Hacker News Reader

Comment by halpow | Hacker News Reader

Japan is the perfect place for this because their house numbering system already requires you to look at a map to find it.

For those unfamiliar with it, numbers are incremented progressively around a block as doors are added to it. So the door "Block SanChome 4" could be on the opposite side of the building from "Block SanChome 6"

View on HN

It is even more complex than that: within a neighborhood you have "chome", then blocks, then buildings. All three levels are numbered chronologically and don't follow any kind of logical order. Oh, and streets don't have names. Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.

So yeah, this system looks like a godsend, I want to try it as soon as possible.

* I don't know if there is a translation for this word.

Indeed - at least now you can enter the property address (e.g. a four-digit number followed by a dash and another number, as in this small town) into google maps and it'll show you where it is. Not long ago it was more like driving in the general direction while hanging on the mobile phone and trying to agree on a landmark (e.g. a 7/11 or a tower or an office building) while trying to find the place. Before mobile phones? Well, there's this big big sign in a park near the town center, and on that you can find family names on a kind of map.. of course that had this assumption that Nobody Never Moves. So, no, I don't know how people did this in the past.. "Where the Streets Have No Names", the U2 song. I wouldn't have imagined, but that's how it is.

> Honestly, I don't know how people did before modern navigation systems.

The good old: ask a local about it. Nowadays people seems so against just stopping a random passerby to ask them a question. (obviously not feasible with the huge amount of deliveries we do today but back then it would have been reserved for the very rich or rare occasions)

This won't change. The article starts:

> Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses.

Their proposal is useful when one wants to move addresses.

Also useful for anyone who wants their personal residence recorded in less databases

Doesn't it just give the shop a way to fetch the full address from some public API? I don't think you can just jot down that number on a box and have it delivered.

> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.

Yeah but now it's a personal identifier that actually moves with you when you move to a different physical address. In terms of privacy, that might just be worse.

How do you plan to order anything from an online shop without the shop knowing your delivery address?

You put a trusted intermediary (JP Post) that knows the address in the middle, and provide the seller with an identifier that the intermediary can associate with your physical address.

That’s already how it works if you buy something trough the online marketplaces here - Mercari et. al.

Mercari knows addresses of all counterparties, but the label that the seller puts on the package doesn’t have the destination address, and the label the package has when it reaches your door doesn’t have the seller’s address either.

I don’t think they’re saying that the system is intended to replace old addressing but that the new proposed system is fine because the old addressing system, like this new one, is not very good at providing intuitive physical wayfinding anyways.

This is pretty much how we do it in Bulgaria as well, with almost all residential apartment buildings having no street address, it's just "City region X, building number Y". Online maps services are almost unusable for some places because they simply do not want to handle any system other than "street name + street number".

In that context, something like a stable digital address actually makes way more sense

Reply on news.ycombinator.com