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We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

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Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#171

Post by Mirepox »

NeoTar wrote: post #158
TomK32 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts. According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own postcode) to none living in a demolished village of Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two people living in a district that had no postcode until the prob…

Sorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many German postal codes are there"!

[flagged]

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#172

Post by logifail »

dghf wrote: post #163
mywacaday wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put Ireland at the top of the list, one postcode for every address, every house has one, every apartment has one, every building has one, even some old ruins have one.

Yeah, but Irish posties mean you don't actually need them. You can just put stuff like this on the envelopes: Your man Henderson That boy with the glasses who is doing a PhD up here at Queen's in Belfast. Buncrana Co. Donegal Ireland https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33581277

> Irish posties mean you don't actually need them

I worked as a postie for a few weeks as a Christmas job when I was at Uni a looong time ago.

My GF used to write to me regularly (yes, writing letters was a thing back then), we came up a nice scheme: instead of using my actual address she wrote to a made-up non-existant address but with a valid postcode ("501 Any Street, Town, AB1 1AB" on a street with only a dozen houses) that was in one of the streets I'd be sorting letters for/delivering to.

Worked like a charm, would find her letter waiting for me in the pile to be sorted when I rocked up at the sorting office at 5am.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#173

Post by Propelloni »

gabesullice wrote: post #167
Propelloni wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like bad design by the property developer and a sloppy building authority. The first is corroborated by the lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing? The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there on it is the building authorities job to check building plans and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they are usually le…

You could be right, but I think it's a little beside the point. The challenge illustrated in the blog post is that it's practically impossible to build a really accurate address dataset since the real world is messy for the reasons you listed. Just like falsehoods programmers believe about names [1], you shouldn't put much faith in anything that claims to normalize addresses either. As other commenters have said in t…

Good saying!

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#174

Post by devmor »

NeoTar wrote: post #158
TomK32 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts. According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own postcode) to none living in a demolished village of Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two people living in a district that had no postcode until the prob…

Sorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many German postal codes are there"!

Please don’t regurgitate LLM output without disclosing it up front. We can all go get fake data and make up stories on our own if that’s what we want.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#175

Post by bluGill »

_trampeltier wrote: post #114
xnorswap wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drop a pin in google maps it shows you the lat/lon, e.g. 51.5010392, -0.1423616 7 decimal places of lat/lon is approximately a centimetre.

Centimetre, and after the next big earthquake are all numbers off, sometimes even by several meters. Now what you do? New addresses for all, or wrong numbers to new buildings?

In the best case your GPS is off by far more than the worst case GPS. There are GPS receivers that can get you to within 2cm, but they cost thousands of dollars and are not used in phones.

In the context of navigation that is good enough - if you are within 100 meters you can look to see your destination.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#176

Post by bluGill »

dmurray wrote: post #106
crote wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is that US postcodes describe very large areas. A 5-digit US ZIP code describes a town or neighborhood, with on average 8200 people living in each ZIP code. 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 o…

The US also has 9-digit postcodes which usually map to a single building or smaller: aren't they public too?

They are public, but the post office changes the last 4 digits every few months so there is no point in telling anyone what yours is. These days the post office can look up your street address and give you all the information they need - which is an 11 digit bar code good for the next week.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#177

Post by BoxOfRain »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #113
n4r9 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of the UK government attempting to do such a thing fills me with the utmost dread.

When did this almost Reaganite sentiment ("I'm from the government and I'm here to help") make home in the UK? I know it's not recent: I remember similar arguments coming from the No2ID camp in 2005 at-least.

For ID cards specifically most of the hostility was towards Blair's specific implementation which had a wide-ranging database that pretty much everyone and their dog in the public sector and beyond would have access to. While the arguments are perhaps a bit weaker in the modern day where the government taps the internet backbones and surveillance is a major category of business model, there were definitely good arguments against Blair's proposals that weren't necessarily applicable to ID cards in general.

I don't think it's necessarily Thatcherism that made people like this, just a slow erosion of trust that the government has the competency to carry out the tasks of a modern country that's accelerated as time's gone on. Anecdotally Liz Truss's episode as Prime Minister seemed to be the final straw for a lot of people's goodwill towards the government.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#178

Post by bluGill »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #142
ascorbic wrote: post #60

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…

Why can't it be taken for free? The system and data was created by a publicly owned body, surely Crown copyright.

I have no idea what UK law is. In the US the data itself is public domain, but the compilation is of data is copyright. Maps commonly would intentionally have errors in to detect copying - the error is creative work and so a copyright violation to copy so if someone copies your map you can sue them for copyright violation for not just the errors but also that compilation. If you take someone else's map and then use that to create own map off of (thus finding and fixing the errors) it is legal, but that is as much work as just creating a map from scratch.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#179

Post by bluGill »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #142
ascorbic wrote: post #60

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…

Why can't it be taken for free? The system and data was created by a publicly owned body, surely Crown copyright.

> Why can't it be taken for free?

It can be, but that has unknown long term effects. If you do this it shows everyone your government cannot be trusted and so other good ideas will not happen because people cannot trust the government. We probably do not agree on what is a good idea so I'm going to leave this vague - whatever your political side there is a good idea that is suddenly unworkable because the government cannot be trusted to hold their end of the deal.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#180

Post by febusravenga »

Mirepox wrote: post #171
NeoTar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many German postal codes are there"!

[flagged]

I felt your reply was too harsh, but after few moments I realized that I instinctively think the same I treat any output from ChatGpt as garbage until checked in other sources. So effectively, not worth looking there in the first place.
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