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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

#111

Post by robalfonso »

jxf wrote: post #93

I think this is a neat way of encoding things. But this also has a lot of shortcomings that existing mailing addresses don't have; it's really only useful for identifying a physical spot, which is what a lat/long and geocodings of mailing addresses will do anyway. Additionally: * What if you live at an apartment? * What if your address doesn't correspond to a fixed physical location, like an APO? * Aren't the city an…

I think a couple changes would be required to address the shortcomings:

apartments need a z value as you already have a x and y - of course you need to account for height above sea level if you keep to the same type of measurement as lat and long (rather than just saying floor 2). It could be tricky for someone to sort that out for themselves.

I'd think a prefix on the address could indicate a special case that needs to be handled differently to fix APO etc.

I played with the demo, it seemed like the city/county operate as a checksum so you can verify the location you've decoded. Its not needed but nice to have

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

#112

Post by koolba »

rusanu wrote: post #96
sly010 wrote: post #75

As a sidenote, Australia moves about 7cm north annually [1], so any encoding of GPS location is not flexible enough in the long term. Also only encoding lat/long makes it so you would not be able to address a single floor in a large building. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36912700

Obviously we need to add the date the coordinates were encoded. The decoding will have to apply correction based on ample databases of tectonic data. A simple formula will not work, a major earthquake can move a rift by some 5-10 cm. And you need to know exactly what plate does the coordinate refer to, is not as simple as 'Australia moves 7cm a year', consider parts of California east vs. west of the fault. Well, tha…

> Obviously we need to add the date the coordinates were encoded. The decoding will have to apply correction based on ample databases of tectonic data. A simple formula will not work, a major earthquake can move a rift by some 5-10 cm. And you need to know exactly what plate does the coordinate refer to, is not as simple as 'Australia moves 7cm a year', consider parts of California east vs. west of the fault. Well, that spiraled out of control fast... It makes the time issues like [0] seem trivial by comparison.

I didn't think it was possible to come up with an idea worse than leap seconds but we did it guys!

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

#113

Post by roberdam »

jpalomaki wrote: post #110

I see the point especially with foreign addresses. It can be bit of a challenge to communicate addresses like "Nándorfejérvári út 4" or "Kısıklı Büyük Çamlıca Cd. No:9" over the phone. Coordinates are of course alternative, but for most of us, few words and number are easier to keep in mind for few minutes. The given notation is hard to decode inside the head, but if you can memorize it for 30 seconds then you can fi…

Yes!, in this case "Nándorfejérvári út 4" can be "CRUEL RUN 4604 - Budapest, Hungary

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

#115

Post by fshean »

igravious wrote: post #73
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.

http://www.iammoving.com/ :) This is for the UK. Dunno about elsewhere. Dunno about competitors in the UK. I remember having this idea in the late 90s (while in London, moving around frequently) and did a net search and found that there was a provider of such a service even back then. Do not know if it the same crowd since way back then.

This is for the US. In fact it is the US Postal Service version of the service.

https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/move-info/icoa-main-flow.d...

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

#116

Post by SamBam »

jbb555 wrote: post #105

Very nice. But nobody is going to use it as it's solving a non problem. Nobody has any issue giving people an address.

That's simply wrong, and assumes that everyone in the world lives in the situation you do.

What3Words (the commercial equivalent) has only been around three years, and look at its usage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Usage_and_awards

A single usage (Mongolia Post using it to deliver mail) is enough to discount the idea that it's a non-problem: http://mongolpost.mn/more/156

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

#117

Post by madgar »

tener wrote: post #103
T-A wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the README: If you want to transmit your Xaddress by phone you will say "7150 MAGICAL PEARL - Maluku ,Indonesia" my avatar is a boot

So to check whether the address is valid I need to use a smartphone app. If I cannot do it online and only after someone gives me the address I will know it is broken, but will not know what is the correct address.

Bingo, error detection is functionally distinct from error recovery. In this context, error detection helps prevent some misdeliveries, but can't help ensure additional correct deliveries in the face of error.

By analogy, ECC memory can typically detect two bit errors but can only correct single bit errors. That's because the functionality used to detect two bit errors in ECC memory is insufficient to recover both bits.

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

#118

Post by SamBam »

I don't see any versioning on this, and that seems like it is something that needs to be implemented ASAP if you actually want any of these addresses to start to be used in the wild.

If you make any changes to your word lists (in response to, say, all the comments here that say you should be omitting rude words), your old addresses won't be valid.

If someone gives me the address "Afraid Anus" (to pick an example someone found below), but I'm using a new version of your word list that omits "Anus," how am I supposed to know which version of the word lists I should be looking at?

It's all well and good to say that it will be forever backwards-compatible, but what if people find real flaws with the system?

(Another potential flaw: are homophones excluded? What if I'm giving the address over the phone?)

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

#119

Post by pareshverma91 »

IanCal wrote: post #87
jeeeeefff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason we have DNS instead of remembering IP addresses.

DNS allows us to keep swapping the IP address associated with a service though, this (afaik) doesn't.

Ability to swap underlying ip address is orthogonal to using alphanumerics in DNS. Numeric sequences could also be used as CNAME for the ip address. But we don't because of human brain.

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

#120

Post by roberdam »

SamBam wrote: post #118

I don't see any versioning on this, and that seems like it is something that needs to be implemented ASAP if you actually want any of these addresses to start to be used in the wild. If you make any changes to your word lists (in response to, say, all the comments here that say you should be omitting rude words), your old addresses won't be valid. If someone gives me the address "Afraid Anus" (to pick an example some…

Your Xaddress will work even if we remove the word from the available list, you can try encoding or decoding by hand to understand how it works https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand
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