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Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

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Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#121

Post by saalweachter »

knz wrote: post #102
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have long maintained that an extension of the postal service should provide a one-stop-shop for your addresses. I have moved nearly every year since I left for college and I hate having to reset every address on every service I have. I'm sick of it.

The USPS have a hard enough time maintaining a conventional address database. My understanding is that addresses in the US are usually derived from the municipal authority and by the time those trickle out to the various consumers (counties, states, feds, USPS, Census, and commercial consumers) it's a mess. There are many initiatives underway to clean this up (usually in the context of E-911 and putting a single poin…

The reason cities vary randomly in mailing addresses is that the third line of your mailing address:

  YOUR NAME
  123 YOUR STREET
  NOT-YOUR-TOWN, STATE ZIP
is not the name of any city at all, it's the name of the post office from which your mail is delivered. The post office will shuffle addresses between ZIP codes based on what makes for an efficient delivery route -- it has nothing to do with municipalities.

The mismatch is especially common in areas which used to have dozens of post offices which have now been either shut down or downgraded to PO box-only offices, and all home delivery has been consolidated to a single post office for cost efficiency.

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#122

Post by dvcc »

aw3c2 wrote: post #107
tener wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the address can be made relative to some landmark which moves in the same direction. This could add an additional word in front of it (for the landmark) but will resolve such issues.

That's a great idea, maybe something like "church street" and a number that denotes a length on that street?

If that was the case we might run into naming collisions if there are multiple cities with the same street names. It would be best if we namespace it to the city as well. So we would have something like { "street": "Church Street", "length": "5", "city": "Church City" } all of course packaged in JSON.

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#125

Post by knz »

saalweachter wrote: post #121
knz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USPS have a hard enough time maintaining a conventional address database. My understanding is that addresses in the US are usually derived from the municipal authority and by the time those trickle out to the various consumers (counties, states, feds, USPS, Census, and commercial consumers) it's a mess. There are many initiatives underway to clean this up (usually in the context of E-911 and putting a single poin…

The reason cities vary randomly in mailing addresses is that the third line of your mailing address: YOUR NAME 123 YOUR STREET NOT-YOUR-TOWN, STATE ZIP is not the name of any city at all, it's the name of the post office from which your mail is delivered. The post office will shuffle addresses between ZIP codes based on what makes for an efficient delivery route -- it has nothing to do with municipalities. The mismat…

Correct. I've heard that it varies depending upon your location. For example St Paul, MN was massive when it was set up so most of the eastern suburbs of the Twin Cities have St Paul MN, 5XXXX rather than the actual city.

Municipalities assign the rest of the address (street name, house number etc) and are responsible for that mess.

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#126

Post by roberdam »

hasenj wrote: post #123

Resembles a normal address? In the Anglosphere, maybe. Have you seen how addresses look like in other countries? For example, in some countries, the address is broken down into several components: City, District, Block, Street, Building

good point... resembles a normal address compared with the alternatives at least. https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress#compare-encodings

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#127

Post by aw3c2 »

dvcc wrote: post #122
aw3c2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great idea, maybe something like "church street" and a number that denotes a length on that street?

If that was the case we might run into naming collisions if there are multiple cities with the same street names. It would be best if we namespace it to the city as well. So we would have something like { "street": "Church Street", "length": "5", "city": "Church City" } all of course packaged in JSON.

That's a great idea and will help making addresses more solid. I would suggest we also add some more levels like the country the city is in?

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#128

Post by pns »

mabbo wrote: post #80

Maybe I'm missing something but why does "Pearl" mean 8480 and "Magical" -6129? If that's a hash, I really dislike this, because A: humans can't do hashing in their heads, and B: get one letter wrong and suddenly you don't have the right address. This has also been my big opposition to what3word. Addresses need to be resilient. If I make a tiny mistake in my address, there should be enough redundant data to help fix…

From having worked on addressing in Nairobi, Kenya for the past two years, I can tell you the precision problem is worse than you think actually. You're making the assumption

* someone knows how to use a map to a very high degree of precision (not true often)

* GPS is accurate enough, and this is a double whammy - on initial assignment of the GPS point (i.e. it's the GPS of their door/gate, not of their living room couch, and it was collected with enough precision) and on usage (i.e. the GPS antenna on a $30 smartphone)

* plenty of other issues

There are a couple startups trying to solve this beyond what3words mentioned in other comments - they'd suffer from many of the same issues I mention above. Some encourage people to put a placard outside their door/gate with the code to make last-mile arrival easier.

But a more successful approach from research I've done is what OkHi (http://okhi.com) is building - use a photo attached to GPS. From n>1000 tests, we found that the photo drastically decreases time over the alternative, even reducing average time to find the location by over 50% in the last 500m for some addresses.

(Full disclosure - I was worked on the addressing problem for the two years in Nairobi at OkHi, so I obviously believe in their solution or wouldn't have dedicated that much time there :)

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#129

Post by niftich »

At first I was skeptical of 'yet another geocode', but the addition of the avatar alongside it (for error-checking and instant-recognizability purposes) makes this scheme intriguing, and in my opinion, far better than any other geocoding.

It's essentially a combination of an Identicon [1] (of sorts, but with actual clip-art) and hash wordlist, but transmitted together as a unit. This is a very good idea and exploits a lot better how humans actually memorize and recognize things.

It needs a better wordlist though. Better is subjective, but the current list is very anglocentric, not very distinctive, and laced with profanity, making it awkward for interactions between strangers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

Re: Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

#130

Post by dvcc »

aw3c2 wrote: post #127
dvcc wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was the case we might run into naming collisions if there are multiple cities with the same street names. It would be best if we namespace it to the city as well. So we would have something like { "street": "Church Street", "length": "5", "city": "Church City" } all of course packaged in JSON.

That's a great idea and will help making addresses more solid. I would suggest we also add some more levels like the country the city is in?

Wonderful idea, and we could even go so far as standardizing how we write it so that we don't need to worry about putting it into JSON and makes it more memorable for humans. Something like:

Length Street

City

Country

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