
Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore - Fej
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-on-google-maps-anymore/
======
underbluewaters
As a software developer for a lab within a big University, I appreciate the
bit about Google offering edu discounts, but only if working with a
representative _for the entire institution_. A lot of big companies offer
discounts this way and it is maddening. There are so many different
development projects within a university setting and they often operate with
zero involvement of campus IT. It's like expecting a foreign company to
involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.

~~~
asdff
The worst is when it's clear that bargaining has happened: limited use site
licenses. There is a hypothetical microscope that costs over 250k and has a
service contract. All output files are in proprietary format that can only be
analyzed and exported using the proprietary software, and the license is such
that only 10 people can use the software at once.

The bean counters in the university aren't going to cough up whatever Zeiss
wants for an unlimited use license, and Zeiss isn't going to expand the
license without trying to squeeze even more cash from the university. In
either case, demand for the microscope would be exactly the same, only now
researchers are setting alarms for 3am just to export a damn file.

~~~
FK3LRnamzX
That really sounds like a scenario where adversarial interoperability should
be applied. Maybe build a service for queueing, processing and exporting to a
mail/ftp or something like that.

------
sct202
One of the criticisms of when Google Maps API was basically a free for all was
that it was suppressing the ability of startups to exist by devaluing
products; it seems like with these pricing changes Google is giving the
competition an opportunity to swoop in.

~~~
criley2
Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really
difficult

* Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous * Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps * Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible * Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best

I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could

~~~
pja
It’s kind of ironic that Google Maps is so bad at some things then. Walking &
Cycling directions are especially bad - I get much better directions from OSM
than I do from Google Maps.

For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the
majority of their userbase is.

~~~
brewdad
GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night.

I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it
close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at
rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would
rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I
saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency
vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice
but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to
take.

The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.

~~~
viraptor
You mean, there was an edge case where Google didn't have real-life data for a
specific accident available for you? This is an extreme case that we wouldn't
even expect to exist a few years ago, (and then got annoyed by passive
surveillance) but now gmaps is failing for missing it? Is this the new norm?

Did you mark the accident yourself when you saw it?

~~~
CamperBob2
He shouldn't need to mark it. Maps can tell that its users are spending 20
minutes to get through a single intersection.

~~~
viraptor
If you have enough users with gmaps on that segment, it will happen. Can we
guarantee there was enough in that situation?

------
spaethnl
I develop an application at a university that allows users to share and lookup
accessibility information on public places that uses Google Maps and the
Google Places API. We have run in to exactly the same issues as described in
this post and we have had a few meetings on what to do about it. I would like
to switch to OSM but I haven't been able to find a quality replacement for the
Google Places API, which is critical to our application.

We could switch to using OSM + Places, to at least partially alleviate our
problem, except that Google requires any Google Places API results that are
displayed on a map to be displayed on a Google Map, which really locks us in.

Is anyone aware of a good Google Places API alternative, including any paid
self-hosted databases?

~~~
nathancahill
What type of accessibility information are you getting back from the Places
API? OSM seems like a great fit for this since information is tagged in a
structured way:
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities)

Feel free to email me, this is my area of expertise. For projects like that I
can often help pro-bono.

~~~
spaethnl
I just spent some more time looking at OSM's place data, and I'm not sure if
more has been added since last looking at it, or if I wasn't using it
correctly, but it seems to have more than I remember.

