toponym Resolution in Text, University of Edinburgh, 2007): It is a challenge for humans (I know people who flew to the wrong place with the right name) and even more for machines (going only by the string, all 1627 ¨Santa Ana¨s look the same to the machine).

I know live in Coburg, Germany, and googling for ¨pizza coburg¨ I still get pizza places from Coburg, Victoria, Australia in my result page as of 2023.

I wonder how many times per day a little pizza store in Coburg VIC gets random calls in German? "Sorry mate, you're a bit outside our free delivery range."

> (I know people who flew to the wrong place with the right name)

I've imagined this might happen with Ontario, CA, and Ontario, CA (ONT vs. YYZ, maybe), or Portland, ME and Portland, OR (PWM vs. PDL), or maybe Vancouver vs. Vancouver Island (YYJ instead of YVR?).

Or San José, Costa Rica (SJO) instead of San José, California (SJC)??

I've heard of a mishap involving Granada vs Grenada

I hope nobody managed to mess up Georgia the state and the country

It has happened between Birmingham, Alabama (BHM) and Birmingham, England, UK (BHX)

https://www.cbs42.com/news/alabama-welcomes-british-couple-a...

Obviously people don't pay attention to flight times, it should've been obvious when the trip was 9 hours shorter than it should've taken

If I understood that article correctly, the flight was mistakenly booked to begin at BHM instead of BHX (not to end at BHM instead of BHX). This is also a consequential mistake, but one that initially meant that the purchased flight couldn't be used, rather than that it took the travelers to an unexpected destination.

(But according to the story, people then bought an additional BHX-BHM flight for these travelers as a gift so that they could visit the other Birmingham and apparently then make use of the mistaken flight.)

>If I understood that article correctly, the flight was mistakenly booked to begin at BHM instead of BHX (not to end at BHM instead of BHX)

Yes, but it should've been obvious when the flight to Las Vegas was 4 hours instead of 12

Oh, I see, you mean the length of the flight displayed when booking it, rather than the length experienced when sitting on board it!

I live in Melbourne, and once had Linkedin feed me a job in Coburg, Germany (upon where I learned that Backend Entwickler means backend developer in German)

Australian place names often follow a slightly dysfunctional pattern IMHO; X Victoria, or Y New South Wales will 9 times out of 10 mean X is a suburb of Melbourne or Y is a suburb of Sydney. The same (albeit slightly weaker) pattern applies to Brisbane/Queensland, Perth/Western Australia, and Adelaide/South Australia. In my humble opinion they botched this, and they should have designed the system so that Coburg, Melbourne, Australia is the canonical form instead because it is much more informative (Coburg is a classic inner city suburb, a quick tram ride from the Melbourne CBD). The underlying reason for this is that the Australian population is usually clustered around the five largest cities in general, and the two largest cities in particular.

This is pudding cool but the heuristic might need greater weight on proximity, especially at close distances.

For example, Bingham County, ID [1] currently yields…

  Rank #1 Springfield, MA
  Rank #2 Springfield, IL

… but residents would more likely be referring to the local Springfield, ID [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_County,_Idaho

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Idaho

This is an interesting concept but I feel like the formula needs tuning. There is no way a person in Boston who mentions Baltimore is most likely talking about Baltimore, Vermont a town of 200 people.

Pleased to see this goes further than just accounting for city names that are spelled the same.

I often travel to Portland for work. First time I was asked by a number of employees "Where are you from?" Answering "Milwaukee" eventually resulted in a follow-up: "...but you flew here?" That puzzling question lead me to realize that everyone thought I was from "Milwaukie, OR", which is quite close to Portland. Pronounced the same as "Milwaukee", different spelling.

Looking at the map in this thread, indeed "Milwaukee" means Milwaukee, WI everywhere in the US except for a subsection of OR.

I thought the map for "Portland" was going to be an interesting split between the city in Oregon vs the city in Maine, but it didn't even recognize the city in Maine. I think it showed up fourth on its list losing out to two cities in Midwestern states.

Portland is interesting. It ranks Portland, Tennessee and Portland, Indiana above Portland, Maine.

https://pudding.cool/2023/03/same-name/?place=Portland

Weighing wiki length more heavily seems to produce better results.

Aside: there are several Portlands that don't seem to be ports (they're not on oceans or rivers)?

It dropped me into Denver, telling me that as a resident of Wake County, NC, I'm mostly likely talking about Denver, NC.

I've lived in Wake County since 2004 and literally never heard of Denver, NC before today.

Oh well. NC does have a town named Climax and apparently it's town most people in the US are thinking of when they're thinking of Climax.

The top Cambridge listed is Cambridge, KY, which is bizarre.

I'd have expected Cambridge, MA, or Cambridge, UK, far and away the most well known towns of this name in the world, but they're far down the list.

Algorithm could use some fine tuning :)

I imagine it varies greatly depending on social-economic class too. I would guess that people who didn't go to college are less aware of Cambridge, MA, since it's perhaps best known for its famous schools.

Yeah but socio-economic class has no part in the methodology used here, which seems entirely based on population, proximity and Wikipedia article size.

Right, but the HN demographic is probably more college-aware than the population at large, so that may explain why Cambridge, MA ranked lower than virtualwhys expected.

Weirdly, it doesn't handle unique placenames. So if I say my mom is from Huntertown, where do people think she's from?

No answer, and it won't even try. That's because there's only one Huntertown.

Finally found out where the Simpsons most likely live. Springfield...MA.

They revealed it in an episode. It's "Springfield, Oh Hi, Mom!"

Is that the one west of Cambridge?

In another life I was a truck driver. I was shocked by how many states had a town called Bowling Green. It seemed like every state I drove through would have one.

It would be cool if it could handle "the city"

As someone who's lived in both Atlanta, GA and Seattle, WA, I've never heard of Washington, GA :)

Now I'm curious to know what is the most common city name in the US.

Franklin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._p...

I'm really shocked they didn't think to make a sorted list of the most common city names available -- seems like that would be everyone's first question.

Doesn’t load.

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