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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Good for them -- it's their town after all!

My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name and insisting that we grandkids address letters to her by name. As far as I know they always arrived. There was no number on the house or letterbox. I went by a few months ago (somebody else lives there now) and there's a number on the letterbox.

My in-laws live in a village in Germany (a little south of the town in this article) with only two streets, referred to as "am Berge" and "im Dorf" (on the hill and in the village) and though the house numbers are not unified as in this article's case, there is no actual street sign -- but by "name" it's pretty obvious which is which.

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> My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name and insisting that we grandkids address letters to her by name. As far as I know they always arrived.

-My parents once received a postcard addressed simply to their first names - period. No last name. No street. No town. No postcode. No nothing.

It goes to show that:

a) Norway is, as such things go, a pretty small country with at least one postal clerk bored enough at work to do a little bit of investigating, and:

b) Having a central database in which every Norwegian is required by law to be registered with the address of his or her residence does have its benefits for the less privacy-conscious. (This was pre-internet everywhere, and they were not listed in online yellow pages or similar - so someone must have made a query to the folkeregisteret database along the lines of 'Is there a $male_name which lives with $female_name anywhere in the country?)

That is rather amazing.

There was one case I remember reading about 15-20 years ago where someone in the UK dropped a letter into a mailbox with just a name, street number (IIRC), and street and it managed to get to the recipient in Pennsylvania, US. Someone from the post office guessed that a bunch of misreadings happened to get it close enough.

I guess a creepy possibility is if they have a database of every letter sent they can search that to often figure out the likely recipient (at least in the case I am thinking about where they were in regular contact).

This is a textbook case of tyranny of the majority. The people who aren't inconvenienced by the current status quo vote to preserve status quo. The few people who are inconvenienced aren't numerous enough to change the status quo. In the end nothing is done to solve the problem.

I'm not sure "a group of people has an inconvenience that doesn't apply to the a majority of people, we should change it for everyone" is much better. It happens and I support it when it's specific kind of issues that's worth protecting the minority even if costly (discrimination, fondamental freedoms,...) but for things like that...

It's the same principle as when some want to filter the entire internet to protect a small minority from reaching content that could shock them (often porn). It feels less like tyranny of the majority and more like democracy. Being in the minority in a vote should not be confused with being abused by the majority like you do, because that dilutes the recognition for cases where it really happens.

It's not like people will suffer when their house suddenly gets a proper address.

On the other hand, people already suffer because they have problems with their deliveries, visitors etc.

People didn't suffer either with opt-out internet filters schemes that we saw in some anglo saxon countries, they can just opt-out ! On the other hand, people already suffer because they have kids getting access to porn, etc ...

The problem is not always the direct change, but the infrastructure and public mindset change. Add a filter, and now adding things to it is much easier. Germany for better or worse is very much privacy minded, even more so that us neighbors (and compared to the US or asian countries we're very privacy minded). They basically have no google maps coverage because of it, for exemple. So a change in that direction will impact them.

> Germany for better or worse is very much privacy minded

Are you kidding me? 6 German police officers were taken out of their job because they have threatened an ethnic Turk, attorney. They have threatened her new born baby by his name while even none of her neighborhoods know the babie's name. And how did they found that the police did it? Apparently few hours ago the police officers have queried her and her babie's name from their database.

So, while Germans think that they mind their privacy they have no idea that they live in none private country. Germany is not really different from other European countries in term of privacy. Who cares about your shopping habits? Will someone going to point you a gun for shopping or for not using DNT header in your web browser or for using a credit card? Police have all citizens' addresses, names, phone numbers, relatives. And police have guns to point at citizens and arrest them just because. Can you hide your name and address from German police? No.

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/frankfurt-seda-basay-y...

https://www.hukukihaber.net/dunyadan/turk-avukata-tehditleri...

Yes they did.

  It's not like people will suffer
  when their house suddenly gets a 
  proper address.

The 'suffering' is the loss of their cultural distinctiveness.

Like if you told the French they should all start speaking english to better interact with the international business community, or if you told programmers they should start wearing dress shirts so they look like professionals.