I see that a couple of popular restaurants that have been around for at least
a decade are still not shown, but maybe that is anomalous? I'll have to re-
consider OSM.

~~~
nathancahill
If you're collecting accessibility data consider adding it to OSM or making it
available publicly for others to add :)

------
cowpig
Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade, and it
drives me crazy. I asked a google employee about this who told me a lot of the
changes I hate stem from a refactor around 2014-2015. Obviously there was some
big culture shift on the team though...

Google maps is

* Much, much slower than it used to be. My machine in 2012 was able to drag the map around and everything would load just fine.

* Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is.

* Much worse at text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and get what I'm looking for.

* Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection. It felt pretty dangerous, getting confused by a popup in the map like that mid-intersection), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP.

* Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans

* While every good review site seems to fail for whatever reason (tough to monetize, and fighting spam/fraud is also hard?), Maps seems to have become the de facto review site in many places. But the UX is so godawful I can't even wrap my head around it. For example, search for a restaurant, and you get one (ONE) possible filter in browsers: star rating. There's also a "more filters" button which brings you to a separate view where star rating is the only available filter. On the phone app, sometimes I can select "open now," and a few other things about 20% of the time I use the app, and it's not clear why those options are gone the rest of the time...

I think it's a real shame, because I remember in, e.g. 2012 I thought Google
Maps was an incredible revelation. It was so much better than MapQuest, it was
free, fast, and just worked. If only they had open-sourced the old version
before the refactor...

\---

Anyway, I hope someone writes a nice open-source view layer that sits on top
of OpenStreetMaps someday. Like a wikipedia for maps

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I
have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of
the street I'm looking at is._

To add another nitpick, I often want to see the name of the street I’m
standing on, especially in San Francisco which doesn’t like spending money on
street signs it seems. But GMaps usually requires zooming way out or panning a
non-trivial distance to find that. All the other nearby streets on the map
have clearly visible names without having to do that, just not the one I’m
one. It happens regularly enough to be annoying.

~~~
SamBam
Adding to the chorus, but the decisions on what street names to show is simply
insane. Opening the map right now on Android and scrolling around, almost none
of the major streets near me are named, and tons of tiny streets are. Why
would anyone do this? What AI got programmed that learned to make these
decisions with no oversight?

~~~
zimpenfish
Apple Maps does this too. Or it'll show the street names in tiny, tiny font
and then keep the tiny font when you zoom in. "Hello, I'm zooming because I
can't read the font, you arseholes!" (although I will grant it's impossible to
distinguish between "can't read font" and "need more detail" zooms but still.)

------
Diesel555
I switched from Google Maps to Apple's Mapkit JS. It's awesome. And they
respond to bug reports and make quick fixes.
[https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/](https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/)

~~~
saagarjha
Like, Feedback Assistant reports?

------
heisenbit
Taking the power e.g. search, the profits from one domain e.g. advertisement
and going into another domain e.g. 2-D maps and charging nothing or little
until competition has thinned and dominant position has been achieved and then
raising prizes tenfold is the sort of behavior regulators find interesting.

~~~
nojvek
Unfortunately US regulators are too sissy (or probably already in bed with the
big corps) unlike the old days where Microsoft was getting sued left and right
due to antitrust violations.

------
sailfast
This is a great write-up - thanks to the author and for their continued work
in this space to bring home the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons.

Leaflet is an amazing library and I've found it a very useful and powerful
tool with a great plugin ecosystem. Glad they managed to land the page
someplace that was less dear to them monthly.

------
SlowRobotAhead
It definitely should not cost 10 cents per visitor to use the maps API to toy
around with nuclear scenarios.

The idea that he could apply for a “grant” to escape a poor pricing model is
insulting and I think good for him for just dumping Google instead. I look
forward to seeing how far the 2019 Google backlash goes.

~~~
ravenstine
Too bad the backlash will only be among the modern archmages than hang around
HN. The average people whom I know still get a warm fuzzy feeling from The
Google. They're largely shielded from the obvious problems the pricing models.
As long as the peasants don't have to pay with their pocketbooks, not much
will change.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Maybe, but I see a lot of the censorship and demonetization on YouTube getting
attention first from conservatives and second from lesser liked candidates
like Tulsi, the antitrust investigations in USA and EU, and some of the
Facebook and Twitter criticism being rightly shared by Google. I would say
“fuck Google” is extending beyond geeks.

------
rotrux
Google maps is only profitable on the basis of advertising syndication & data
collection. If you're not pumping google information about how people are
using your map service or directing people to the sites of google's ads
customers, they are probably losing money by serving you.

The issue is similar to the one that ruined their custom search offering: it
doesn't make them enough money to justify its existence as anything more than
a public service. Unless charity is what Google had in mind when they launched
the api, their behavior makes business sense.

------
pbw
Google has 100,000 employees not one can offer up anything in defense of their
pricing? That's sad, I'm sure they have some explanation for what they did,
and why they did it, and how they want things to evolve from here. Would be
nice to hear something even if it was PR laden.

This pricing hike is over a year and old and everywhere I see complaints and
about it and not a shred of explanation from them.

I'd expect something like "Yes Google Maps was free for a long time, but it's
a very expensive service to run, for the service to exist long term we needed
to increase the cost. Here are some resources how to contain your costs. Here
is how to apply to be a non-profit."

