Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Generally, I would say standard addresses are better, because streets are already a form of information compression, since you always indicate a position on a street, you almost never indicate a position in the middle on a forest of a field.

Streets are already transforming 2D information on a 1D line, a bit like a hilbert curve.

GPS has a military use because the military go off-road, but citizens really don't (99.999% of the time).

So yeah, it's another one of those case where software engineers are trying to solve a problem where there was no problem in the first place, because they don't like dealing with standard addresses.

If you want to share a GPS coordinate, just use geohash, and use NATO alphabet if you need to share it orally.

View on HN

Adresses are anything but standard, many words can easily sound alike, and in some places that address couldn’t be properly spoken by a someone not familiar with the language. That’s when there even are adresses for your location. Many places simply don’t have one.

As for gps coordinates, they are rather long and enunciating long sequences of characters can be quite tedious as anyone who has ever had to deal with game cd keys could tell.

That, and most people don’t know NATO alphabet.

So I’d, on the contrary, say a geohash-ish approache relying on a dictionary of carefully chosen hard to confuse and easy to enunciate words has its merits.

But the optimal solution to me would be "press here to send your exact location".

> Generally, I would say standard addresses are better, because streets are already a form of information compression, since you always indicate a position on a street, you almost never indicate a position in the middle on a forest of a field.

> GPS has a military use because the military go off-road, but citizens really don't (99.999% of the time)

This is true for most of the world but not true for a lot of Africa - which does not have a real address system and relies on describing where a person lives and then doing a pin drop (websites will just accept pin drop).

Sure, but this still mean western society should encode streets, not coordinates

Sure we should for most use cases, but I think your original post ignores where that approach doesn’t work.

I’m not a fan of W3W, but it’s pitch is generally to fill in the gaps where addresses don’t work, not to replace addresses entirely.

I used to live in a European city where many streets of a given neighbourhood belonged to the same lexical field. If somebody lived in "Falcon" street, you could go to their neighbourhood without knowing the exact street. There were neighbourhoods about birds, doctors, journalists, and IDK what else. I do not know why people do not do that more often.

Roads that have consecutive numbers are also useful.

These w3w words can be useful for logistics but they seem to be useless for human beings.

I live in such a lexical area, and you'd be surprised how often we have to explain to DPD 'no, it says <X> Court, not <X> Street, not <X> Rise, those are other addresses and we don't live there, what is printed on the label? Oh, it's '<X> Court'? How surprising'

in my hometown, there's a whole set of streets (<X> Avenue, Drive, Place) that got built in the 90s with <X> being the surname of the chair of the council planning committee at the time, who was about to retire (ie the person who grants permission to build those houses). You almost have to admire the blatantness of the grift.

> GPS has a military use because the military go off-road, but citizens really don't (99.999% of the time).

Lots of people do go off-road as a hobby. It's still probably something like 90% or more, but alternatives to addresses do have some utility. W3W happens to be an extremely bad solution to somewhat legitimate problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com