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  • Hacker News
  • :sigh:

    As an American, I offer my apology to Canada and the world for this action.

    by ElijahLynn
  • Apology is meaningless. Do something.
    by inigyou
  • So stupid.
    by imagetic
  • I feel like there's a way to make a policy that is "We update all geographies within America at 4 years, once a rename has had time to make it into the common parlance."

    But whatever, every such scar he leaves will just be on the list of reminders of why he was the worst president in history, and likely haunt the party for decades.

    by zug_zug
  • For the technicals, this is why data source malleability and decentralization is important, even if 99.9% of the time you never want to use it. How much needless sticky friction is there from people's workflows defaulting to "Google Maps" software, which has no option to actually pull up from this and let people decide "you know, this US GNIS doesn't seem very authoritative any more". Does OpenStreetMap show any inkling of propagating these stupid antics?

    Politically, tell me again how the "unitary executive theory" (aka autocracy by any other name) is going to make our country "great" ? We're a fucking laughingstock - if this senile old man were in the correct venue of a memory care home, staff would have long ago learned to mitigate his behavior - and it's not like the rest of the world is blind to this! Instead the corpos and their stooges stuck him in the highest office in the land and let him loose from the rule of law, to destroy what last vestiges of Constitutional rights we have left. We're talking about what had been a straightforwardly trustable agency, now having that trust destroyed simply to preserve one idiot's ego after having been called on his bullshit.

    by mindslight
  • OpenStreetMap keeps a collection of tags for each node, including "official names," so in that sense it does include records of these arbitrary renamings, but there are rules about naming things and to solve disputes/edit wars[1] (most commonly, the "on the ground" rule that reflects real world usage[2]). For example, see the Gulf of Mexico node[3], its wiki page[4], and the discussion following the executive order to rename it[5].

    [1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes

    [2]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Map_what's...

    [3]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/305639190/history/143

    [4]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico

    [5]: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-o...

    by ura_yukimitsu
  • - they do this in india too, a different map of kashmir is shown depending on which country the person is viewing it from
    by vivzkestrel
  • Wouldn't it be enough to detect if the request is coming from a very specific subset of clients and send them what they want?
    by willismichael
  • That’s exactly how it’s done IIRC.

    They’re just treated as cultural localizations, internally.

    by DANmode
  • Why would they do that? Their goal is to stay in the good graces of the administration, to avoid financial or legal retribution.

    If you think conscientious resistance is anywhere on the agenda of these corporations, I'd refer you to the inauguration photos and donation list, and the various acts of public supplication by their executives.

    I don't even think it's wrong for them to do any of that - at least now the mask is off - but people should stop looking to corporations to take moral stances, despite their attempts over decades to convince you to attribute morality to them.

    by danans
  • [dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495947
    by ChrisArchitect
  • The province Ontario was named after the lake, not vice versa. It's kind of absurd to rename this lake in particular just because it seems the least American-sounding.
    by throwawayk7h
  • Americans will tell you to "go back to you country" even though they've been there for 3 generations or that they single handedly saved Europe during ww2, facts and history don't exist over here
    by toasty228
  • FWIW, I worked on map rendering in a past life at another large tech company. General policy was to show "official" names and borders based on the user's country. It wasn't quite that clean, but IIRC there were a surprising number of disputed borders and place names in the world.
    by fatnoah
  • The country's government doesn't get to name geographic features. The people name it, and people are calling it Lake Ontario.
    by bigstrat2003
  • Means nothing. Google changed before government data was updated. It was deliberate support of the change. Google is buying what they want by playing ball. It's time to break them up.
    by roosterIllusi0n
  • Renaming Lake Ontario is Not Just Stupid and Petty. It is also Illegal.

    https://verdict.justia.com/2026/08/31/renaming-lake-ontario-...

    by IncandescentGas
  • Everything this regime does is illegal. It's time to admit the law is no longer the law.
    by inigyou
  • Fiduciary responsibility seems to mean that one has no choice but to follow orders if under threat - something that is worth remembering when it seems that corporate power is larger than state power.

    Also shows how a lot of people making moves in the short term, especially if they “have no choice”, leads to acquiescence of totalitarianism. It seems we have no belief in collective power.

    by taurath
  • I hate it, but my guess is if they don't play ball here, they risk losing government contracts or worse, being blacklisted as a "supply chain threat" as they tried to do with Anthropic. Gov't/military canceling GCP and Gemini contracts probably wouldn't do well for their stock.
    by m4ck_