I have to believe there are hundreds of people at Google who fully understand
this has ruined many people's projects, do they not feel some obligation to at
least open up a channel of communication? Seems like a no-brainer.

Or are they just so embarrassed and so wracked with in-fighting that they
can't stomach even authoring a post?

~~~
nojvek
I'm sure Google employees are probably not allowed to comment on HN without
legal approval. BigCos have a lot of red-tape for communication.

------
lemoncucumber
> [B]ut they do have a way to request discounted access to the Google Cloud
> Platform, which appears to be some kind of machine-learning platform

This line in the article made me laugh out loud. GCP is a full blown
competitor to AWS, but it sounds like whatever marketing page the author
landed on is hyping machine learning so much that they didn't even realize
that.

------
WD-42
In this post the author speaks a lot to how inaccessible Google is for any
kind of support. This is one of the under appreciate reasons NOT to use
services provided by the big cloud providers: AWS, GCP, etc.

I recently started a small SASS project for a client and decided that Heroku
would be a good fit for the situation. That led me to use smaller independent
service providers like Mailgun for email, Mapbox for maps, Transloadit for
video encoding. I haven't needed much support but when I have I actually talk
to real people (and developers on the other end). It's a very pleasant
experience. I get much more of a feeling that they actually care about
developers using their products. Plus it feels "good" to be supporting
independent shops, instead of giant tech monoliths.

Consolidated billing can be annoying if you decide to go with many smaller,
independent providers. At least Heroku covers that well.

~~~
tomcam
I pay a ridiculously small $100/month for AWS support and they get the job
done however I want it (chat, voice, email) at any hour of the day. I
basically signed up for it so I'd have someone to blame if something went
wrong, but they resolve every single issue to my satisfaction.

~~~
seph-reed
You pay a small monetary amount for now.

Most of these companies are super powers with blatant disregard for humanity.
When it comes to the good in your life, the things around you; opportunities,
options, community health... they are slowly but surely drinking your
milkshake.

~~~
Spooky23
That's a little extreme.

I got hooked on Unix when as a dev/DBA I inherited Solaris administration that
I wasn't really qualified for. Sun support bootstrapped my skills and taught
me alot. In another gig I had similar experiences with IBM.

It contrasted heavily against Microsoft, where even the $$$ Premier offerings
are pretty awful, with lots of ridiculous hoops between you and super-skilled
SEs.

Companies may suck or not, but that doesn't mean their support organization
sucks.

------
seshagiric
Since the Google Maps price hike, there are a number of such projects that
have got affected. However I am curious why no one seems to be considering
Bing Maps (from Microsoft) at all??

Bing Maps actually has a pretty decent free usage quota that should fit most
such projects (either free or low cost).

~~~
nxc18
Not even Azure uses Bing Maps. Instead of using their own existing mapping
platform, Microsoft created Azure Maps, complete with a totally independent
data store, rendering, etc.

Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

I miss the Bing maps that was innovating and delivering regularly, but I
haven't taken them seriously since 2016 at least; this is coming from a former
Bing fanboy.

edit - links:

* Azure Maps: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/)

* Bing Maps: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-a...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-api)

~~~
throwawayGMaps
From their copyrights, it looks like

\- Azure uses TomTom

\- Bing uses HERE (formerly Navteq/Nokia)

Did Microsoft buy _all_ of Nokia? Or just their phone business?

~~~
nxc18
Microsoft only bought parts. HERE has been its own thing for a while now.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/here-and-microsoft-
extend-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/here-and-microsoft-extend-
mapping-deal-expanding-into-connected-car-data/)

Related - Uber hired/bought many of the engineers and assets involved in Bing
Maps' data: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-
bing...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-bings-
mapping-assets-will-absorb-around-100-microsoft-employees/)

------
upofadown
>But in 2018, Google changes its pricing model, and my bill jumped to more
like $1,800 per month.

Presumably, Google has done the market research here and had found that this
level of pricing will end up maximizing revenue. It would be interesting to
have a generally accepted model for these no money now, money later business
models based on some measure of industry lock in. That way it would be
possible to do the pricing at the start of a project rather than part of the
way through when everyone had forgotten to budget anything.

The Googles of the world get to know how much our projects are going to cost,
why can't we at least get an idea?