It's not even remotely drastic as that. It's a street addressing system. This whole situation seems like a proxy war for something else.

Why do you find it hard to believe that people could become attached to and invested in their town's unusual street numbering system?

People become deeply attached to all kinds of arbitrary things, e.g. the particular shade of red used by their favorite sports team, or the exact shape of the cookies their family has baked for Christmas every year.

I agree that it's not remotely as drastic as telling the French they have to speak English, but it seems fairly comparable to telling programmers they have to wear dress shirts.

> Like if you told the French they should all start speaking english to better interact with the international business community, or if you told programmers they should start wearing dress shirts so they look like professionals.

Both of those are also true btw.

They may be, but is it worth it or necessary?

For the French, I don't know, but you could argue that it would improve the French economy I suppose.

However, for programmers, I don't see the benefit: programmers do not have any trouble these days finding jobs, and in fact are in high demand regardless of how they dress. Dressing more "professionally" doesn't seem like it would actually help them any, so why bother?

I guess those people could continue to use their old addressing scheme, however sooner or later their mail may no longer be delivered to them.

> It feels less like tyranny of the majority and more like democracy.

Those are the same concept. One is just supposed to be good while the other is bad.

From the article it doesn’t sound like much of a problem to me.

And the world is becoming increasingly homogenized so I’m delighted to see some people pushing back.

Pushing back is fine if you have a good reason to do so, and the proposed improvement really isn't an improvement at all.

I fail to see how this is the case here: visitors to the town are getting lost because their address scheme makes no sense at all except to the locals. There's a good reason every other city and town in the whole country (presumably) has adopted the building-number / street-name convention (and in most other countries as well).

You assume there is a problem.

Good for the 60% of the 69% of voters that showed up and voted against street names. Less good for 40% of 69% voters that showed up and voted for street names. And probably 'meh' for 31% of voters that didn't care enough to show up.

Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up. People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

Plus codes work as long as your location doesn't change.

Happens not so often. But it does happen that the coordinates of a building don't stay fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation

What if you move? Your address changes. Why would it be any other way?

If you want something attached to your identity not your location, that's what names are for. Just don't be surprised people can't find where you are if you give them your name instead of location.

I would imagine your classic postal address (ZIP / postal code) would also change if that happened since all western methods for addressing houses are based on location.

I say "western methods" because there are some exceptions to this rule is countries with high numbers of nomadic tribes.

Hm, in Sweden they are shifting Kiruna, a mining town.

You don't have to resort to countries with nomadic tribes.

House numbering logic wildly differs between countries. In Tokyo, houses are numbered in the order in which they are constructed. I would expect a moved house therefore to keep its number.

London (or even the UK as a whole?) also has a rather random assignment of house numbers even though the natives will claim its completely logical.

What are you referring to for UK house numbers? They’re just sequential by location on the road in most cases.

> House numbering logic wildly differs between countries. In Tokyo, houses are numbered in the order in which they are constructed.

Isn't that the case for most countries?

> I would expect a moved house therefore to keep its number.

Do you have any reason for this expectation? I ask because your comment here sounds very speculative judging by the way it has been written.

> London (or even the UK as a whole?) also has a rather random assignment of house numbers even though the natives will claim its completely logical.

It's only random where houses haven't been built sequentially down the road. Much like the Tokyo example you gave.

In any case, you're addressing the point about house numbers where as I was discussing postal codes. The two differ. House numbers are an exact designation for your property; be it a house, flat, or even mobile home on a plot of land. Post codes (zip codes, etc) are a region of land which would typically serve a cluster of homes. While you code move a property and decide to keep the same house name (though it would be massively confusing if you kept the same house number if you moved it to another street - so I suspect some authority or other would step in and say you cannot do that), you cannot keep the same post code.

To use a comparison, it's a bit like moving your house out of London and into Tokyo but still putting London, England on your addresses and expecting post to get delivered to the right place. While you can move your house, you cannot move London nor England with it. And the same is true for postal / zip codes - in fact more so because you can in theory put garbage down as your address just so long as you get the house number/name and the post code right.

