Google Street View adds Antarctica, Brazil, Ireland | Hacker News Reader

Google Street View adds Antarctica, Brazil, Ireland

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38 pointsmsbmsb23 comments

When I saw this headline I was wondering how they managed to get pictures from Antarctica, but looking at Google Maps, it just looks like a geotagged photo-album

I was hoping they were going to haze a Noogler and force him into deep sub zero tundra.

It may yet happen.

I would work for free if my "hazing" consisted of an all expenses paid trip to Antarctica.

Right, taken on a vacation to Half Moon Island by the VP of Engineering for Maps. Not all of Antarctica, yet.

Let's face it, most places in Antarctica look pretty much alike.

They could pretty much just use a couple of frames out of Empire Strikes Back and nobody would know the difference.

I'm incredibly impressed with the streetview coverage including the classic Irish one-track, grass-down-the-middle roads like this one near my house: http://bit.ly/8XLSfU

That is a very pretty road.

This is one of the many things I love about Ireland. You don't have to drive very far outside Dublin, Cork or Galway to go back 50-100 years in time. These one-lane roads also make for good cycling too, if you go with a group who knows where they are going. :-)

Aroofromcorkayamaroo? Ha, nice to see a fellow Irishman here. I too have spent the last 20 minutes exploring the backroads of my hometown. Hats off to Google, the quality is really goood.

Having lived away from Ireland for years and not getting home too frequently, I find that Street View has the power to fully immerse me and make me nostalagic for places. It is up there with the list of Space Age Things I dreamed of as a kid and now almost take for granted. The future is arriving in wonderful ways and washing over us in waves. (But I'm still disappointed I can't hop into a suborbital hotel for a cheap 0g holiday)

http://goo.gl/qDP4

I wonder are there enough of us for a HN meetup in Cork.

yep, there are! http://www.hackernewsers.com/meetups/2

There's a few of us that meet once a month to talk Ruby, Rails and other bits of HN/startup/tech stuff. It's all very informal and you're welcome to come along (even if you're not a Ruby dev). Details here: http://rubyireland.com/cork/

Google Brazil employees: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

And yet they still don't have my block, smack in the middle of the SF Bay Area.

Last time I talked to the Street View people they mentioned that missing streets like yours are usually related to bad GPS reception at the time of capture, leading to the inability to match roads and imagery. This is usually the reason for small pockets of no coverage in otherwise densely-covered areas.

i didn't know they had streets in Antarctica :-) great pictures.

They have bus drivers. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounters_at_the_End_of_the_Wo...

Interesting documentary.

I've always wanted to go down there. There's even a few couchsurfers down there

It isn't an impossible dream. There are regular jobs available at McMurdo base and Scott Base and they need IT staff. I know two people who spend 6 months or so every year working down there and they are addicted to it, constantly drawn back to the beauty. They have a lots of amazing stories. You can also of course just make the trip as a tourist.

That sounds interesting. How did your friends go about getting those jobs? It sounds like the kind of thing i'd do. I'd prefer not going down their as a tourist; I'd rather be involved in something if I were spending time there.

I'm not sure how they got started (they've been going for years and years). I don't have an easy way to reach them right now to ask, but a quick Google came up with these which may serve as starting points: http://www.coolantarctica.com/Community/find_a_job_in_antarc... http://www.usap.gov/usapgov/jobsAndOpportunities/index.cfm?m...

Thanks for the links, reading through them now. Lots of great info.

Thank you for your recommendation on this documentary. I watched it just now and it is powerful.

Many sincere thanks!

-Igor

That depends on your definition of "street". They do, after all, have one of the most extreme highways on Earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo-South_Pole_highway

I would pay money to cruise down that in Street View. I wonder if you could stick the Street View photo module on top of one of those Snow Cats and hit record next time they do a run?

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