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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

#171

Post by Myrmornis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #167
Myrmornis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a politically incorrect term but are you sure it's unreasonable to call Iqaluit "Third World"? I live in Oakland, California and I definitely think of it as a Third World city -- the utter poverty, homelessness with no end in sight, squalid encampments in the dirt in derelict land, the lack of help for anyone falling through the bottom of society. I wasn't born in the US but I find it odd that one of the criteri…

> I live in Oakland, California and I definitely think of it as a Third World city Oakland is in the top 20 US cities by median household income. If it is "Third World", then essentially the whole world (including most of the United States) is "Third World". > I wasn't born in the US but I find it odd that one of the criteria for somewhere to be considered third world seems to be "far away, not in USA". The First/Sec…

> the labels apply to countries

That's an opinion I think? Take Brazil for example; the difference between middle class suburbs in Sao Paulo and a remote settlement in an Amazonian state straddle our concepts of First and Third World. In fact the middle classes in the southern cities pretty much don't ever go to the north precisely because they view it as the Third World.

For many people in American cities, their access to healthcare, education, sanitation is not different, or in fact worse, than it would be in cities more conventionally thought of as third world. America's lack of social safety net is causing it to be accurate to refer to parts of America as Third World.

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

#172

Post by 7952 »

sly010 wrote: post #67

This is probably a first world problem, but I wouldn't mind something similar for the western world. Some sort of extended zip code that I can just enter on any device in a second and it represents my entire fully and correctly defined location including door number, floor, gps coordinates and crossing streets and if it's left or right side of a one way street, etc. Just a ~12 digit number for every single door (and…

The problem with this is that the various data would be somewhat inaccurate and ephemeral. You actually need to store a history of facts contributed by multiple different people. So a delivery person could update the record with better information. Or maybe the drone would add a lidar point cloud of the approach to the window.

Perhaps you could have QR or NFC stickers tied to a GUID. They get stuck to things and then scanned by different users. They would contribute facts based on the GUID to various public or private databases. Not particularly memorable, but super simple to setup.

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

#173

Post by dragonwriter »

Myrmornis wrote: post #171
dragonwriter wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in Oakland, California and I definitely think of it as a Third World city Oakland is in the top 20 US cities by median household income. If it is "Third World", then essentially the whole world (including most of the United States) is "Third World". > I wasn't born in the US but I find it odd that one of the criteria for somewhere to be considered third world seems to be "far away, not in USA". The First/Sec…

> the labels apply to countries That's an opinion I think? Take Brazil for example; the difference between middle class suburbs in Sao Paulo and a remote settlement in an Amazonian state straddle our concepts of First and Third World. In fact the middle classes in the southern cities pretty much don't ever go to the north precisely because they view it as the Third World. For many people in American cities, their acc…

> That's an opinion I think?

Well, the original form was strictly for countries; if you want to use it to describe something that is neither on the level of analysis nor on the axis of variation of the original form, its not worth even using the terminology (the common modern form still uses the country unit of analysis, but is an economic rather than geopolitical axis.)

> Take Brazil for example; the difference between middle class suburbs in Sao Paulo and a remote settlement in an Amazonian state straddle our concepts of First and Third World.

Not really. Actually, have sharp geographic and class divides is typical of the developing world; having elite areas is not at all out of line of the traditional understanding of a developing (or "Third World") country.

Though a binary developing/developed or First/Third divide is problematic for other reasons -- Brazil (like Argentina, Mexico, and lots of other places) really ought to be viewed in a middle tier; its nearly as far above, by most meaures, a lot of the places more typical of the "Third World" as it is behind the places more typical of the "First World". (Perhaps we ought to resurrect "Second World" for this.)

> For many people in American cities, their access to healthcare, education, sanitation is not different, or in fact worse, than it would be in cities more conventionally thought of as third world.

To the extent one wants to discuss claims that that is the case, it may make sense to describe the particular American cities being like developing (or "Third") world cities with regard to the particular concerns, but that's different than describing them as part of the "Third World" which involves more than just those issues.

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

#175

Post by saalweachter »

roberdam wrote: post #164
saalweachter wrote: post #155

My biggest problem with this sort of schema (and the similar ones other people have mentioned in this thread) is that it doesn't solve any of the difficult problems an addressing system needs to solve. At best, it's just a "maybe easier to remember than GPS coordinates" system -- but remembering GPS coordinates with this level of precision is not really an insurmountable problem. I know its hard to remember, but up u…

Did you try the "take me Here" option? http://www.xaddress.org/takeme?from=40.7848694,%20-73.969670... You can integrate third party services to do just that.

