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Comment by TheWoolRug | Hacker News Reader

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TheWoolRug

You can put a google plus code (like coordinates) into the starlink address finder for places without street addresses.

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Why not just coordinates? Talk about overcomplicating.

Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to screw up.

Find the place on Google Maps, copy the plus code.

Rather than entering lat/lon coords... except did you get the sign right, or maybe you flipped lat/lon, or got a significant digit out.

… or you used minutes with a decimal minute, or minutes and seconds, or maybe decimal degrees.

There comes a time when a format has so many confusable variants, it’s best to make a new unambiguous format.

I prefer “three words”. You get three words and they identify a location suitably accurate for navigation. https://what3words.com/

If only 3 words wasn't a proprietary black box, which demands that you use their service / api and that you are not allowed to reproduce it without their assent. Plus there's a bunch of other drawbacks to w3w if you just search a bit online.

At least the algorithm for plus codes is known and can be reused even if Google decides to drop it in the future.

A system that depends on a functioning proprietary API to resolve coordinates is idiotic. That’s so unreliable that it can’t be used for anything more than an ephemeral exchange. At that point you might as well have a 3 word url shortened link.

I prefer an unambiguous and open way of communicating locations on the surface of the Earth, to a proprietary service from a company with a long history of pulling the plug on products.

"Plus codes" are also known as "open location codes", and they are open source, not proprietary, nor do they rely on a central service.

You appear to be conflating other proprietary systems with this open one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

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

Interestingly, the plus code for me is almost working. It's sending me to another place once I've put in the location on the site.

It's a good start though, I'll try other close plus codes until I get it right. Would still have been better to use coordinates.

Clicking on a map location in Google maps shows a context menu where the first entry is the latitude and longitude, click that and it copies it to the clipboard. No need to use a Google specific encoding.

I'm not sure that using Google Maps to demonstrate copying a single way of encoding coordinates vs using an open standard is a terribly convincing argument.

Having a field that takes lat and lon has all sorts of ways to enter data either incorrectly, or in an unexpected format - if someone has coordinates from some other source they might be typing it in, rather than copy/pasting.

Also, as others have mentioned - plus codes (or Open Location Codes) are an open standard that can be implemented by anyone under an Apache 2.0 license with a whole bunch of example implementations on github[1]

[1] https://github.com/google/open-location-code

> Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to screw up

Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to use with non-Google services and open source map tools

It's open source... anyone can encode and decode plus codes: https://github.com/google/open-location-code

TIL!

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