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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

  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.

> 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...

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.

> 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.

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 ...

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).

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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