Hacker News Reader

Comment by manarth | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of comments saying that given a fixed area (e.g. "Somewhere in the USA), that it's common to return the centroid of a polygon.

There's an interesting note in the Fusion article[1], where it mentions "[the farm] is a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States".

> As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W.

> In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522

> So MaxMind decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38.0000,-97.0000.

I wonder whether that decision - to choose a location, rather than use the precise centroid of the area - will cost MaxMind the case.

[1] http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansa...

View on HN

Why don't they return 00.000000,00.000000 or the GPS position for the North Pole instead? Would be a lot less confusing that the data was void.

In that case they'd be getting sued by various police agencies who have wasted money on arctic trips, as well as the survivors of various officers who were eaten by polar bears.

Except 0,0 is not in the Arctic, it's a little bit off the coast of Nigeria.

And, the problem with returning Null or 0,0 is that it implies there is no information available. There is still value in having a default location of the country of an IP is known, but the location is not. If you work with MaxMind a lot, you know that 38,-97 is a US IP with unknown location.

>Except 0,0 is not in the Arctic, it's a little bit off the coast of Nigeria.

Amusingly, that would actually lead many agencies to a closer proximity of the scammers they're searching for.

At least nobody would get eaten by polar bears.

Hahaha, I think "the North Pole" is in the Arctic.

Who looks at lat-lng anyhow? Prefixes have proper fields for addresses, or even comments. There are no objects for individual IP addresses anyhow. MaxMind is good for a quick country of origin assignment, and that's it. Their city level DB is just smoke and mirrors.

He did say "or the GPS position for the North Pole" though, as well as (0,0)

Not all IPs are in the USA, so an output of "Somewhere in the United States" is way better than "Somewhere in the world".

I also wonder how many Law enforcement officials are turning up at 39.8333333,-98.585522 because they're using a different geoip provider.

Someone close by should go there and stick a sign in the ground reading "This is not the location you're looking for".

However, for some people it actually is the location they're looking for. The closest road junction to that place actually has some signs: https://goo.gl/maps/1vyM9Ss7o8t

I wonder how many geocaches are hidden in that patch? (Hmm... had to register to geocaching.com to find out; apparently just one at the exact spot and then a couple nearby.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com