14 ms·
Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address
- losteverything 10y agoRemember, addresses are very personal. They are reflective; they are metallic and have a magnetic quality; they are outwardly expressive; they have a perceived value; they are understandable; they are historic (having a history)
- igravious 10y agoThat's not what this is though.
- losteverything 10y agoDirectly no - you are absolutely right. Indirectly yes - if a human is associated with it. As I'm making deliveries now with addresses on it there is no way anyone with a current address will change it. Or should I say allow anyone to change their address. People already have at least two addresses (lat long ) and a third (parcel block for taxes)
- sly010 10y agoThis is probably a first world problem, but I wouldn't mind something similar for the western world. Some sort of extended zip code that I can just enter on any device in a second and it represents my entire fully and correctly defined location including door number, floor, gps coordinates and crossing streets and if it's left or right side of a one way street, etc. Just a ~12 digit number for every single door (and maybe window - for drone delivery) in the world. It would probably have a positive impact on the economy.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoI have long maintained that an extension of the postal service should provide a one-stop-shop for your addresses. I have moved nearly every year since I left for college and I hate having to reset every address on every service I have. I'm sick of it.
- igravious 10y agohttp://www.iammoving.com/ http://www.iammoving.com/ :) This is for the UK. Dunno about elsewhere. Dunno about competitors in the UK. I remember having this idea in the late 90s (while in London, moving around frequently) and did a net search and found that there was a provider of such a service even back then. Do not know if it the same crowd since way back then.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoNice find! I'd love to see something like this in the US. You can get the usps to forward your mail for a year but the thing that would really win me over would be to update my address on the usps, go buy a thing on, say, Amazon, and see at the checkout page that my delivery address AND billing address have been automatically updated. Of course all of this automated centralization will result in security holes, so that'll suck, especially if the federal government's fallback is the woefully insecure social security number.
- fshean 10y agoThis is for the US. In fact it is the US Postal Service version of the service. https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/move-info/icoa-main-flow.do?execution=e1s2&_flowId=icoa-main-flow https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/move-info/icoa-main-flow.d...
- nradov 10y agoRight the USPS should provide a layer of indirection. Give everyone a virtual mailing address, and then they could automatically route your mail to wherever you actually happen to live at the moment.
- 7952 10y agoThe problem with this is that the various data would be somewhat inaccurate and ephemeral. You actually need to store a history of facts contributed by multiple different people. So a delivery person could update the record with better information. Or maybe the drone would add a lidar point cloud of the approach to the window. Perhaps you could have QR or NFC stickers tied to a GUID. They get stuck to things and then scanned by different users. They would contribute facts based on the GUID to various public or private databases. Not particularly memorable, but super simple to setup.
- yladiz 10y agoI think this is a really nice idea, and it seems somewhat more memorizable than a what3words address because it incorporates numbers. Really cool work! The only two complaints I have are 1) as others in this submission have said, is that the list should really be curated, or at least be filtered to remove "bad words", and 2) ideally this algorithm could be tweaked to not require a city to go along with it, so it becomes easier for a place that hasn't been able to designate cities can use it more easily.
- sly010 10y agoAs a sidenote, Australia moves about 7cm north annually [1], so any encoding of GPS location is not flexible enough in the long term. Also only encoding lat/long makes it so you would not be able to address a single floor in a large building. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36912700 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36912700
- clarkmoody 10y agoGiven the spatial resolution of this project (10m) and the lifetime of humans (80 years), it should be alright :-) Floor / apartment number / suite number could just be tacked onto the end.
- robalfonso 10y agoAny position can be determined from x,y,z, you could just tack on the z coordinate - though you'd need to match that locally, accounting for sea level. If you are using latitude and longitude you should stick with the paradigm for height, since floors can be different heights.
- roywiggins 10y agoBut then knowing something is X feet in the air only gives me an approximate floor number- I'd have to guess at the storey height and divide.
- robalfonso 10y agoNo question, I considered that too. But for determining position in 3d space I think its more consistent than having floors. If you get to say the 10th floor with different floor heights the difference could be considerable. Its the problem with whats practicable in daily use and what makes sense from a system perspective.
