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Comment by enkrs | Hacker News Reader

My shipping address is "Roņu street, Liepāja" and in the other end of our city is "Rožu street, Liepāja"

If the address gets somehow mangled, as it often does, the shipping label could read "Ro?u street" and the postal offices guess on the address being "Roņu" or "Rožu" is as good as anyones.

I too usually just write "Ronu street"

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How about adding the zip code for disambiguation?

Because even with no characters messed up, many cities have 2 or more streets with the same name.

Depending on the size of the city, there's a good chance these two differently-named streets are in the same postal code.

in many parts of the world zip codes are city-wide (regardless of city size), so that wouldn't help

And some countries don't use zip-codes at all.

And at least one country (Singapore) has building-level zip codes

Ireland goes even further and each apartment in an apartment block would have its own unique code.

At lest in that particular case, the postal code is the same (LV-3401) for both streets.

Coincidentally, at least here, the official addresses are guaranteed to be unique, a city/town can not have two streets with the same name (at least at any single point of time, renaming over centuries gets weird) - naming streets and assigning numbers to houses is not an arbitrary decision that the landowner can make, it is managed/coordinated centrally.

Same code for the two addresses. Liepāja is a major city by local standards but still only has some 80k people and about 15 postal codes cover the entire city. No two streets in the same city are supposed to have the same name per our national rules though.

Something like https://map.what3words.com/broken.rare.share might be useful

I'm more peeved that we can't just use GPS co-ordinates for an address.

In addition to an address at most. One missing/misprinted digit and your package is dropped into siberian forest. Sorting is also trouble unless fully automated.

If you're printing 14 digits of coordinate it's easy to add two more of checksum.

So what do you do if the checksum doesn't match? Could be off by a meter or half an Earth. So the only recourse is to send it back. Normal addresses are far more resilient. Wrong post code? It'll get re-routed and just takes a few days longer. Wrong house number? In most cases the mailman knows the names in their area and will still deliver it. Typo in the address, name, city? In most cases it still works fine, the example of enkrs notwithstanding. Letters get mangled all the time, and mail still arrives.

Also I'm much better remembering addresses of people instead of their GPS coordinates, especially when they're close together, like in a city, where the coordinates would all be almost the same.

I specified adding multiple more so you can use the checksum to repair the number. If they get three or more digits wrong, well, they could have put the wrong city name on there too. In the realm of transcription errors, it's easy to make coordinates work. It's remembering these addresses that causes the real problems.

It's far more likely for someone to screw up writing digits than it is for them to write the wrong city name. People handle words well, but they don't handle numbers all that great.

And if they do write the wrong city, well, that's what the zip code is for.

Then there's a major earthquake and your GPS co-ordinates change.

So? Just maintain a GPS Offset Table :-P

If a major earthquake moves your GPS co-ordinates enough to change your effective address I'd claim that you have bigger problems than getting your mail delivered. Houses aren't typically designed to change coordinates via the earth snapping beneath it.

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