You can do a lot of things with computer systems loaded with rich geographical datasets.

But how does this help the 4 billion people currently without addresses? Do you think there are rich geographical datasets in places without addresses?

Even in places like the US where you do have rich datasets, it is still enormously inconvenient to not be able to do anything without them. The advantage of 911 & USPS street addresses isn't that they're easy to remember, it's that they encode a lot of useful information into them. (And even then, they don't include all useful information -- you typically need to know some ill-defined political or social boundaries, like the name of a neighborhood, to find out if someone delivers to your area or what the rate is for a taxi.)

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

#176

Post by Myrmornis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #173
Myrmornis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the labels apply to countries That's an opinion I think? Take Brazil for example; the difference between middle class suburbs in Sao Paulo and a remote settlement in an Amazonian state straddle our concepts of First and Third World. In fact the middle classes in the southern cities pretty much don't ever go to the north precisely because they view it as the Third World. For many people in American cities, their acc…

> That's an opinion I think? Well, the original form was strictly for countries; if you want to use it to describe something that is neither on the level of analysis nor on the axis of variation of the original form, its not worth even using the terminology (the common modern form still uses the country unit of analysis, but is an economic rather than geopolitical axis.) > Take Brazil for example; the difference betw…

Yes, on balance I think you win this debate. You are perhaps a little too strongly influenced by the Cold War origins of this term, when for a couple of decades now the term has been almost exclusively used to describe places with poorly developed infrastructure and institutions. Phrases like "third world conditions" are common and as we agree, a feature of modern developing nations is high spatial variance in such things. So, since the Cold War is history, and since semantics evolve, I think a reasonable case can be made for taking the modern definition of "the Third World" to be the union of spatial areas which the speaker deems to exhibit third world characteristics. In any case, I'm shortly going to go out in the northern section of West Oakland, and there I will encounter scenes that I literally will not be able to distinguish from bad areas in Addis Ababa.

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

#177

Post by NeutronBoy »

creshal wrote: post #132
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.

Well-structured data like this is better encapsulated in XML: 5 Church City ]]> Isn't that much more legible and understandable? (I hate XML. So much. This shouldn't be a valid document in any language.)

While I get your point, the XML document includes so much more information than the JSON example. Encoding, version, data types, 'scale', response length, etc.

Please try not to make any false equivalences :)

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

#178

Post by cyphar »

koolba wrote: post #112
rusanu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

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

Leap seconds aren't the problem, its the fact that we're stuck on a Babylonian style of timekeeping. Measuring time with completely uncorrelated rotations of objects is a ... fun idea. Or maybe the problem is that time is very hard to determine "naturally".

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

#179

Post by stevewilhelm »

sandworm101 wrote: post #162
pns wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It isn't a third world or African problem. The capital city of Canada's newest territory (Iqaluit, capital of Nunavut) didn't have any street names until a few years ago. Buildings today are still identified by numbers alone, with a degree of local knowledge needed to find many locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iqaluit

Economists and 'social entrepreneurs' prefer the term developing world or developing countries in contrast to developed countries.

Countries can be evaluated using the Human Development Index to determine their designation.

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

#180

Post by Myrmornis »

sandworm101 wrote: post #168
Myrmornis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a politically incorrect term but are you sure it's unreasonable to call Iqaluit "Third World"? I live in Oakland, California and I definitely think of it as a Third World city -- the utter poverty, homelessness with no end in sight, squalid encampments in the dirt in derelict land, the lack of help for anyone falling through the bottom of society. I wasn't born in the US but I find it odd that one of the criteri…

Iqaluit is Canada. It isn't third world, by either the original definition or the new. There is certainly poverty and deprivation there as in much of the north, but it isn't the same as a true "third world" nation. Each and every person in Iqaluit is free to move within Canada however they wish, vote for who they wish and exercise all the rights and freedoms of any other Canadian, including education and health care.

> Each and every person in Iqaluit is free to move within Canada however they wish, vote for who they wish and exercise all the rights and freedoms of any other Canadian

The absence of those abilities is not a defining character of the Third World by any definition I'm familiar with.

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