Hacker News Reader

Comment by lozenge | Hacker News Reader

Note the simple words are assigned to populated areas. In the ocean it might give you "overripe.thoroughbreds.salads".

In French, on their map demo which centers the map in Paris, it's already pretty bad. I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean.

Edit: A few examples taken randomly of mostly unused words in French (require a dictionary for a good 90% of native speakers): Volute, redise, dépiler, rapière, ânier, putatif, toison. All of that is in the center of Paris, and it took me 5 mins to find them, there's probably hundreds of rare words.

I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean.

Do you need to? If you don't speak the appropriate language you won't know the meaning of the words for any place. That doesn't make it any less useful so long as you can pronounce them.

The main goal of this project is to have memorable words instead of a meaningless address name, if that's not any better than the existing system, why would we use it?

But you need to know how to write the word and in which grammatical case the word is or otherwise you end up on the wrong end of the earth because every homophone also maps to a real location.

I French this is extremely important.

For one we have plenty of homphones. Is it saut, seau, sôt sceau ?

Then if you do not know a word, say châtière, it can become chattière.

So only homophonically unique words and well known ones should be used

I have no idea how they chose their words, you will get things like the words you listed, say "ânier" which is apparently a donkey-driver, or "chatière" (a cat flap) but their dictionary doesn't even include just "âne" or "chat" (donkey and cat respectively) which are words anyone would know.

This is completely absurd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com