freyfogle

This is nothing unique to French, it is just the generational evolution of language. Listen to a news report in any language from the 1920s. It is vastly different in tone, style, vocabulary and possibly accent than a news report today. Change is the only constant.

much history? This is exactly the way new languages evolve.

yes, of course we would invent new languages. We do this continually. In any big language there are many different dialects. This is a way to signal group identity. Over time they become new languages. Latin becomes French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. If you disagree why do you not speak your English with a (choose those that don't apply:) English / southern / Indian / Scottish / Irish / South African / Jamaican / New England / etc accent.

As an aside - I'm confused why you care what language I choose to speak or teach my children? How does it hurt you for me to be multilingual? If you desire to see the world only through the prism of a single language, well, fair enough. Likewise you can feel free to eat the same food for every meal, listen to the same music endlessly, re-read the same authors, program in only one language, etc. Lots of us enjoy experiencing more of the great diversity of humanity.

I've never understood why you need CSS, I just do it all in VRML

Can confirm. US (dual) citizen living in Europe. Increasingly banks here will not take US citizens as customers as it is too annoying for them to deal with.

Why would this surprise you? Perl continues to improve and is battle tested. More Perl is written today than ever before (that said, much more software in general is written than ever before, and there is no doubt Perl's share has declined). Particularly if you're doing lots of text processing Perl remains a great choice.

I still think you're putting to much weight on accuracy as the key feature. We have plenty of customers who only care about having the correct town or postal zone or neighbourhood, and some even who actually do NOT want accuracy (due to privacy implications).

Nevertheless, yes of course I get what you are asking. Fundamentally all geocoders rely on someone having verified the input data, be it a government surveyor, a car taking pictures that are then evaluated (by humans and/or image processing software) or an OpenStreetMap volunteer, etc. We are at the end of a long data chain and have to trust the inputs we get.

In my 20% time I'm working on a world map at 1:1 scale which will solve this problem, hoping to launch next quarter ....

The only way to know if our service will meet your need is to try it. Please give the free trial a go.

We don't offer an autocomplete.

Hi, co-founder of the OpenCage Geocoder here.

I can't speak to the opinions of others, but for me your question is a lot like asking "what's the best programming language?" The only realistic answer is that it depends on your task. We're continually facing new customer requirements, and what one customer thinks is absolutely essential, the next guy couldn't care less about.

A good example is speed. For some clients every millisecond is critical (imagine real time bidding systems), for others they are running a batch process to geocode their database in the middle of the night and couldn't care less if it takes one hour or two. Likewise huge differences in requirements in terms of accuracy. Some clients will accept only perfection, meanwhile the next guy intentionally wants a vague answer so that consumer privacy is maintained. Then obviously there are big differences across countries, forward and reverse, etc, etc. Some clients must have the attributes that using an open data source like OpenStreetMap allows, others care only about price.

So there is almost certainly a perfect answer for your specific geocoding needs, but there is no perfect geocoder.

Not sure about your first sentence.

I'm founder of the OpenCage geocoder, we'll gladly work with anyone large or small, we have clients doing millions of requests per day. We use OpenStreetMap but also other open geo data sets. https://geocoder.opencagedata.com

You may also enjoy: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com

Check out Overleaf - here's a referral link that gives you and me more disk space: https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=64cf3f9ff138

Web based LaTeX editing, makes it very easy to collaborate. But also they have many standard journal and university templates, and direct submission links to lots of journals to make the whole process of formatting and submitting a paper much simpler.

Yes, this of course raises the question of why some journals charge so much.

wow, great stuff, hadn't seen your project (or the Google dataset), thanks for making me aware. There are a few others as well that are programming language specific. Our goal from the beginning was to make templates that are language agnostic

The big challenge I think is the conflicting use cases between "official" postal format of a country and trying to represent an address in a way that makes sense to users - especially when you only have limited data available (for example when using a datasource like OpenStreetMap where you are at the whim of what the mapper decided to add). Our project isn't about forming perfect postal addresses for things like printing labels and such, it's about taking the real world data in OSM and making it look reasonable. As an example one of the next things I want to add is basic rules about postal codes so we can catch garbage that comes in when mappers mistakenly put the town name in the post code tag and such.

Will definitely take you up on the offer of comparing formats. Any further feedback you have would be really useful, you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this space.

As someone who works on a geocoder, no, I am not surprised how hand-tuned things are. I'm guilty of such sins myself. Clearly this is the way forward.

Feel free to help out on address-formatting. Where we really need help is eastern Asian countries with double-byte character scripts. Specifically CN, HK, JP, KP, KR, MO, and TW - those countries obviously represent a significant chunk of the world's population, so would be great if we could get help on those from folks with local knowledge.

An amazing effort, many congrats to all involved.

I work on the address-formatting project, one small piece of the many used here. We currently have formatting rules for 93% of the world's 249 territories (as defined by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes), but we need help to finish things out - especially from people with local knowledge and native speakers. Even for the countries we've "finished" more tests are always useful.

Here's the repo if you'd like to get involved: https://github.com/OpenCageData/address-formatting

Here's a post I did a week ago on the regions we need help with, though since then we've started making good progress on Arabic speaking countries. http://blog.opencagedata.com/post/138991962708/an-update-on-...

Feel free to ping me if you'd like to get involved. Thanks.

out of curiosity, what country is this?

Took our service, a geocoding API for the world based on various open geocoders, out of beta: https://geocoder.opencagedata.com All feedback, positive or negative, very welcome.

yes. Non-commodity, offline maps: http://www.splash-maps.com and by offline I mean can get it wet, indestructible, draw on it, bleed on it, throw it in the washing machine, etc.

Agree with you, the perl community is great.

If you don't yet, I recommend you subscribe to the perl weekly: http://perlweekly.com it's a great, concise overview of what's happening in perl (5 and 6). A very simple, low effort way to give back financially would be to sponsor the newsletter via GratisPay http://szabgab.com/gratipay.html Obviously there are also many other ways, financial and non-financial, to contribute to the community.

if anyone wants an overleaf invite (let's you - and me - get some more storage space) sign-up via this link: https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=64cf3f9ff138

The online latex editor is very cool, but the more powerful piece is the direct submission to many journals, ability to sync with git, and all the pre-existing templates.

Not saying you're wrong (am a heavy twitter user myself), but we should consider that taste is a fickle thing. Only a few years ago many people checked myspace, friendster, orkut, etc everyday. Now they don't. As quickly as social networks grow they can also collapse.

relevant: http://geohipster.com/

if you want water/rip proffing, allow me to introduce http://www.splash-maps.com

Out of curiosity, why do you believe this became apparent to advertisers now as opposed to previously?

If anyone wants an invite code to writeLatex, the service featured here, here it is https://www.writelatex.com/signup?ref=64cf3f9ff138 If you sign up via that link you get free space (and so do I). Happy LaTeXing.

I would hypothesize that the vast majority of communication is between two speakers of the same language.

There's a world of difference between "an addressing system" and one that is effective.

Try to go anywhere in India by using the address. You will find it challenging.

It works in many different languages, including many non-latin script languages.

You're commenting from the perspective of someone who comes from a culture with addresses. Most of the world doesn't have addresses.

Try to go to a meeting in India. It typically involves three or four phone calls to find the place.

Does the name imply it's influenced by Perl's Dancer framework? http://perldancer.org