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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Place name ambiguity was my Ph.D. dissertation topic (Toponym Resolution in Text, University of Edinburgh, 2007): It is a challenge for humans (I know people who flew to the wrong place with the right name) and even more for machines (going only by the string, all 1627 ¨Santa Ana¨s look the same to the machine).

I know live in Coburg, Germany, and googling for ¨pizza coburg¨ I still get pizza places from Coburg, Victoria, Australia in my result page as of 2023.

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> (I know people who flew to the wrong place with the right name)

I've imagined this might happen with Ontario, CA, and Ontario, CA (ONT vs. YYZ, maybe), or Portland, ME and Portland, OR (PWM vs. PDL), or maybe Vancouver vs. Vancouver Island (YYJ instead of YVR?).

Or San José, Costa Rica (SJO) instead of San José, California (SJC)??

I've heard of a mishap involving Granada vs Grenada

I hope nobody managed to mess up Georgia the state and the country

It has happened between Birmingham, Alabama (BHM) and Birmingham, England, UK (BHX)

https://www.cbs42.com/news/alabama-welcomes-british-couple-a...

Obviously people don't pay attention to flight times, it should've been obvious when the trip was 9 hours shorter than it should've taken

If I understood that article correctly, the flight was mistakenly booked to begin at BHM instead of BHX (not to end at BHM instead of BHX). This is also a consequential mistake, but one that initially meant that the purchased flight couldn't be used, rather than that it took the travelers to an unexpected destination.

(But according to the story, people then bought an additional BHX-BHM flight for these travelers as a gift so that they could visit the other Birmingham and apparently then make use of the mistaken flight.)

>If I understood that article correctly, the flight was mistakenly booked to begin at BHM instead of BHX (not to end at BHM instead of BHX)

Yes, but it should've been obvious when the flight to Las Vegas was 4 hours instead of 12

Oh, I see, you mean the length of the flight displayed when booking it, rather than the length experienced when sitting on board it!

Australian place names often follow a slightly dysfunctional pattern IMHO; X Victoria, or Y New South Wales will 9 times out of 10 mean X is a suburb of Melbourne or Y is a suburb of Sydney. The same (albeit slightly weaker) pattern applies to Brisbane/Queensland, Perth/Western Australia, and Adelaide/South Australia. In my humble opinion they botched this, and they should have designed the system so that Coburg, Melbourne, Australia is the canonical form instead because it is much more informative (Coburg is a classic inner city suburb, a quick tram ride from the Melbourne CBD). The underlying reason for this is that the Australian population is usually clustered around the five largest cities in general, and the two largest cities in particular.

I live in Melbourne, and once had Linkedin feed me a job in Coburg, Germany (upon where I learned that Backend Entwickler means backend developer in German)

I wonder how many times per day a little pizza store in Coburg VIC gets random calls in German? "Sorry mate, you're a bit outside our free delivery range."

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