- rusanu 10y agoObviously we need to add the date the coordinates were encoded. The decoding will have to apply correction based on ample databases of tectonic data. A simple formula will not work, a major earthquake can move a rift by some 5-10 cm. And you need to know exactly what plate does the coordinate refer to, is not as simple as 'Australia moves 7cm a year', consider parts of California east vs. west of the fault. Well, that spiraled out of control fast... It makes the time issues like [0] seem trivial by comparison. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtractin...
- mabbo 10y agoMaybe I'm missing something but why does "Pearl" mean 8480 and "Magical" -6129? If that's a hash, I really dislike this, because A: humans can't do hashing in their heads, and B: get one letter wrong and suddenly you don't have the right address. This has also been my big opposition to what3word. Addresses need to be resilient. If I make a tiny mistake in my address, there should be enough redundant data to help fix the problem. Postal Codes are great for this, because if you get your code wrong, well, it'll probably be one nearby and the delivery service can figure it out. But with hashes? One letter off and you're doomed.
- Melkor765 10y agoThis is why he's incorporated the avatar - in the example he provides you wouldn't see the "boot" avatar if you had missed a letter, the boot is part of the address and should be communicated verbally when giving the address verbally.
- gjem97 10y agoLove this. I couldn't see any deeper explanation of the encode/decode algorithm. Is that written up somewhere?
- roberdam 10y agoThanks!, of course, you can encode/decode the Xaddress even by hand so it can be used in low tech environments, the guide is https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand
- jbb555 10y agoThe page seems to forget to say what the point of this is.
- sharpercoder 10y agohttps://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
- roberdam 10y agohttp://locationawarenames.org/ http://locationawarenames.org/
- jspekken 10y agoIs there any reason the code is written half Spanish half English? As I'm from the Netherlands my understanding of the English language is great but because this is in Spanish I have to use Google translate to read te code.
- roberdam 10y agoThe original code was written in spanish (my native language) and I translated to english, let me know your particular problem with the code and I will change it.
- BillyParadise 10y agoBuscar.
- monkpit 10y agoNone of it appears to be translated to English apart from the messages displayed to the user. Without comments in your code and especially when you abbreviate variable names, it's difficult to visually scan the code and have any idea what's going on. You have to mentally process the program to try and reason about what any variables or functions are actually doing.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks for the feedback, I will work to translate all the variables to make it more readable, in the meanwhile you can check the logic behind the problem here: https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wscott 10y agoIt is nicely done and unlike what3words.com (which is very similar) this version isn't commercial. The icon acting as a visual hash is a nice touch.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks wscott!, I put the first version here on HN 2 years ago, from the feedback here is the improved version.
- joekinley 10y agoThe site doesn't work for me as the Google Map API seems to be broken, Authorization removed or something
- dolftax 10y agohttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/35288250/google-maps-javascript-api-referernotallowedmaperror http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35288250/google-maps-java...
- roberdam 10y agoI just tryed and still works fine, not yet reach the 2500 pageviews of google today :D
- stevehb 10y agoSeems broken for me as well. I'm on desktop Chrome. Message says to check JS console. In case it helps, this is the error message: Google Maps API error: RefererNotAllowedMapError https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/error-messages#referer-not-allowed-map-error https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/... Your site URL to be authorized: http://xaddress.org/try?lng=en_.bb http://xaddress.org/try?lng=en_.bb @ js?key=AIzaSyAOUib5wvPGPSazgnTc-Mq415kxB1fNuu8&v=3.24&libraries=drawing,places&language=en:32(anonymous function) @ common.js:52(anonymous function) @ common.js:224d @ common.js:46(anonymous function) @ AuthenticationService.Authenticate?1shttp%3A%2F%2Fxaddress.org%2Ftry%3Flng%3Den&4sAIzaSyAOUib5wvPGP…:1
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sharemywin 10y agoI got a oops something went wrong while clicking "try it now". using chrome on a desktop.
- roberdam 10y ago"HN Hug of Death", just resize the droplet, you can try again
- king_magic 10y agoThis is really clever. It would be incredible if this took off and became a standard way to represent addresses.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks king_magic, at least is a start, and because is Opensource it can evolve with the needs of the people.
- king_magic 10y agoIt's really a great idea. It's something I didn't know I wanted until I saw it. My (admittedly potentially naive view) is that it has the potential to simplify many things in the mapping/shipping world - it's so specific. No messy address ambiguity. I also love the idea of an embeddable "Xaddress badge" (e.g. this image: http://bit.ly/2biI3YY http://bit.ly/2biI3YY) - unless of course I misunderstood what that is. Maybe you could work the "legacy" address into that badge as well? Just thinking it would be useful for mentally placing an address - e.g., if you give me a raw GPS address, I have no idea where that is - but if you tell me it's somewhere on 5th avenue in manhattan, I know roughly where that is.