>> House numbering logic wildly differs between countries. In Tokyo, houses are numbered in the order in which they are constructed.

>Isn't that the case for most countries?

I don't think so.. as far as I can (subjectively) tell, it's more common to set up a logical system. Another poster mentioned the Finnish system, where the number reflects the physical distance from the start of the road (123 = 1230 meters). Another common scheme is to use even numbers on one side of the road, and odd numbers on the other side, and numbering the houses sequentially, leaving gaps for not-yet built houses. In my street, for example, there's a large gap in the numbering because the next building is nearly a hundred meters away. On the occasional 'two buildings squeezed into one spot' just add A and B (and C and so on) as needed. And around here the numbering always start from the most southern part of the road or street (and if you ask "what about roads going exactly east-west", then a) I don't know, and b) It's really hard to find a roading that goes exactly east-west. I suspect, however, that there's a system for that as well - "if in doubt, start from east" or something).

> Another common scheme is to use even numbers on one side of the road, and odd numbers on the other side, and numbering the houses sequentially, leaving gaps for not-yet built houses. In my street, for example, there's a large gap in the numbering because the next building is nearly a hundred meters away. On the occasional 'two buildings squeezed into one spot' just add A and B (and C and so on) as needed.

That's what we do in the UK as well (barring the gaps in the numbering) but for the most part it still ends up following the logic of "houses numbered in the order in which they are constructed" because you either need to know that there should be a gap (in which case the estimated build date is close enough to the rest of the street's build that you might as well consider it one lump development) or else you end up with letter suffixes or unordered numbering (which is what often ends up in the UK as roads get further developed decades after they were first built).

Ultimately though, there is no law in the UK about how houses should be numbered so as much as there are conventions, it's up to the housing development to apply them. However might differ in other countries which might have stricter legislation about naming houses?

Regarding the south->north scheme, I'd be interested to know what the streets are like in places that follow that convention. In the UK our roads are like a big bowl of spaghetti with even new builds wiggling around and even looping back on themselves (the road I live on is crescent-shaped). But where you have straighter roads, I could imagine a numbering scheme based on the direction of the road might work pretty well.

Yes, there is. It is the Towns Improvement Clauses Act 1847.

Thank you, I didn't know that existed. Though having a read through that, I can't seem to find anything that dictates the system in which houses are numbered (only that houses should be numbered).

Section 64 and 65 talk about house numbers from a display presentation perspective but only go so far as saying "houses with such numbers as the commissioners approve of" but I cannot locate where it describes what systems are approved by commissioners.

Are you able to guide me to the part which does describe what the "approved" system is? I'm rather curious to read it because what I've seen and read to date has lead to to believe it's really more of an agreed convention than anything legislative so very interested to read what the actual rules are.

UK house numbering generally numbers away from the town centre. 1 is always on the left. Applies to most places I know. For twisty roads, it's the starting point that matters. I suspect this breaks in London, Manchester etc where the towns they were centred on have merged into one urban sprawl.

Cul-de-sacs number clockwise consecutively rather than following one side odd, other even.

Some of the strange situations where it breaks stem from WW2 bomb damage breaking a road in two, or removing a dozen houses etc.

Most councils do regulate street names and numbering, and they seem broadly in agreement. No idea of legislation or origin of the convention, but seems nationwide.

Example - chosen as it was one of the longer ones search popped up: https://www.swale.gov.uk/street-naming-policy/

Awesome. Thank you

>I would imagine your classic postal address (ZIP / postal code) would also change if that happened since all western methods for addressing houses are based on location.

Not really, there are plenty of businesses that have big enough buildings that they have a single postal code to themselves.

> Not really, there are plenty of businesses that have big enough buildings that they have a single postal code to themselves.

Indeed but doesn't contradict my point because it's still just a location. The only difference is in your example it's home to a singular business rather than multiple residential buildings.

As an aside, I've worked in some buildings that actually had multiple post codes. This is common with large government buildings such as County / City Halls.

