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Comment by Sinnesloschen | Hacker News Reader

I think kind of confusion could be solved with http://what3words.com/

It's a different way to look up locations through the entire world, using three random words you can find any address or location with in 10 feet.

The only downside I see is the three words are all English words. Which could be unfamiliar to non English speaking parts of the world.

Just think about how easy it would be teach your children where they live by memorizing just three words instead of House number, Street name, City, State, Zip code.

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A lot of information is coded in just the numeric part of a street address. Even or odd tells you which side of the street it is on, you can tell where an address is relative to other addresses on the street, and there's usually a sign on the building that you can match with the address you have to make sure you're at the right place.

Three random words have none of these properties.

The other downsides are

- It's a proprietary system

- The three words give no clues in relation to other words -- except that similar words are some distance from each other. "59 Main Street" is very often very close to "57 Main Street".

Yeah, basically all the three words give you is "somewhat? memorable unique identifiers". You get jack diddly squat in terms of routing information.

You want a lot of things out of a good address system.

  1.  Unique identifier.  (ie, no duplicates)
  2.  Reasonably simple to remember.  (ie, not lat-longs)
  3.  Simple levels of abstraction.  ("Do you deliver to X?")
  4.  Recursive routing. (Navigating to one layer of the address, then another, should work reasonably well.)
  5.  Decentralized implementation.  (Localities must be able to assign names while following a few reasonable rules.)

#1 and 2 aren't really the hard parts of the problem.

I'm guessing it would be a logical next-step to simply generate place names according to this grid in every known language, ideally using the same word as in English where possible.

edit: they already have that for what looks like at least 13 major languages.

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