Fair enough, but that's not the use case for the code. It's designed to get someone who's using a consumer navigation device to a location with reasonable accuracy with high accuracy in entering the location itself.
That's the great thing about hacker news -- you can throw an idea at them, get some feedback, and iterate while it's still cheap to change.
For example, people have said that the ability to compare two codes is important to see how close they are. They've said this without justification and it is not a use case for which I designed the code.
Also, people have said that arbitrary levels of accuracy are important, they are not needed for a navigation device being used by an individual to get to a location.
Others have brought up the issue of using it instead of postcodes. It was not designed for that either.
It's okay to intend a tool for a specific purpose! It's okay to do one thing well.
This post left too many blanks, and we are trying to fill them in. If you don't show people why we should use your tool, and why it is better than the alternatives, people may not figure them out.
I've raised this objection, but I still think it is quite valid.
Compare "43 Montgomery St" to KN4 HNA M33B. First off, I'll tell you immediately which one I find more memorable! I can use any number of mnemonics to store the first; the second is near incomprehensible.
Ignoring even that, people have quite a bit of experiential knowledge of local street addresses. Give most people an address -- even an unfamiliar one -- and they can provide with some degree of accuracy what's around, a way to get there, etc.
For local use only, this encoding doesn't make sense to me. But, if we assume that the typical user of SOC would be a person who strictly uses their GPS to navigate from point to point, this encoding has some advantages.
Another possible use case would be for travelers. Costa Rican addresses are based on distances from landmarks, and as a traveler I quickly learned that many of the landmarks refer to buildings that were demolished in the 1970s! In that case, 75 m Norte de la Coca Cola means exactly as much to me as HFW QMJ BBBE, and this encoding could actually be entered into my GPS.
So, actually, that property would be pretty helpful for deduplication.
When I traveled to Costa Rica, I quickly learned that no formal addressing system exists, and instead everything is based on landmarks. This made use of GPSes extremely difficult, to the point that many people say using a GPS in Costa Rica is fairly worthless.
If I was back in Costa Rica, I'd love to be able to type HFW QMJ BBBE and be directed to my destination, rather than trying to parse "75 m Norte de la Coca Cola" -- first, where's "Coca Cola"? Wait, it's a bus station?! It was a Coca Cola plant back in the 1970s? Gee, that's helpful...
More generally: this is why everyone MUST narrow your idea's scope and build everything around that. When I hear "positioning code", my mind jumps to using this code to locate a new restaurant that opened downtown. That's worthless. Just tell me the damn street address instead.
But if you told me that this code could let me navigate to a restaurant in a city I've just traveled to for the first time, in a country that doesn't speak my native language, and doesn't do street addresses like I'd expect? I'd say you were an absolute genius.
This happens because the post focused on the idea, and barely spent a single line talking about the applications. Thus, I do what everyone else does -- I filled in the blanks. Don't let people fill in your idea's blanks!