If the location changes drastically, which I guess would only matter for a public building anyway, you could just update the adress. I don't see the problem.

> Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up.

Who needs some proprietary system (there’s also a so-called “three word” competing system). Just use lat/long which are universal.

> People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

What can be more “local” than an address and why should it be subject to outside specification?

If you consider lat/long user-unfriendly then just stuff them into URIs of some sort — URLs would work — and keep this em in a sort of DNS. Then people could name their addresses whatever they want.

> What can be more “local” than an address and why should it be subject to outside specification?

This is a pretty strange statement. Ad address, in my interpretation, is an identifier that can be given to anyone without local contextual knowledge to find a place of interest. You can tell me in my hometown that the cafe is opposite of the hardware store and I'll find it precisely because I know where the hardware store is. In other towns/places, as an outsider, I would need an address to be able to find something.

I'd love to use lat/long. I would expect that on the phone with GPS I should be able to paste my current location (after reviewing it and possibly adjusting it on a map) anywhere .. mail, text, message in any app, any text field. And whoever views the message or document with such pasted location should be able to see where it is, navigate there.

But regrettably that's not the case. So I'm hoping that SOMETHING will catch on eventually.

Yeah and guess how good it works offline. You don't even know which country a place is in if you only know coordinates and have no access to the smartphone. Do a typo and there's no redundancy or error correction. You'll end up in some ocean then.

can't you already do this with share intents on android? how many messaging apps do you know of that don't provide an endpoint for share location from google maps?

> What can be more “local” than an address and why should it be subject to outside specification?

Your age is even more local. I'd say even personal. Still all others could use objective sense of what a year is and how many of those ago you were born. That's why we need outside specification for local things. Because local doesn't mean isolated from the rest of humanity.

  Just use lat/long which are universal.

I'm no supporter of plus codes or w3w, lat/long are no panacea. In particular, (a) they're quite long, which is inconvenient for writing on envelopes or entering into sat nav systems; (b) there's no way to detect swapped or miskeyed digits, which depending on the digit can cause arbitrarily large errors; and (c) they're difficult for humans to parse compared to city and country names.

Also, the idea of expecting average people to memorize them is utterly ridiculous.

The issue with lat/long isn't just that it's inconvenient, but it doesn't map to high density structures. A resident of 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the world with 96 stories, would share a lat/long with 95 other people.

Simple fix. Just include altitude :)

The same applies to just "432 Park Avenue" as well.

You can do exactly what is done now...

LatxLng Apt 23C

Assuming the building is bound on all sides by roads then delivery drivers will need to know on which of those roads to gain access. Why not name the roads, then you can say the road name.

Also, when sorting mail looking up lat-long for every item is tedious, so we could name the address by the town/city name that it is local too.

Now lat-long is getting to be redundant ...

> Who needs some proprietary system (there’s also a so-called “three word” competing system). Just use lat/long which are universal. >

Plus Codes are open source and there are no licensing fees. They also compare different location encoding systems like Lat-Long etc.

https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...

What can be more “local” than an address and why should it be subject to outside specification?

Surely its the exact opposite. Locals don't need an address, they know what you mean when you say "the yellow house behind where the pharmacy used to be". "Outsiders" are the target users for addresses and thus it should be optimized for their understanding and use cases.

The same reason phone numbers are ? I would have thought that was some what obvious.

Not many people know that the x.400 email standard allowed for physical delivery options in the spec

Plus codes are just a well-specified algorithm for encoding lat/long. They are intended to be used alongside a hyper-local identifier, such as a door number (or colour or other symbol).

Due to the urban canyon effect with limited visibility to overhead navigation satellites, lat/long doesn't necessarily have enough precision for reliable delivery. Are you supposed to deliver the package here or to the building next door? With street address numbers it's easy to verify but with only lat/long it's hard to be certain.

The Japanese Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) is designed specifically to work around this problem, but that level of precision isn't available everywhere yet.

All of the routing services I have tried work perfectly well Hilgermissen.

For instance, https://planner.myrouteonline.com/route-planner/1752/#, works perfectly in Hilgermissen and has no trouble finding the houses and finding the optimal route.