- roberdam 10y agoGreate idea!, Xaddress generate a short code, you can use all of them if you want to. https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3354868/17262858/d616e1ca-55ab-11e6-9d8a-78dd524a4063.png https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3354868/17262858/...
- dalbin 10y agoLove the concept, but P2 code depends on the country, I think it should not be resilient on geopolitical address. For example, in France, states have changed recently (change in name and merging).
- roberdam 10y agoThanks dalbin, short codes are resilient and independent from geopolitical addresses, both codes are created at the same time, for the sake of clarity is not show today in the Xaddress
- codev 10y agoMy current location is 5308 AFRAID ANUS. Might be best to exclude ANUS from the word list.
- echeese 10y agoI'm at "ETERNAL SHITTIN" No thanks.
- roberdam 10y agothanks codev, added to the TODO!
- perfectfire 10y agoProbably don't want SCROTAL in there either
- codev 10y agoGreat. It's a nice project, nice demo as well. I realised when I was living in Japan recently how much I miss the UK postcode system. When I'm in the UK I can give anyone a short alphanumeric string and they can find me. A global coordinate system like this is really useful. I hope you can get some traction with it.
- erelde 10y agoWhat are you afraid of? More serioulsy. I think there are curated word lists out there without swear words.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jdhawk 10y agoMy Street is "BASTARD BOX" Jee, thanks.
- throwanem 10y ago
- Ocha 10y agoreminds me of http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/
- dantudor 10y agoI don't see anything new here that isn't already part of w3w.
- yladiz 10y agoIt's the same, barring some differences like dictionary (this list isn't curated very well, see other comments in this submission), but the big difference is that it's open source unlike w3w.
- softawre 10y agoYes, which he clearly links on his github readme. He says it is a commercial version with a patented algorithm.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aw3c2 10y agoYou missed http://what2numbers.org/ http://what2numbers.org/ and http://www.what3fucks.com/ http://www.what3fucks.com/ in the comparison.
- pella 10y agohttps://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/pull/7/files https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/pull/7/files
- csomar 10y ago8512 WANT ILLEGITIMATE Not bad.
- ComodoHacker 10y agoYet another location encoding. Why not MapCode[1]? >Designed to be used in low tech environments What are supposed uses of encoded lattitude and longitude in "low tech environments", other than simple transfer? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapCode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapCode
- kalleboo 10y agoIt looks like the only thing it adds to MapCode is the pain of localization
- roberdam 10y agoMapcode is great, compact and precise. Xaddress looks more like a traditional address so it might be easier to fit in , also gives you a hint of where the address is located, and is clear how to encode and decode. But at the end of the day both are tools that might work depending on your needs.
- cgsmith 10y agoFirst, you have to teach long division and long multiplication to your 7B people. Like the concept and idea and truly hope for adoption. Is it possible to reduce to addition and subtraction? I feel that multiplication and division is a high barrier for most.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks cgsmith, a pocket calculator will be great when decoding/encoding by hand. Im guessing that low tech phones (even old nokias) can do the trick by using it as calculator, but then that may not be as low tech as needed.
- pingec 10y agoThis is genius! Seems like HN killed it though. The demo is not working anymore, probably rate limits have been hit. Edit: seems to work on the default location but not when I move the maps to Slovenia.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks pingec, it seems to be something with the Google Api, I will check that, in the meanwhile you can try the CLI if you know ruby or try it by hand https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand
- jakobegger 10y agoWhat makes this better than actual coordinates? I can easily find numeric coordinates on a map, without any special tables or computations. I can immediately see if two numeric coordinates are close just by looking at the numbers. Very many people understand how to use standard numeric coordinates.
- yladiz 10y agoTry remembering and telling someone your home's coordinates. Then try telling them the coordinates of the restaurant up the street.
- Programmatic 10y agoThis would seem to suffer from a similar problem, given that we travel on and interact with roads primarily. Decoupling from that seems like it would be set to fail for human memory, since there would probably be nothing to reinforce the memory over time for your restaurant example.
