81–90 of 317 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hence why a house number and postcode constitutes a complete address in the UK, we’ve sort of already got What Three Words with “a number and 5-7 characters” - not quite as catchy though
We needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Amazing. For a e-commerce site I argued that we would save ourself a lot of trouble by simply making the address field one large text field, rather than attempt to making a form that would work for every country and city (looking at you Mannheim). But apparently that would make data analysis to complicated.
The address field names are fairly standardized[0] and Google has an open dataset (used by Chrome and Android) describing which countries need which fields[1].
I have an older PHP library[2] and a newer Go library[3] that build upon this, while crowdsourcing fixes (since Google hasn't updated their dataset in a while). The Go library allows me to serve all address formats and state lists in a single HTTP request, which can then power a very fast JS widget.
[0] Initially by the OASIS eXtensible Address Language (xAL) which trickled down into everything from maps to HTML5 autocomplete.
[1] https://chromium-i18n.appspot.com/ssl-address
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I call some place I've never heard of before, know nothing about, my first interaction with them on the phone shouldn't result in "Oh my god, these people seem like scammy used car salespeople!" If your assertion is true, that it's a joke, it's going to backfire. That's because that call is the equivalent of what's happening here. I called, and the person on the other end ... thinking it a joke, funny, did their b…
It hardly requires a huge amount of investigation to see that's not a scam link. It literally has the blog authors name attached to it, along with a post date and a "read the full story"link that has the same web address as the blog. It's just a few seconds work to see it's legit.
On the other side of the Channel, the French government has managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the country along with precise GPS coordinates: https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, f…
Even in the far right US postcodes are public info :)
Most European postcodes are far more precise, often describing a single street, part of a street, or even part of a building. Postcode + house number is usually enough to uniquely identify a mailbox. For example, in The Netherlands on average only 40 people live in each postcode. That makes the dataset far more valuable for geolocation.
On the other side of the Channel, the French government has managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the country along with precise GPS coordinates: https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, f…
I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manually create and delete addresses because the old address import tool broke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I call some place I've never heard of before, know nothing about, my first interaction with them on the phone shouldn't result in "Oh my god, these people seem like scammy used car salespeople!" If your assertion is true, that it's a joke, it's going to backfire. That's because that call is the equivalent of what's happening here. I called, and the person on the other end ... thinking it a joke, funny, did their b…
It pattern-matched "scam" so you classified it as "scam" and absolved yourself of doing any further thinking. If something pattern-matches "legit" are you equally blase about sticking with your snap judgment and absolving yourself of doing any further thinking?
Should I.. what? Call back and see if they laugh and say "Oh no, we're not really used car salespeople, what was a just a good joke!". Why would I, or anyone do that? Yet this is apparently a "snap judgement" and "not thinking" to you?
So why would I spend time trying to determine if the people which purposefully acted as scam artists and clickbait boneheads on websites, are actually playing a joke? What's in it for me? As I said, I'd have to do this for every single clickbait website.
I don't read clickbait websites, and I'm not going to take the time to see if it was all a big jolly joke.
As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining th…
You can pass the law, get sued and pay whatever the PAF is worth. But that's just.. fair? The govnerment spent 5 mio just for a survey concluding that it's impossible to recreate the PAF. So hundreds of millions sounds like a good deal.
On the other side of the Channel, the French government has managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the country along with precise GPS coordinates: https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, f…
Australia is similar, howeve, irrespective of how perfect your national addressing standards are, companies ingesting this data providing any sort of to-the-premise service still have to mash and clean and dissect it to fit whatever legacy system they are running. I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manuall…
The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal Mail. Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past. The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is suffic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hence why a house number and postcode constitutes a complete address in the UK, we’ve sort of already got What Three Words with “a number and 5-7 characters” - not quite as catchy though
We needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.
e.g. 51.5010392, -0.1423616
7 decimal places of lat/lon is approximately a centimetre.