~~~
TheRealPomax
That presumes a project starts with people who intend to charge from the get-
go, but defer that step to later. Rather than being started by folks who love
what they're doing, getting funneled into a PM'ed project where the enthusiasm
is curbed by "product viability", and then goes through a period of a few
years where the original project folks rotate out until no one left is
invested in how useful the product is, and a lot of folks are invested in how
much money can be made by pivoting to a model that heavily monetizes on
scoping down to purely the most used features used by its biggest, financially
secure customers.

~~~
takeda
That reminded me of a project where person leading it estimated that it will
be cheaper and faster to use AWS, they only forgot all the hidden fees that
AWS adds, most commonly the network fees (which are charged between AZs) or
EBS etc.

On top of that an instance that claims to have specific parameters won't
deliver the same performance as supposedly equivalent physical machine, so you
will need to use bigger instances etc.

Ultimately the project did not have resources to set up DR version which was
originally planned and still went way over the budget.

------
nik736
We switched to Mapbox as well, the only downside we faced was the horrendous
satelitte maps. They apperantly bought a lot of satellite imagery, but it
still looks way way worse compared to Google or Apple Maps. The weird thing is
that when zooming in it gets pixelated, even though the maps actually look
more crisp when not zoomed in completely.

~~~
jeen02
The streets are pretty offset as well :(

------
kuroguro
If you're not afraid of breaching Google's ToS you can load Google tiles
directly with leaflet. The tiles themselves have no API key requirement.
Obviously not a proper solution both legally and technically as the routes are
undocumented and can change at any time (tho I've seen only 1 major change in
the past ~7 years).

------
sebasmurphy
Their documentation seems to be lacking as of late or at least the last time I
checked. I was attempting to get geocoding working on a project and was having
a hell of time getting the api keys issued with the correct permissions.
Swapped over to mapbox and had everything working in a few minutes.

------
nojvek
> They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious
> if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing
> to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing
> for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes.

That is really true. Google isn't for the small devs anymore, they're too big
to care about us. They need to cross that trillion dollar mark and it seems
everything's about profits right now.

Lesson: Don't even touch google apis unless you're a really large corporation
willing to spend >10k per month. Even if you're a really large corporation,
have a plan B, because google will still fuck you over with their APIs
changing without much notice.

------
chihuahua
There is something called "Here maps" that's a pretty good alternative to
Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps for mobile phones. Obviously that's not
what Nukemap is talking about, but for those who are frustrated with the
shortcomings of those 3 apps, "Here WeGo" is a free Android/iOS app. It was
developed by Nokia and then sold off.

I like it because I can download an entire state with just a few clicks. And
the UI isn't cluttered by "explore your neighborhood" nonsense.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_WeGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_WeGo)

~~~
henriks
Here wasn’t really developed by Nokia; it existed as Navteq before Nokia
bought it in the 00’s and was headquartered in Chicago. At some point at least
they were a fairly big player in in-car navigation systems.

------
FpUser
For business, dedicated servers are the only thing I am paying for (also
mirrored on me on premises). Well there is still some storage fees from
Mediafire but I am in a process of moving it to dedicates servers as well.
Following few very unpleasant experiences with the cloudy stuff I've develop a
simple rule. NOTHING gets done/developed for my businesses until I can run it
on premises and rented dedicated servers.

------
forrestthewoods
I wrote a commute visualizer. Imho it’s better than anything else widely
available - free or paid. Given a home/office it can visualize commute times
for multiple modes of transit.

Google’s new pricing scheme makes it cost multiple dollars for a single map.
Their new pricing scheme is beyond absurd and has no basis in reality.

------
komali2
> fobbed me off onto a non-Google “valued partner” who was licensed to deal
> with corporations on volume pricing.

Haha what? Who managed to set that up with Google, and how does it even work?
Do they transfer gcloud credits to you? Do you use their gcloud account to
make a maps app?

~~~
beering
It's Google's strategy for selling Maps and maybe some other enterprise
services. I think it makes sense, actually. The reseller deals with things
like basic support, consulting, drafting up contracts, limited negotiations,
etc., basically the sort of high-touch stuff we know Google hasn't always been
great at.

The reseller infra is built into Maps, so you still work with your own Google
account, but you pay the reseller. It's not fully in gcloud, afaik, since I
remember there being a Salesforce portal you had to use to manage your Maps
premium account.

~~~
wolco
SugarCRM does this. I don't like the setup when support is required because
the reseller tries to sell additional products.

