Hacker News Reader

Well, any notion of a mailman who knows things goes out the window with this model.

Good luck to those whose delivery location can't be easily located in the real world using <map app of the day>.

That is a problem. Our UPS driver has his own map of the area because there are so many addresses that don't map. I doubt gigster type is going to put in that much effort.

I wish there was larger adoption of a system like what3words for these rural areas. Something like if Amazon is unable to geocode your address give you the option to specify lat/lon location or 3x3m grid.

Shame that the company that uses the system seems really protective of the idea and might try to sue if someone were to come up with their own similar implementation. It's one of the places I believe that the profit motive actually gets in the way of innovation (the idea itself is simple enough that you could probably engineer a system to use it in a few weeks).

There's https://plus.codes/ which seems to be more liberal and licenses its codes under the Apache 2.0 license.

However, although it has been around since 2014, I've never seen any practical use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com