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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

#181

Post by kalleboo »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #70
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…

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.

In Sweden our population registry is used for that purpose - for stuff like banks, utilities and even some online shopping you sign up with your personal ID number, and then they pull the address from the government population registry, and then sync changes periodically. Change your address with the registry and it updates nearly everywhere.

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

#182

Post by roywiggins »

cyphar wrote: post #178
koolba wrote: post #112

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, 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".

Time is very easy to define naturally as long as it's always "local." Local noon is when the sun is at its highest. Local midnight is halfway between noons, come up with some subdivision, and you're done.

It breaks down once you need to synchronize distant events of course...

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

#183

Post by roywiggins »

robalfonso wrote: post #109
clarkmoody wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the spatial resolution of this project (10m) and the lifetime of humans (80 years), it should be alright :-) Floor / apartment number / suite number could just be tacked onto the end.

Any position can be determined from x,y,z, you could just tack on the z coordinate - though you'd need to match that locally, accounting for sea level. If you are using latitude and longitude you should stick with the paradigm for height, since floors can be different heights.

But then knowing something is X feet in the air only gives me an approximate floor number- I'd have to guess at the storey height and divide.

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

#186

Post by adrianratnapala »

ben_jones wrote: post #149
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…

I feel like this a communication and NLP problem, at least in regards to an address being directions to a given location. Like with a picture, an address such as "Next to Sal's general store" would be enough for most mailmen to find the location 100% of the time. Given it does not stand the test of time, but to my understanding this was the system in Ireland for a long time in small disparate communities. In that par…

When I get instructions like that, I often end up in trouble. Once I find Sal's general store, I find there is not just one or two, but three or four spots that could be intereted as "next to" it.

And if none of them is obviously the thing I am looking for, the list starts to grow "maybe he meant across the road, down the street...".

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

#187

Post by slavik81 »

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned MGRS as a somewhat similar system. Coordinates look like so; 4QFJ 1234 5678.

That means the coordinate is in the 100km grid-square named 4QFJ. At 12,340m North and 56,780m East of the SW corner.

It's easy to reason about the coordinates if they're on the same square, and given how big squares are they usually will be. You do need to memorize some letters and numbers, but since the relationships between coordinates are clear, you should only need to memorize the least-significant digits for nearby locations.

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

#188

Post by quesera »

Myrmornis wrote: post #176
dragonwriter wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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.

It took me a moment to realize that you're probably not referring to the Ethiopian food on Telegraph Ave.

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

#189

Post by karussell »

I like this comparison: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc...

Which makes it also clear why open location code is really smart (disclaimer: I'm not involved nor a google fan boy ;))

But e.g. the fact is lovely that you can combine OLC with a city name (or more address information) making the code shorter

I don't like the fact that Xaddress depends on words and uses an image for a visual hash.

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

#190

Post by jaakl »

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

This problem could be resolved within coordinate systems adaptations. I don't know if WGS84, the datum used in GPS, does it, but for example European official datum is ETRS89 which is very similar to WGS84, but adjusts coordinates to these tectonic movements, certain number of cm per year. The principle is to keep same coordinate numbers for same places, even through their global location has changed a bit, even over hundreds of years. In GPS world that does not matter really, but land survey deals with sub-cm accuracy and these things do matter.
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