- jasode 10y ago>What makes this better than actual coordinates? I can easily find numeric coordinates on a map, ... It may be "better" and more optimized for a particular purpose: human memorization It has a similar mnemonic strategy to other memorization techniques for numbers.[1] Apparently, there's something special about the language processing of the brain that makes it easier to remember words than numeric sequences. Phone-number-to-words (vanity phone #) is another example.[2][3] For other tasks you mentioned such as mathematical calculation/comparison, or computer lookup in db indexes, the encoding is definitely not optimized for that. However, that's not its purpose. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system [2]http://lifehacker.com/201752/spell-your-phone-number http://lifehacker.com/201752/spell-your-phone-number [3]http://hello-operator.softwareadvice.com/want-memorable-toll-free-number-ask-neuroscientist-0414/ http://hello-operator.softwareadvice.com/want-memorable-toll...
- jeeeeefff 10y agoSame reason we have DNS instead of remembering IP addresses.
- acangiano 10y agoGreat idea / initiative but I must ask, are you new to Ruby? I've rarely come across code that was so not idiomatic.
- jsjohnst 10y agoAt first I thought you might be being overly critical as can sometimes be the case here, but glad I checked the code. Your comment is spot-on.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks, yes, I'm ashamed of my code, this is my first project in ruby , my last programming work was 15 years ago, (Foxpro for DOS) so this is my comeback to programming. I hope that being opensource will help it to improve.
- jwn 10y agoI applaud you for putting it out there! Fear of negative feedback often keeps me from releasing code in situations like this.
- acangiano 10y agoNo sweat, man. You are new to the language and you're putting yourself out there. Major kudos for that. Now, for some low hanging fruits / pointers: - $name is a global variable. Virtually unused in idiomatic Ruby. - @name is an instance variable. So it's perfectly ok to use it... within a class. - You should omit the 'then' after each if. - I'd use find_words rather than busca_palabras. - Except for rare edge cases, you can drop the .nil? from if my_var.nil?. If my_var is nil it will on its own make the condition false. - I would use more spaces. 'a = 1' instead of 'a=1', 'b == 0' rather than 'b==0'. - Use indentation consistently. 2 spaces. - The else clause is indented at the same level as the leading if. - Use && instead of 'and' in conditionals. Likewise || instead of 'or'. These short circuit the evaluation for you. So if the first argument is false && won't bother evaluating the second argument. Likewise, if the first argument is true || won't bother executing the second argument as it doesn't matter. - Ruby is an Object-Oriented programming language. I would look into modules and classes to restructure the code in a less procedural way.
- losteverything 10y agoIsn't this a solution waiting for a (sponsored) problem? Zone Improvement Plan solved a problem and where would shipping be without it?
- goodmachine 10y agoAFRAID SEA here. To avoid confusion, might be best to exclude words that are common placenames from the word list (street, road, lake) as well as rude words. Great to see an open alternative to http://what3words.com http://what3words.com (and I also love the icon as visual hash.)
- trekking101 10y agoBut why? Forget about the tech. What does this accomplish? What3words is nonsensical for the same reasons- Amazon Prime is not coming to Mongolia anytime soon and it has a lot more to do with little disposable income/economics than logistics.
- yladiz 10y agoSo the people in Mongolia, for example, that don't have a physical address in the postal service's database don't deserve mail, or being able to more easily communicate with their government where they're located? Just because Amazon Prime isn't come somewhere doesn't mean that logistics problems don't exist and don't need to be solved.
- SpeakMouthWords 10y agoWhat3Words, for example, would be a great help to all the Deliveroo drivers that can't find my house because it opens onto an alleyway instead of a road. This is in the UK, mind you, not Mongolia.
- parennoob 10y agoI have seen a lot of these co-ordinate based alternative address mechanisms (in fact the author gives a list -- https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress#compare-encodings https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress#compare-encodings). But in my opinion, one thing they all ignore or get wrong is establishing some kind of linking mechanism between real world and co-ordinate based addresses. This is a hard problem, but one without which it is not going to be able to gain significant adoption. How do we solve it? I am not sure. Maybe somehow augmenting regular national postcodes with coordinates would work better than these (kinda like the 4-digit augmentation to US ZIP codes) – because those are things you use on a daily or atleast monthly basis, and remember. Something like 98002-MAGICAL PEARL would be more easily remembered, and not get rid of existing information.
