A Geocode Is Not an Address | Hacker News Reader

A Geocode Is Not an Address

wired.com

35 pointssusiecambria34 comments

It's been discussed before, but what 3 words had a ton of flaws compared to other systems like pluscodes. What they do have is a great PR person who gets them fantastic advertising article like this one.

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

Chris Mellon, the author of this piece seems to be on their payroll, there are countless 'articles' by him in various media.

Seems like a good reason to flag this submission.

The article seems to be against What3Words, so why would it be flag-worthy? I mean, he doesn't disclose the conflict of interest, but this doesn't seem an attempt to peddle a narrative that benefits the company in any way.

It's pretty mild criticism though, and even oddly mild criticism is a positive for a relatively small startup given that it's getting them attention.

The app is fantastic though. It makes the whole process of coding and decoding super easy. Usability is an effective solution to a lot of the technical flaws.

It seems (and sorry to sound blunt but it seems so) that Puerto Rico the State (not the people) has not done its homework in a long time. Japan has a much more complicated address system and they do not seem to have a problem.

If FEMA does not know how to reach a point, the problem is not the type of address used, it is that nobody (in the Administration) has cared in quite a while.

Puerto Rico is a territory owned by the United States, not a state. The Democratic Party officially wants to make it a state; the Republican Party does not. PR has voted for statehood in two referenda, but voter turnout was low.

It is certainly true that FEMA is terrible at its job.

It seems pretty clear that the OP used "state" in a generic sense despite the admittedly confusing capitalization, not referring to a US state or a sovereign state but a general political organization that controls some land [1]. It's more than unnecessary to transition this into a remark on the mainstream US political parties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)

Discussing Puerto Rico without reference to the established policies of the main political parties is like recommending that poor people who can't get bread should eat cake instead.

Oh, addressing is a local problem for which they have had quite some DECADES. Whatever the National interests. It is complicated but not SO much.

Seems to me that the article starts with an argument that Puerto Rico’s addresses are confusing to US addressing because they follow Spanish heritage. And then argues that replacing with Geocoding would lose the heritage connection. Presumably making addresses US standard would lose the same heritage connections.

Also seems to fail to recognise that the zip code or postal code part of the address is a specialised, possibly irregular shape, geocode that identifies an area of the world within its local context.

They would have at least some of the same names in them (maybe just street name and city?), so they wouldn't be lost completely.

I wonder if the Maidenhead locator system devised by radio amateurs in 1980 and still used by all hams today would be a better fit. This uses geocodes not much longer than a zip code which are not random.

It's easy to check if two locators are close just by looking at them and of course I know my locator as it's easy to remember.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

Here is a Google map showing grid locators as you zoom in: https://www.egloff.eu/googlemap_v3/carto.php

Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

Among other flaws of geo codes already discussed were: they are non continuous so you cannot know who is neighbor with whom, they cannot be used for navigation (follow that street, turn into another one) and they are not permanent, because earth moves.

I understand geo codes as a better positioning system. If i want to describe i dont have to describe e.g. in a park very ambigous because there are no clear points. I can say i am at e.g. „house flower car“ and they can find it easily by translation to gps coordinates and showing on a map.

What do you mean by "earth moves" do you mean tectonic plates ?

Wouldn't that apply to any of the other global location descriptions (GPS coordinates) as well? And is this really less permanent than street names/numbers that may be changed several times over the course of a few hundred years?

If you are going to describe a path to an ancient tomb, Indiana Jones style, than the movement might matter but over the timespans this system is used I don't think earth movement is an issue.

> changed several times over the course of a few hundred years

The street I live on has had four names over the last 100 years, as different regimes have taken power.

Tectonic plates is one thing. More short term reasons are earth quakes. And indeed, it is a problem with gps coordinates as well.

Most of the people(me included) want just an accurate address, easy to share/communicate and care very little about its story. Most of the street names have nothing to do with the actual place anyway. If you want to mark an event you can always build a landmark.

I'm pretty sure that the young people have no problem with the new system(considering is more accurate) and this is a classic example of people resisting to change(of any kind).