~~~
komali2
Holy shit that's the worst when you're barely holding on trying to get through
support tickets, but management wants you to side-sell as well.

------
Uptrenda
1\. Give product away at a loss / or even for free.

2\. People say 'great', and start taking advantage of it.

3\. Competitors (for profit) can't keep up and slowly stop offering products.

4\. Over time the majority of the market is capture by a single company.

5\. People become overly dependent on that company, allowing them to build an
even bigger, better 'moat', and discouraging any new competitors from
emerging.

6\. $$$$$$$$$ Prices get jacked up. Customers have no alternatives.

Kind of like an army besieging a walled city. A company doesn't need to build
the best product or have the best fighters to win. They just need enough
resources to outlast the competition and they automatically get access to the
left-overs.

~~~
stoolpigeon
In the linked post he states that the changes mystify him because there are
alternatives. So if Google is following the plan you've laid out, they are not
doing it well.

------
bpodgursky
I've found MapBox (if you're using MapBox GL) to have pretty decent pricing on
my own hobby projects, albeit higher than I'd prefer

I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets
for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure
(bandwidth?) is pretty pricey.

Anyway, I'm glad Nukemap found a way to stay up. I've had fun playing with it,
and have used it as a reference before.

~~~
NetToolKit
> I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles
> mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying
> infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey.

Mapbox charges ~$4 for a thousand map views, while we charge $0.10 for a
thousand map views (less than a tenth of Mapbox's price). How do we convince
you to switch to our services?
[https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about](https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about)

~~~
wizzwizz4
Privacy guarantees (or, rather, an explanation as to what you do with the
statistics you can gather from people using the tile server) – currently it's
not clear what's the policy for your site v.s. the API.

Plus, actually knowing about it in the first place would be nice! You have a
piece of text saying "you don't need to credit us; just credit OpenStreetMap
contributors because they made the thing", but it might be a good idea to say
"but if you're feeling generous, you can tack a 'via NetToolKit' on the end".
I found out about Mapbox, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap via those little copyright
signs at the bottom of maps – and if asked, I'd certainly put one in for you
if I were using your services.

~~~
NetToolKit
Thanks for your answer and for your suggestions. We'll try to find a place to
clarify the privacy policy (we don't do anything externally facing with it,
but might use it to track down performance issues), and I like your wording
regarding attribution.

I agree that we have a marketing problem (letting people know about our
services). However, even if we to solve that, I want to understand what it
would take for someone who is aware of our services to actually convert.
Hence, I appreciate your answer and hope others chime in as well.

Thanks again.

------
tpmx
The general underlying reason:

Google has shifted from the innovation/growth phase run by engineers to the
MBA/marketing/lawyer-managed monetization phase.

~~~
ysopex
Thank you, I was about to comment it's not a service it's a product. And
frankly this has always been the case they were just more subtle about it in
the past.

------
aagha
It's frustrating that with the number of Google engineers out there--many of
which reach HN--to not see any comments from them about a post like this.

It's almost as if they don't care, or are now worried that saying something
could negatively impact them.

------
Qub3d
>It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to
make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term.
They let cool projects atrophy and die.

This is the absolute root of the problem, and one that is unique to Google
among the big cloud providers. Yes, AWS may roll out new features, but
generally the core stuff _stays put_.

I'm not losing sleep over route 53 getting "sunset" with a 1 month notice.
Can't say the same about Google. While it won't sink them, I can see this
becoming a bigger and bigger obstacle as the number of IT pros who get caught
in the fallout of Google's internal ADHD grows.

If Google, or a vendor using a product on top of Google services contacts me,
I'm not touching it unless they're willing to enter into an SLA where they pay
for the trouble of migrating my stuff when they axe the service.

In other words, I'm not using it, because no one would ever offer such a
thing.

~~~
mesoman
It's internal Aspergers, not just ADHD. Google seems to have no insight into
its users.

------
jaimex2
Google's pricing change is a really good thing. Diversity is needed on the
Internet and since their changes things like MapBox and OSM have had a big
increase in uptake.

------
alexellisuk
What are the main limitations of OpenStreetMaps here? I used Google Maps back
when the pricing was at that lower point, and am working with Mapbox now for a
project.