There is in fact not a problem to be solved, except perhaps between the ears of the people managing delivery companies.

>People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

That's up to the locals. They have the right to insist you should care first about local arrangements before interacting with them.

What if I'm a local but I don't care about other locals and their arrangements and I just want to get my damn package delivered from people who care about local arrangements even less than I do?

Campaign harder for the next referendum, I guess, put up with it, or move.

I could understand it if the existing system were broken, but it doesn't seem to be. From what I can read, it seems to work, presumably people do get their mail and packages.

> Campaign harder for the next referendum, I guess, put up with it, or move.

Or work around local arrangements using lat/long or plus codes or whatever naming scheme delivery companies will choose to use for your town...

Democracy (or any form of government) wouldn't last long if you couldn't work around regulations.

> They have the right to insist...

People have a right to share true information legitimately acquired without the constraints of governments or mobs in other jurisdictions.

Locals can't prevent foreigners from giving directions to their library or the best restaurant. Those are just facts of the world. Visitors are welcome to go discover a town then leave and tell their friends about it.

Then an addressing system is just a shorthand for that locational information. It's just a hash function or a lookup table. No one has a right to prevent others from using data structures to organize their thoughts.

All rights granted to some impose negative obligations on others. Those implied negative obligations should not conflict with other rights. Rights should promote the healthy functioning of society. Also, rights should promote freedom more than restriction.

A right to prevent others from discussing addresses without permission of locals conflicts with other rights, doesn't promote the healthy functioning of society, and creates far more restrictions than freedoms. I don't think it's a good right.

It's adorable and precious and very "silicon valley startup" to reinvent the coordinate system and then proudly remind you that it's free!

> Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up. People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

So… they've reinvented japanese block-based addressing except shittier all around, and proprietary?

Perhaps you could explain the Japanese system, and why it's better. Plus codes are open source though

> Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up. People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

It would already be a better solution indeed. But ultimately I would prefer to have a kind of unique identifier for my person that is not based on my location nor my name, like for instance A23C-B442-9F72. It could then be associated to a first name, last name, and geographical address in a database. Delivery services can then look-up the geographical address and your name at delivery time to find you or your mailbox.

This would avoid so much troubles for stuff like:

- Moving: I can change my address in one place and everything will be delivered to the new place, no needs for thousands of calls and letters to companies to update every subscription.

- Changing name: Whenever someone is changing his name for any reason (weeding, gender change, etc.) it should only be modified in one place.

- Disposable address: It should be possible to get disposable identifiers that can only be read by delivery services for hiding your real identifier/address from suspicious website

Of course this system is not perfect and probably has drawbacks, but it would be already a step in the good direction for me. Implementation details are left open for discussion (Centralized vs distributed database(s), checksum for spelling mistakes, financial repercussions, etc.)

maybe this is already obvious to you, but a disposable address only hides your location to a certain degree. an untrustworthy vendor probably couldn't figure out your exact address, but I bet they could narrow down your city/town by requesting shipping quotes from many different locations and triangulating via price differences.

To me, it seems like an utter failure of democracy.

Why wouldn't the locals want street names?

As the mailman had to visit every house, and did it every day, he'd soon learn the idiosyncrasies of selfish people who refuse to label their house.

I used to deliver pizzas. If she'd ordered one, it wouldn't have arrived. "Joes Cottage, Long Lane", is a completely pointless address, it forces the person attempting to find it to investigate on average 50% of the houses on Long Lane. Given that only about 1 in 10 hours had a number visible at night from the car - especially in the rain - this would be pretty much impossible to do.

The mailman problem

I have relatives who live in Donegal, Ireland. They don't even have house names, just their personal name and a townland.

When post sorting & delivery was run in the town, by generational postmen who grew up there, everything was fine. They knew that Patrick R Flaherty was in the white house and Paddy J Flaherty was in the stone one.

Now the deliveries are by rotating agency workers driving a post van over from Donegal Town. It's chaos.

While it's imperfect, Eircode should help with this.

