Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mpetrov 4407 days ago
It's the geographic center of Canada, that's the coordinate that the geo-ip database gives us back when no specific city is available. Works well for smaller countries, but in Canada it's quite visibly "off" :)
3 comments

I have this gripe with mapping in general - area of uncertainty doesn't seem to be plumbed well. The assumption that everything is a point seems to permeate everything.
Even more visible in Australia, nobody lives in the center.
Well the NSA's listening station is in Alice Springs, so that part makes perfect sense.
I do know that Alice Springs exists, but it's an error in the Geo IP database they are using rather than true data. That's where the general hand-waving "australia" marker is placed when they don't know more than the country of allocation. There's a huge disparity between the number of people that live in NT and in other states, so the large number of results "coming from" there is telling in itself.
Yup, you'll occasionally see the same "bug" result in a bunch of hits to Kansas.