------
buboard
google's business is ads, monopoly ads, and all these side projects were good
for distracting people from their monopoly. they don't care because they don't
need to care and i wouldnt be surprised if all their services incl. gmail have
the same fate. good thing that the market abhors a vacuum

~~~
xvector
> good thing that the market abhors a vacuum

Indeed. I greatly prefer Apple Maps on iOS. The directions barely take any
longer and the UX is just so much better.

~~~
ViViDboarder
The new voice prompts on Apple Maps are great. “Turn right at the next stop
sign” is way more helpful than “In 1000 feet, turn right”

~~~
wolco
If they combined them turn right next stop sign about a thousand feet.
Otherwise it's like this stop sign here or do they mean that one..

~~~
dbt00
They say things like turn left at the second light.

------
daveheq
I dont know why the author can't download a cached map every month and use
that for the hits.

------
Symmetry
I'm excited to hear about the new fallout feature in Nukemap.

------
ilaksh
Google wanting to get paid for use of its APIs doesn't seem like the most
significant aspect of this post to me.

I hope some of us are able to escape from this planet before it is destroyed
by a nuclear holocaust. This is why I think that the lunar and mars missions
should be a bigger priority.

~~~
incompatible
I suspect that even after a nuclear war, Earth will still be far more
inhabitable than either the Moon or Mars.

------
perspective1
Kind of predictable. Google's a business. Surprise, surprise, you can't rely
on its free services long-term.

------
fastball
I feel that the author is seriously underestimating the cost of his traffic to
the Google Maps API.

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tssva
The average after financial aid per student cost to attend Stevens Institute
of Technology is $35k. As of 2017 they had an endowment of $184 million
dollars. If they thought this was enough of a priority they could allocate the
additional funding for this. The fact that they haven't and that the lower
$200 a month was coming out of pocket versus being paid by Stevens indicates
the level of importance they place on this work. Why should Google in essence
help fund work that the organization doing the work can afford to but doesn't
want to fund?

~~~
detaro
> _I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with an institution (my
> employers, the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of
> Technology) that was willing to foot the bill._

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jaquers
Lots of comments (bitching) here about not showing street names. Can confirm,
there are definitely bugs regarding street names being off-screen / not
showing at the right zoom levels.

But are we technologists, or what? Figure out the behavior and suggest a
solution.

I find that it happens to throw street names close to major intersections,
which happen to be offscreen due to panning. Seems to me that there could be a
change to detect when a street name is not present on the screen and make an
adjustment to do the same. In other words tweak the heuristic for showing
names +- zoom level. They do have _a lot_ of data.

I think it's really popular to hate on Google right now for a myriad of
reasons—but I also think that people who work on Gmaps want to improve their
product.

Y'all know how to file bug reports. Expected behavior, current behavior, steps
to reproduce, etc. Stop complaining about a service that is free, or
else—don't use it.

BTW; agree w/ the majority of OP's points regarding contacting humans & lack
of features / price etc for API. That's valid feedback.

------
crazygringo
> _...people at educational institutions (even not-for-profit ones, like mine)
> are disqualified from applying. Why? Because Google wants to capture the
> educational market in a revenue-generating way, and so directs you to their
> Google for Education site, which as you will quickly find is based on a very
> different sort of model. ...you have to claim you are representing an entire
> educational institution (I am not) and that you are interested in
> implementing Google’s products on your campus (I am not), and if you do all
> this (as I did, just to get through to them) you can finally talk to them a
> bit._

The base Google for Education used by most educational institutions has always
been free, it's not revenue-generating.

And even if the author had gone the non-profit route, Google for Nonprofits is
the same -- you have to represent your entire nonprofit institution.

Because when you're _part of a large institution_ , your _institution_ is
responsible for licensing, grants, policies, etc.

Google (justifiably) doesn't want to deal with 100 different professors
setting up 100 different free quotas and not talking to each other. They want
it to all be tracked at an institution level.

~~~
yborg
Professors are accustomed to requesting grants from individual entities all
the time and while they may often have internal institutional review or
coordination, the granting entities don't typically require all requests from
say Harvard to be submitted by Harvard as an institution. tl;dr professors are
used to submitting proposals for grants directly to an organization, Google's
approach at least in higher education would not be what a professor would
consider the norm.