- JoshGlazebrook 10y agoI was so confident you were using particles.js, but turns out you coded that yourself!
- jxf 10y agoI think this is a neat way of encoding things. But this also has a lot of shortcomings that existing mailing addresses don't have; it's really only useful for identifying a physical spot, which is what a lat/long and geocodings of mailing addresses will do anyway. Additionally: * What if you live at an apartment? * What if your address doesn't correspond to a fixed physical location, like an APO? * Aren't the city and country redundant if you have a physical lat/long location? Still, we need to look at how we send information to our fellow humans. Addresses are important and I'm glad folks like the OP are taking a closer look.
- robalfonso 10y agoI think a couple changes would be required to address the shortcomings: apartments need a z value as you already have a x and y - of course you need to account for height above sea level if you keep to the same type of measurement as lat and long (rather than just saying floor 2). It could be tricky for someone to sort that out for themselves. I'd think a prefix on the address could indicate a special case that needs to be handled differently to fix APO etc. I played with the demo, it seemed like the city/county operate as a checksum so you can verify the location you've decoded. Its not needed but nice to have
- diskooo 10y agoIsn't this pretty much the same concept as http://what3words.com/ http://what3words.com/, or am I mistaken?
- tyleraldrich 10y agoYou're not mistaken. If you look at the "Compare encodings" section, you will see the encodings compared.
- jbb555 10y agoVery nice. But nobody is going to use it as it's solving a non problem. Nobody has any issue giving people an address.
- Flimm 10y agoI strongly disagree that it's a non-problem, addresses are very unusable in many areas of the world.
- SamBam 10y agoThat's simply wrong, and assumes that everyone in the world lives in the situation you do. What3Words (the commercial equivalent) has only been around three years, and look at its usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Usage_and_awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Usage_and_awards A single usage (Mongolia Post using it to deliver mail) is enough to discount the idea that it's a non-problem: http://mongolpost.mn/more/156 http://mongolpost.mn/more/156
- jpalomaki 10y agoI see the point especially with foreign addresses. It can be bit of a challenge to communicate addresses like "Nándorfejérvári út 4" or "Kısıklı Büyük Çamlıca Cd. No:9" over the phone. Coordinates are of course alternative, but for most of us, few words and number are easier to keep in mind for few minutes. The given notation is hard to decode inside the head, but if you can memorize it for 30 seconds then you can fire up an app to do the decoding. Pictogram is clever idea for the checksum. Probably something that sticks to your head. Reminds me of the Lotus Notes login dialog [1], [2] [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dramatic-password-reveal/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dramatic-password-reveal/ [2] http://www.tenable.com/pvs-plugins/1305 http://www.tenable.com/pvs-plugins/1305
- roberdam 10y agoYes!, in this case "Nándorfejérvári út 4" can be "CRUEL RUN 4604 - Budapest, Hungary
- SamBam 10y agoI don't see any versioning on this, and that seems like it is something that needs to be implemented ASAP if you actually want any of these addresses to start to be used in the wild. If you make any changes to your word lists (in response to, say, all the comments here that say you should be omitting rude words), your old addresses won't be valid. If someone gives me the address "Afraid Anus" (to pick an example someone found below), but I'm using a new version of your word list that omits "Anus," how am I supposed to know which version of the word lists I should be looking at? It's all well and good to say that it will be forever backwards-compatible, but what if people find real flaws with the system? (Another potential flaw: are homophones excluded? What if I'm giving the address over the phone?)
- roberdam 10y agoYour Xaddress will work even if we remove the word from the available list, you can try encoding or decoding by hand to understand how it works https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/tree/master/by_hand
- SamBam 10y agoThat's totally true (and I missed that), but it seems to me that the Country/State-specific look-up table is still the unversioned weak point. What if state or national borders change? Or how about disputed areas? Which table should I go to to look up words for Kashmir? And is the choice of table an (unintended) political statement? Let's say I am creating an address in Kashmir. I have the integer coordinates 32,76, so I look up the number in the Indian table and I get 04. I then hand my address to someone else, who believes Kashmir is Pakistani. He looks up the Pakistani table, which includes the table for Azad Kashmir, and looks up the coordinate for 04, which is 33,73. Oops. True, "Azad Kashmir" is currently considered to be a distinct region, but it is certainly within the bounds of credible that Pakistan officially renames that area to "Kashmir" alone, in an attempt to bolster their claim on the region. Then you'd have two distinct areas named Kashmir in your tables, but two different interpretations of the geographical bounds of those regions in the minds of the people in Pakistan and India. The advantage of some of the other systems is that they are dependent on nothing other than latitude and longitude. ---- (Edit: to be clear, I think this is a cool project, and any edge-cases that may be problematic here are much tinier than my original, incorrect concern about word-list versioning.)
