Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address

Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by jakobegger on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @10:04AM (#12261789)

What 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.

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by jasode on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @10:29AM (#12262010)

>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

[2]http://lifehacker.com/201752/spell-your-phone-number

[3]http://hello-operator.softwareadvice.com/want-memorable-toll...

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by jeeeeefff on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @10:33AM (#12262043)

Same reason we have DNS instead of remembering IP addresses.

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by IanCal on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @11:06AM (#12262298)

DNS allows us to keep swapping the IP address associated with a service though, this (afaik) doesn't.

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by pareshverma91 on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @12:55PM (#12263188)

Ability to swap underlying ip address is orthogonal to using alphanumerics in DNS. Numeric sequences could also be used as CNAME for the ip address. But we don't because of human brain.

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by james_pm on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @10:14AM (#12261878)

Seems more easily remembered and therefore easier to accurately share without reliance on technology. 6342 LAY TRANSCENDENT (my location right now) is easier to write down, and comes with a built in typo checker (icon is the earth in this case).

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by ktta on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @10:55AM (#12262207)

Probably not a good idea to post your address where people can see who you are (you have your keybase details on your profile)

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by james_pm on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @03:23PM (#12264193)

I'd be happy to meet anyone from HackerNews who wanted to drop by. I'm here everyday. It's the Tucows office in Toronto and it's no secret I work here most weekdays.

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by yladiz on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @10:20AM (#12261927)

Try remembering and telling someone your home's coordinates. Then try telling them the coordinates of the restaurant up the street.

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Re:Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address by Programmatic on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @11:05AM (#12262295)

This 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.

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