Having just purchased a house in rural Offaly where several houses have the exact same address (I guess the post person was supposed to know everyone's name?) Eircode is really helpful for disambiguation.

Bingo: Eircodes were invented for exactly this problem.

Eircodes are unique per delivery point, whereas 35% of addresses were (pre-Eircode) non-unique.

This caused problems for, e.g.:

(1) Delivery people, except the state postal provider (An Post). As you rightly said, An Post kept a note at the local post office (not centralised) of who lives where. For anyone else (e.g. FedEx) it would be literally impossible to tell where to deliver an item, if the address is non-unique.

(2) Ambulances not able to find the correct house.

(3) More complicated provisioning for, e.g., fibre broadband - how do you avoid incorrectly disconnecting a neighbour, if the neighbour has literally the same address as your customer?

Now, an Eircode is sufficient in itself to uniquely identify the delivery point.

To see this in action, go to Google Maps and put in an Eircode, e.g., "D02 AF30 Ireland".

Or go to https://www.eircode.ie/ and put in an Eircode, and the rest of the address will be shown.

But to go the other way (from address to Eircode) literally requires, for non-unique addresses, the person to click on the correct property on a map.

Of course, Google Maps has a problem in that it gives people the wrong eircode if I put in my mailing address (I currently live in a building with several apartments - haven't moved yet). Perhaps Google maps can't handle multiple postcodes per building?

Quite possibly, yes - or otherwise related to the non-unique mapping from address to Eircode.

The other way round should always work though, i.e., if you give Google Maps the Eircode then it should put the location marker in exactly the right place every time.

you're correct, but if people type my exact address "apt X, # streetname, <city>" it still gives them a very different eircode.

Given that more people are using google maps than finder.eircode.ie we might wind up with Google determining truth here.

> I have relatives who live in Donegal, Ireland. They don't even have house names, just their personal name and a townland.

Ha, yeah same with my relatives in Mayo. When sending wedding invites, my English (now) wife was so confused by it all. Particularly so when Mr/Mrs <FAMILY_NAME>, <TOWNLAND>, Mayo would be applicable to a lot of people so first names are a must :)

The chaos is not caused by the changing drivers, but simply by the unclear adresses...

If that is the official address, it should be on the map, so you should have to investigate exactly one cottage. It's not like street numbers are always simple and sequential either. I have streets that become other streets in the middle. I have streets that end in a T-intersection, then continue from another T-intersection half a km away. Addressing globally has never been anything close to e.g. Manhattan's grid system. As long as that town's official addressing system works the way the locals say it does, deliveries should arrive as normal with no hassle. And that town isn't even unique within the EU, there are plenty of towns on my side of the continent that just number their buildings and don't assign them street addresses.

It's silly. If every village gets to do its own scheme we'd have chaos.

The standard street names + numbers scheme works well, it obviously works better than their "numbers only" scheme, it should be adopted.

Street numbers + numbers is a joke, and doesn't work anywhere. People are only able to know where some street is if they happen to know the place very well, and you can never trust the ordering of numbers.

given that knowledge of local streets is necessary to find a route there, what would be a better system?

The city I live uses a sum of two numbers given by the house position in the two directions (one on the hundreds, other on the unities) into a coarse grid.

There are plenty of cities that have numbered streets, in order.

Some cities have named "mega-blocks" as a third grouping element beyond the street/number and finer grained than the usual neighborhood name, so you have to memorize less stuff.

In short, there are plenty of schemes that give way better result. If you have to look up on a street-name database to find an address, there is little to gain compared with a house-number database.

Ok, that makes sense. When your streets are lain out in a grid, everything is easier. But most municipal road systems are far less tractable. I can't imagine easily navigating my hometown, or any other town in New England based on grid coordinates.

> Good for them -- it's their town after all!

Doesn't mean they're doing what's actually best for themselves.

FTA:

> There are some house numbers that are about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) apart,

Sounds like a pain to navigate.

> Good for them -- it's their town after all!

Of course, your grandmother was relying on the kindness of the postal service in this case. The postie could simply have decided it to return it as misaddressed.

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