- hasenj 10y agoResembles a normal address? In the Anglosphere, maybe. Have you seen how addresses look like in other countries? For example, in some countries, the address is broken down into several components: City, District, Block, Street, Building
- roberdam 10y agogood point... resembles a normal address compared with the alternatives at least. https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress#compare-encodings https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress#compare-encodings
- datenwolf 10y agoIMHO the Maidenhead Locator System [1] solves this problem very nicely. Locations are concise and can be specified with arbitrary precision. And the encoding scheme makes vocal transmission quite robust. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
- niftich 10y agoAt first I was skeptical of 'yet another geocode', but the addition of the avatar alongside it (for error-checking and instant-recognizability purposes) makes this scheme intriguing, and in my opinion, far better than any other geocoding. It's essentially a combination of an Identicon [1] (of sorts, but with actual clip-art) and hash wordlist, but transmitted together as a unit. This is a very good idea and exploits a lot better how humans actually memorize and recognize things. It needs a better wordlist though. Better is subjective, but the current list is very anglocentric, not very distinctive, and laced with profanity, making it awkward for interactions between strangers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon
- roberdam 10y agoThanks niftich, you can try the spanish version as well http://test.xaddress.org/try?lng=es http://test.xaddress.org/try?lng=es and more languages can be included.
- niftich 10y agoI'm not sure if having a distinct wordlist for every language is helpful though, as then you can't easily tell that two addresses are the same. Arguably, the desirable features of a geocode are: [a] more memorizable/recognizable than coordinates [b] you can easily tell whether two addresses are the same [c] error-resistant, or at least error-detecting (if you can't correct the error, at least be able to tell there is an error so you know the whole thing is corrupt)
- roberdam 10y agoIt can be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12262754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12262754 in this case "Nándorfejérvári út 4" can be shared as "CRUEL RUN 4604 - Budapest, Hungary
- swehner 10y agoFrom the list of words at https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/blob/master/en/adj_en.csv https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/blob/master/en/adj_en.c..., I take it that some locations will be labelled DESPERATE, UNSPEAKABLE, POSTDOCTORAL, OBSTETRICAL, GENEALOGICAL, ASSASSINATING,CORRUPTED, PROGESTERONE, etc. etc., also RUSSIAN, UKRAINIAN, DUTCH, ...etc. Where did that list come from?
- et-al 10y agoWow, this is a much friendlier alternative to what3words / what3fucks! Few things that I felt could be potential issues: 1) GPS coordinates are great for approximations for areas without clear markers, but in built up urban areas, they don't work so well. As a stranger to a new city, I can fumble around and ask someone, "Excuse, can you help me find 222 Hyde Street?" And they'll hopefully point me in the right direction, and I'll wander wander over until I hit Hyde Street and try heading north and south depending on the numbers. Secondly, if we hash the geocode, then we lose that sense of relativity. I no longer know if "Pearl" is east or west of "Tiger" and don't know which direction to move in. In addition, there's still the final mile (or rather 3 meter) issue. When I'm at a particular lat/long, am I at the right spot? Or is my GPS off, or did the person put the pin just slightly off? Using traditionally addressing, when I have a house number, I know it's the right house because it says so on the door. 2) The icons used for error-checking may not be universally known. For example, 83.png is a hat, but for someone unfamiliar with this, it's.. a horn? a bell? I know this was an MVP to show (and it's great!), but it is something to keep in mind. Ultimately, I think this has potential for the delivery industry (before drivers get replaced by drones/driveless cars, of course). It's already more intuitive than the chiban-style addressing system in Japan [0]. However, similar to that system, we're still reliant on book/web site/app to decode the address. And so here, we're assuming people will readily have access to a smartphone with a reliable GPS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoI completely agree with your thoughts: this is impressive when you don't think about directions from humans for humans but once you toss that wrench in it falls flat. Perhaps they could make improvements to handle directions.
