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Comment by why-oh-why | Hacker News Reader

I find it ludicrous that we’re still not using GPS coordinates as addresses. My address would look something like

    First Last
    Street # or Building Name if any
    18.0000 -7.0000
    USA

Basically the “ZIP city, state” line should be replaced by coordinates; 4 decimals are precise to 11 meters.

And in less dense areas you might not need the second line either:

    First Last
    18.0000 -7.0000

Mail is not handled manually anymore so why act like it still is?

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How does your mail get delivered? Mine still gets delivered by a human.

Your mailman follows a screen that tells them where to go.

From the few mailmen I know, this is hardly the case.

Seems like that would be difficult to remember - every postman I've known in the UK just learns the route. It would also be harder for people posting a letter to remember - it's easier to remember 6-7 characters than 12 digits, and less prone to errors. Get one character wrong in a postcode and it'll _probably_ still go to the right region, or be an obvious error and handled accordingly, and if you're written the full address you have the area/city to check. Mistaking 40.6971, -74.2598 for 41.6971, -74.2598 puts you 100km away, and 50.6971, -74.2598 1000km away, and there's no obvious way of telling that's wrong.

We can do something similar to your system in the UK now - "10 SW1A 2AA" is a unique address, but we don't as it's less robust. "10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA" makes the intention clearer, both if there is an error when writing ("10 Downng Street, Lendon, W1A 2AA" - we can make a fair assumption, particularly if the name indicates it's the same as other mail going there) or if it is damaged in transit ("10 Downing [Unreadable], London, SW-- 2A-").

How does that help solving this fraud? More than one person lives in the same GPS location. If they don't track flat numbers, they still have the same problem.

You didn’t read. The second line is still your regular address if you live in dense areas.

I was just complaining about addresses and not this specific handling of ZIP codes by UK’s post.

I thought I was missing something. If it doesn't solve the problem, why did you propose it then?

So everyone in the North-East facing apartments in my apartment building have the same address?

You didn’t read. The second line is still your regular address if you live in dense areas.

I read it, you didn't describe what you think you described. You didn't say regular address, you said street - which doesn't tell you which apartment in a building you live in.

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