Hoodmaps: Publicly Annotated City Maps | Hacker News Reader

Hoodmaps: Publicly Annotated City Maps

hoodmaps.com

153 pointssurprisetalk85 comments

I'm just getting an angry fruit salad of squares in most places with some edgy comments thrown in.

Basically, OpenStreetMap meets 4chan.

Yep, I don't like it. Amplifies racist and ignorant voices.

AFAIK there is no mechanism to artificially favor any particular view. There is only the thumbs up/down mechanism meaning what you see is what the userbase finds useful or amusing. It ain't that serious.

Yup, seems like no moderation is taking place...

its run by 1 guy that has like 10 other sites. I don't think he makes any money off this one, just leaves it up for fun.

If it was (more) moderated it would just be sterile, boring, and less true to reality. The entire point is to label areas with the most obviously applicable stereotype, and for that it's doing a great job.

Not really. My city seems to be mostly inaccurate trolling.

My area now’s too rural to have much on this site, but the city I’m most familiar with had pretty damn accurate labels.

Forests marked as offices... this is far from accurate.

Neighborhoods and golf course labeled as offices...

I’m not sure why there’s such a high expectation of accuracy on something called “hood maps” that doesn’t use extensive moderation? Just move on if you don’t find it interesting or amusing.

I guess I didn't see a big "this is a joke" label on the site so evaluated it as I would any service purporting to provide maps - where accuracy is a P0.

Guess what? It’s still boring

There used to be something similar to this (was it called wikimapia?) back around 2008-2010 or so (maybe it's still around?) where people could up/down vote the tags and if the downvotes prevailed the tag would go away.

Something similar happened to Google Map in Hong Kong recently. A dozen schools had their names changed by some pranksters. It's surprisingly easy.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3279201/...

When was this made, 2012? It's just so many variations of "hipster".

It’s been around since at least 2016, probably a few years earlier.

Eh, I have found it useful when checking out cities to move to

What do you look for when using this to decide where to move?

Looking at cities near me, I see things like "suburban kids trying to be urban", "we cute here", and "stroller mommies who brunch", alongside some racist stuff. I'm not sure how to use that information when making a life-changing decision like moving to a new city.

Bakfiets moms, International School kids, wannabe TV stars, hipsters, tourists are all useful signals. I'm an international parent who ride a bakfiets and likes art but does not want to be a tv star :-)

Those are all funny and somewhat useful. What’s the issue?

>What’s the issue?

Of those three examples I gave? No issue at all, why do you think there is one?

>and somewhat useful.

I don't see how they are useful when deciding on where to move. Can you explain how you find them somewhat useful in the context of moving cities? How are you factoring in "we cute here" into your relocation decision?

I've seen this same map used for years in digital nomad guides.

There is an overwhelming amount of racism on this app. Not even accurate racism, just racism.

Same for Pittsburgh: Completely wrong information about nearly all neighborhoods with a healthy dose of racism.

Basically, the internet.

Provide one example. Please. Everyone is claiming this but I don't see it at all.

In Amsterdam close to Sloterplas (lake in the West) “aggressive Moroccans”.

My city is, unsurprisingly, covered with racist scare-mongering over its majority-black parts.

I suppose I could put insults over the rich white parts, but why bother.

Same. I live in a poor neighborhood but it has two dope parks, a swimming pool, cool places. The map tells me I'll get murdered at the streets I cross literally every day and night

'dope park' might not be a clear term. I think you mean excellent parks, but my mind immediately went to parks where you might accidentally step on a hypodermic needle.

My town has both types of parks, with a little overlap in the venn diagram.

Has anybody used dope to mean drugs since the early 90s? Even then it could weirdly mean heroine or marijuana, which I'm guessing why it fell out of use.

No, but a lot of HN is (former) kids that had to sit through D.A.R.E for 12 years of school. "dope" immediately means "drugs" in my mind.

I was really sad when I learned what drugs actually were and it wasn't some guy in a trenchcoat and sunglasses giving you a flask filled with boiling pink stuff with smoke coming out the top. 12 years of drug education and they never really said what it was, what they did, what the side effects were, etc.

Yes, I say dope a lot because it’s funny but still informative.

My city has negative stereotypes across all racial and economic lines.

Please provide one single example. I am not seeing this alleged racism.

As an example of a more informative map of income/deprivation, I recently encountered the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation website (https://simd.scot). Only applicable to Scotland (obviously), but it is interesting to see how each city is a mosaic of social status. From personal experience, it is extremely accurate down to the street level!

Oh great. NextDoor was bad enough. Now we get a map version, where anyone can post their inchoate terror of people who don't conform exactly to their ideas of appearance or behavior.

Would you rather it not exist? This is just like a casual project, not a business.

Great site. I've used it for years and it's been very useful travelling around many cities. Especially for booking accomodations.

