Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

Very cool piece of work. Little bit weird that Springfield gets to be the other illustrated city in Massachusetts when Worcester is the second biggest city in the entire region after Boston.

View on HN

Just as deciding what roads to show on a map, deciding what labels to place and where on a map is a hard problem. There may not be sufficient room for it in the location where you want to place it. If so, do you move it ‘a bit’, maybe also move another label, which means having to move another, etc. or do you leave it out?

Worcester likely is too close to Boston to have room for it at the chosen level of detail.

For what it’s worth, when I zoom in on Massachusetts in Apple Maps (which seems to have finer grained zoom levels than OpenStreetMap.org or maps.Google.com), the order in which cities appear is

- Boston

- Springfield

- New Bedford

- Worcester

How close are they to other named places? Back in the 1990s my father was astonished to see his little hometown in Canada on a map of North America but it is in an area with few other settlements so even though it isn't a seat of any level of government, it's still the "major" population center for the area. Meanwhile around Toronto cities 50x larger didn't make the map.

The Simpsons is culturally more relevant for an Aussie, and I would assume a Kiwi, than whatever is not Boston.

There must be at least 40 Springfields in the USA. Given Massachusetts's early statehood, I wouldn't be surprised if Springfield, MA was the "first" Springfield in USA, but are you thinking the artist illustrated all the Springfields because of the Simpsons?

Suddenly I have an urge to make a Voronoi map of the US using each Springfield as the capital of its own state.

It’s the first, largest and (unfortunately) poorest Springfield.

(I’m writing this from Springfield right now)

Springfield MO is larger. About as poor, but Springfield MA ekes that out still.

Yep, you’re correct, I was using old numbers - Springfield MA lost some population while Springfield MO grew. But we still have Dr. Suess!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com