- bumbledraven 10y agoGoogle's Open Location Code is better. https://github.com/google/open-location-code https://github.com/google/open-location-code
- saalweachter 10y agoMy biggest problem with this sort of schema (and the similar ones other people have mentioned in this thread) is that it doesn't solve any of the difficult problems an addressing system needs to solve. At best, it's just a "maybe easier to remember than GPS coordinates" system -- but remembering GPS coordinates with this level of precision is not really an insurmountable problem. I know its hard to remember, but up until a decade or so ago, people used to remember dozens of phone numbers, which requires a similar level of memorization. It doesn't make addresses any easier to find than GPS coordinates -- you pretty much need a GPS. It doesn't necessarily guarantee unique addresses -- you get a different address if you pick different points on the same building or property. It doesn't encode any routing information. So you're a delivery company asked to deliver a package to 123 Wascally Wabbit. You can convert that to a GPS coordinate easily enough, sure. But then what? Which delivery truck do you put the package on out of which delivery center? You can easily compute which delivery center is physically closest to an address, but that doesn't tell you if there is a natural feature like a river or mountain between the two points. On the other hand, USPS addresses encode the routing information -- the third line is the name of the post office that the delivery vehicle for that address departs from. It doesn't encode any navigation information. How do you get to the address once you're in the general area? Which road gets you there? If you're a helicopter or a drone or a crow, you can just fly straight to the GPS coordinates, sure. But if you're walking or driving, as most people will be, you've just re-invented the sport of orienteering. This is the problem 911 emergency addresses were intended to solve -- you have a street name and a number for every address, so if you need to find an address in a hurry, you just navigate to the street (which is an easy amount of local knowledge to learn), and then you have a linear ordering of addresses so that you know when you've passed the address you're looking for. It doesn't encode any service area type information. You want to order a pizza -- does the parlor deliver to 123 Wascally Wabbit? You don't know, and neither do they. You call 911 for a fire truck or ambulance -- are you served by the Newtown fire department, or the Newburgh fire department? Again, your emergency services need to plot your address on a map and then figure out whose region you're in. They can't just say, "Oh, you're in Plymouth, a suburb of Newburgh," and route your call appropriately. (Essentially) saying "just use (masked) GPS coordinates" may technically assign addresses to all of those billions of places which aren't on named roads in recognized municipalities, but it doesn't solve it usefully.
- austinlyons 10y agoAddress in South Austin, TX: "Grounded Bastard 1780" http://i.imgur.com/xgHFFJD.png http://i.imgur.com/xgHFFJD.png
- uobytx 10y agoI poked around and found: 1861 TIME WHORING Nifty concept, could use some work.
- nxzero 10y agoMissing how having a "Mail Address" makes an address deliverable; aka mail service, legal mailbox, etc.
- bradknowles 10y agoDoesn't seem to work on iPad. Have you tested various other platforms?
- slavik81 10y agoI'm surprised nobody has mentioned MGRS as a somewhat similar system. Coordinates look like so; 4QFJ 1234 5678. That means the coordinate is in the 100km grid-square named 4QFJ. At 12,340m North and 56,780m East of the SW corner. It's easy to reason about the coordinates if they're on the same square, and given how big squares are they usually will be. You do need to memorize some letters and numbers, but since the relationships between coordinates are clear, you should only need to memorize the least-significant digits for nearby locations.
- karussell 10y agoI like this comparison: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/docs/comparison.adoc https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc... Which makes it also clear why open location code is really smart (disclaimer: I'm not involved nor a google fan boy ;)) But e.g. the fact is lovely that you can combine OLC with a city name (or more address information) making the code shorter I don't like the fact that Xaddress depends on words and uses an image for a visual hash.
- roberdam 10y agoGreat resource, thanks for sharing
- Tharkun 10y agoAddressing is broken on a global scale. And this won't fix it. Addressing schemes like street & block level addresses can be useful for finding your way around. This is an important feature. I know how to get from 123 My Street to 150 My Street. I don't know how to get from Libres 2956 (Saxophone) to Libres 2900 (Other avatar). Any physical addressing scheme that doesn't take routing into consideration is doomed to failure IMO.
- roberdam 10y agoThanks Tharkun, did you try this? http://www.xaddress.org/takeme?from=40.7848694,%20-73.9696705&to=LIBRES%202956%20@PY-ASU&lng=en http://www.xaddress.org/takeme?from=40.7848694,%20-73.969670...