Sponsored by maptiler, yet is lacking required[1] OpenStreetMap attribution.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

Just found it bottom right ;)

Underneath the UI... (with a label saying: "Beware of the Leopard")

I enjoyed the Cape Town categories. At least in my experience the :

'Students', 'Drunk student', 'Poor students', 'Karens on community whatsapp groups', 'newly weds and almost deads', 'Spoiled rich kids' are all pretty amusing and have a at least a hint of accuracy to them

In case you don't want to give your location, you can click deny in your browser and it seems to take you straight to NYC, then you can search for other places.

I don't understand why that's not the default, or at least a choice.

I'm not super keen to share my exact location just so I can look at a city-wide map

You can disable location sharing in the browser for every site and never see that popup again. Why is this such a big problem?

Cool, but it was impossible for me to navigate to my city. I entered it by name and the map put it's center at 500 miles south of where I was expecting. Then I couldn't even correct the mistake by scrolling to the city because the map stopped me from scrolling too far away.

Similar.

It also auto-completed my city name, but only with "United States" instead of the state and country. There are two cities with the same name in the US - one in Oregon, one in Montana. It defaulted to the Oregon one and put me at a nearby larger city.

The data is a bit stale but this site is great and seems to have checked out well for the cities I've lived in or visited a lot (Dublin, Utrecht, etc.)

The creator of this website was on Lex Friedman podcast[1]. He has dozen of other projects like these. RemoteOK and nomads are two projects that I remember. He talks at length of how he started all these projects single handedly.

[1]: https://lexfridman.com/pieter-levels/

The massive "Stuff we stole from your country" over the museum district of London made me laugh.

This appears to be more prone to abuse than Wikipedia, perhaps because the encyclopedia topic attracts the "right" kind of nerds.

I've been thinking on an off how to identify and label sub-areas of cities automatically in meaningful ways, and how to compute/extract from text useful sets of attributes to describe them.

If this Website was less prone to trolls, its data generated could be used to train and evaluate machine learning models for that task.

B2B: Where would you open your office in order to be close to your customers?

C: Where to find the nearest pizza?

C2C: Where to rent an affordable room close to a university?

Toronto area is mostly accurate and funny. it's been multicultural so long that having to pretend we don't notice our differences creates resentment that wasn't there before and the complainers it mollifies don't really have much to offer in return. this is hilarious, I will use it often.

I've been using this for years! Didn't know it was connected to levels.io https://x.com/levelsio/status/1730659933232730443

Ouch, 11,000 Mapbox bill? Just throw https://protomaps.com/ on a server somewhere and enjoy zero payments to another service provider.

This project came out way later than Hoodmaps, I believe it was even on Google Maps before they introduced high fees?

I'm so confused at so many people calling out racism on this site. I just do not see it and no one has yet provided a single example of the so called racism. Can someone show me what you're talking about?

[0] Freak_NL says: "OpenStreetMap meets 4chan"

What? Have you ever visited 4chan? It's WAY more offensive than anything here.

[1] amsterdorn says: "Yep, I don't like it. Amplifies racist and ignorant voices."

AFAIK there is no mechanism to artificially favor any particular view. There is only the thumbs up/down mechanism meaning what you see is what the userbase finds useful or amusing.

I am genuinely not seeing what the problem is. Can someone please explain? If you're going to say something like "Black people live here" is racist then I'm sorry I'm going to have to disagree. Observations are not racist, and if the labeling is inaccurate _then give it a thumbs down_. Not every site on the internet has to be a sterile, advertiser-friendly, corpo walled garden. Ever heard of having fun? I'm trying really hard to not pass judgement but it honestly seems like so many people commenting here have a stick up their ass.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656327

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656395

Berlin map is on point.

Reminds me of Queering the Map [0]

[0] https://www.queeringthemap.com/

I just painted a whole area as university by accident. No idea how to undo that.

Barcelona is pretty accurate.

Seems like a lot of focus on "fun" here and not much on "function". E.g., the city search is fine if you happened to live in a major metropolis. But good luck trying to find your city if it has a common name.

E.g., "Springfield" in the US drops you in rural Illinois with limited zoom or pan abilities to figure out what state you're in. And it won't even let you zoom out enough or pan to even get to that Springfield.

DC map looks about right.

Pieter was just on Lex Fridman’s podcast not too long ago, I enjoyed it. Smart dude.

https://youtu.be/oFtjKbXKqbg

That was not the impression I got from his Twitter. He might be able to build stuff but his ability to explain social phenomena is really poor (especially for someone with an economics degree).

It's sad to see him leaning into the rage bait..

I've followed him for years. He's always interesting to read since he's successful while being contrarian on many things about business and tech, but he's turning into a mini Elon Musk talking about "mind virus", "libtards" and "soyboys".

Why can't the internet go back to people talking about what they know? I'm tired to everything being politicized

>He might be able to build stuff but his ability to explain social phenomena is really poor.

I didn't say he was a god incarnate lol. He's clearly been successful in at least one narrow domain and that requires some level of intelligence.

His real claim to fame is having built most, if not all, of his successful startups with only a single PHP file sprinkled with jQuery and css.

That's pretty impressive in itself tbh.

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