It depends on were you live

In Europe it makes a lot of difference

In Italy, were I come from, streets history can go back centuries, some of them are thousands years old and many span across regions from South to North uninterrupted

Via Aurelia, started in 250 b.c. with a length of approximately 700 Kms is not gonna be replace by a triplet of random words anytime soon, I can guarantee it

First of all, no one should be using 3 words after Google's plus codes were released and became available in Google maps

Those new locating systems are solving problems which most of the people don't have. They make it even worse. We have street addresses in the most of the cities. In case someone call me if I can come to e.g. "Delnicka 43, Prague, Czech Republic" I know immediately where it is and I can say I can be there in 20 minutes. In case she tell me "mission back envy" I must connect to the Internet and check where exactly is it. So I must have some device and connection. And in emergency situations every minute counts. For places where street address system missing there is geographic coordinate system such as GPS which is widely used and acceptable by (if not all) the most of emergency services. And it's not GPS-dependent only, such coordinates you can find out in many ways (e.g. paper map, position of the Space objects etc.).

The last time I was in the Czech Republic (not Prague) I was staying on a long street where the street numbers seemed completely arbitrary. I passed 954, 37, 238, 952, 950, 77a,... all on my way to find the inn at number 120. Google maps directed me to a location 600m away, near number 124. Is that common in Czechia?

Usually here are two numbers for each address (there are even more specialized but it's not common): landmark - blue background and descriptive - red background (see [1]). "Blue" ones are better for orientation, they are in sequences, counted from 1, which start on the end of the street which is closer to some remarkable point in particular city (e.g. river at Prague). On one side of the street are odd numbers and on the other side are even numbers. Red ones are more "administrative" so they are not suitable for orientation. But at some smaller towns/villages or some parts of the cities are the only ones.

[1] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozna%C4%8Dov%C3%A1n%C3%AD_dom%...

> In case she tell me "mission back envy" I must connect to the Internet and check where exactly is it. So I must have some device and connection

The app works offline, so assume you already have it installed, you don't need a connection.

Infomercial. He pushed What3Words all through the article but then with a few weasel words tried to be impartial in the end. Cute. Almost.

So, I live in the US, and our county went through a FEMA-backed 911 ‘address improvement plan’, where all physical addresses were changed to make it easier for first-responders to find a location.

This made response times worse, made data aggregation more difficult, caused issues with billing and package deliveries, and made me realize a physical address is arbitrary, and can be changed at the whim of the government, much like ‘time’.

So, address changes while physical location remains the same...code for that.

Was it the transition that made things worse, or was it something intrinsic to the new addressing scheme? If the latter, can you elaborate on why it was worse?

Both?

So, my street name remained the same, but the physical address numbers changes from 910 to 582. 582 was a prior valid address for a house 5 blocks away.

So, some deliveries and mail comes to my house or my neighbors. It has been at least 2 years and we are still encountering mixups.

Delivery drivers will simply choose a house in the vicinity and leave the package there.

Also, when contacting certain companies to update the address, it would trigger an ‘event’ in their system that we had physically moved to a new location.

Also, billing address verifications for credit cards were hit or miss for a good year.

There was also the issue of a house fire, and the fire truck could not find the home based on the new address supplied by the 911 dispatcher.

Each geolocation address to lat-lon conversion would provide different results.

Zillow is super-messed up in our area now.

So, all on all, it helped nothing. It seemed like a government experiment on citizens’ reactions.

Do houses have the new numbers on them?

I would expect that, along with the numbers being rationalized (so they increase in one direction or the other), so I wonder what the hell is going on that the mail carriers can't get it right.

One option that seems underdiscussed in this article is, you know, adapting "mainland" systems to more readily handle Puerto Rican addresses. Maybe have the Zip code be the first thing entered, and then whatever system in question uses that to pull up the appropriate entry form. Then just add the relevant missing database columns/fields.

There's surely more to it than that, but it seems like the issue is less "Puerto Ricans don't have addresses" and more "Puerto Ricans have addresses different from the American norm", and it therefore seems like adapting systems to account for those differences would be easier than trying to change Puerto Rican society.

Previous HN thread on issues with What3Words, the GeoCoding company mentioned in this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917

Reply on news.ycombinator.com