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Comment by seanlinehan | Hacker News Reader

Mark, you are incredible. I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of certain locales needing more TLC. I think we can get away with the fully-automated approach for most of the maps, but there are certain regions where this approach more or less falls apart.

The one thing we say -- and mean quite seriously -- is that we are willing to generate maps of wherever you most desire. We've already begun the process of rendering custom areas for customers, all requested through the contact form of the site. I think we'll slowly refine maps of certain areas as time goes on. We wanted to cast the net wide and fast, but I think we can hone in from here on out.

Thanks for your thoughts Mark!

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> I think we can get away with the fully-automated approach for most of the maps

Even though it might look nice to outsiders, I firmly believe you can never get representations of cultural and human data really right if you're doing them automatically.

Such data will always be full of quirks, and representing it will always need some tweaking if you want to get it perfect. Say, moving a label a bit further left so it doesn't hide a monument, displaying a street wider than its actual designation because it's an important way, not showing at all another path because it's disconnected from the rest of the network and really not that important (or displaying the more minor path that connects this one to the rest even though its designation means it should be hidden).

I really think a lot of people who make maps do not acknowledge the fact that human data is not something that is completely normalized, not normalizable, and sometimes might not be able to be processed with a set of rules, however fine.

No problem: I think maybe part of the problem is treating state-level subdivisions the same nationally. For New York, perhaps a decent compromise would be to map by town outside of New York City. Other states don't necessarily have the same concept of what a town is that New York has, but have some other type of subdivision that makes more sense for them. I bet it'd be a lot easier if the US had a system like NUTS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature_of_Territorial_Uni...

Some cities require a larger footprint. For example, Atlanta should include the entire I-285 Perimeter.

Also, cities that are longer east-west than north-south should be in landscape, instead of portrait, orientation. Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA are examples. (And the San Francisco print should probably be a square.)

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