An algorithm that can give an instant solution to 7B people | Hacker News Reader

An algorithm that can give an instant solution to 7B people

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13 pointsroberdam8 comments

I think it's been mentioned in the original XAddress post, but the problem is not necessarily mapping a lat/long pair to a human-memorable address.

The way current addresses have worked (mostly) is by associating with landmarks. Large street names are known by lots of locals. Smaller streets are associated with larger streets by proximity (second left on Large Street). Numbers help place an address at the beginning, middle or end of a street, on the left or right.

Grid cities have an added advantage of encoding approximate location in the street name directly.

XAddress and What3Words solve a problem for the 4bn without street addresses, but they do not help locate things or navigate to them without being online.

Exactly. The addresses would need to be both hierarchical and systematical for people to be able to use them manually and infer unknown adresses from known ones. Otherwise you might as well use coordinates directly or send a shortened Google Maps link.

Just a real life example, I check something im interested on a classified ad and want to go see it, as you say the seller tell me how to get there, referencing other streets and local businesses (streets here are named after generals or war heroes, not grid style). When I try to find the address on Google Maps this is what it shows. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*wK-gIc8QQYHwEz5-Ba... And this is a city just 10 miles from the country capital.

"3645 OUR DUDE - Central,Paraguay" would have been useful.

Agree with you but dont have to be a "this or that" choice.

Well, if one has to input a lat/long pair to get "3645 OUR DUDE - Central,Paraguay", the same effort[1] can lead to better data in Google Maps or better, OpenStreetMaps

[1] http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/29079/my-house-addres...

Some grid cities in the U.S. do even better by naming the named streets according to a system, such as alphabetizing them (Portland, Minneapolis, surely others) or by naming them for Presidents in their historical order (NE Mpls.)

I'm convinced that there's educational benefits to these systems as well. I literally learned my alphabet backwards and forwards at the same time as I learned my local neighborhood geography.

While the algorithm is indeed simple, it is not the kind of thing an average person would remember or have time for. Therefore, it makes us just as dependent on technology as before. After all, if you want to find out where a given address is, you google it (although every once in a while the results are inaccurate or mixed up with a similar address).

So Xaddress does solve a problem. Not the biggest leap forward, but a solid step nonetheless. I'm interested to see what applications can come out of this (that couldn't be done before).

Link to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12260958

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