[HN Gopher] We need to liberate the Postcode Address File
___________________________________________________________________
We need to liberate the Postcode Address File
Author : edward
Score : 314 points
Date : 2024-08-23 06:36 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (takes.jamesomalley.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (takes.jamesomalley.co.uk)
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I can respect the arguments for making it public but there are
| strong arguments also to raise a high barrier of entry to
| discourage abuse. Further, the fewer users of the list, they
| easier they are to police.
| xnorswap wrote:
| It's a lookup between postcode and address, what is the abuse
| cases you're worried about?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Considering that in UK if you live in a building, the door
| next to you can have a different postcode, I wouldn't worry
| at all
| xnorswap wrote:
| If that weren't true, you'd have entire cities in the same
| postcode. There has to be a boundary somewhere.
| nly wrote:
| Odd numbered homes on one side of the street and evens on
| the other often have different postcodes
| willvarfar wrote:
| Postcodes are about sorting mail to match the delivery
| rounds.
| ooklala wrote:
| Many buildings also have their own postcode! (The second
| half of the postcode represents the 'delivery point'
| which is basically limited by the amount of post that the
| postman/woman can physically carry...)
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Well, in Italy postcodes define city areas, and cities,
| for example for my city the main postcode is 80100, but
| my area is 80142, and it contains few buildings, so it's
| different from UK, UK was the first time I saw such
| specific postcodes, and I've lived also in Germany and
| Netherlands
| Muromec wrote:
| Netherlands had a postcode per street
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Oh yeah, I remember being able to insert just postcode
| and street number in forms, but it's not as specific as
| UK, I think
| ben_w wrote:
| I've lived in a one bed apartment where the front and back
| doors had different postcodes.
|
| IIRC, the neighbours to one side in the same building had a
| third postcode for their front, but shared mine for the
| back.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Crucially, it doesn't have people's names in it.
| xnorswap wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| If it's an issue that someone would know your address, then
| it's an issue that they would know your postcode.
|
| If it's an issue that someone would know your postcode,
| then it's an issue that they would know your address.
|
| I'm struggling to think of a scenario where you'd be fine
| with someone knowing one of those pieces of information
| without knowing the other.
|
| It's not therefore an issue that there's a lookup between
| the two. Indeed you can do it trivially with google maps,
| or the plenty of other services that expose this database
| through their operation.
|
| Any safety concerns aren't at the layer of translation
| between postcode and address, they're how someone tied
| either of those pieces of information to a given person.
| secretsatan wrote:
| You miss the point that it was once freely accessible, and now
| it is not.
| scraplab wrote:
| I don't believe it's ever been accessible for free. It's just
| that ownership has moved from the state to a private company
| and now it's difficult to make it open.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah, maybe you should pay a subscription to know your own post
| code...
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| What nonsense. Are you worried about physical spam mail? That
| ship has already sailed. I genuinely can't think of any other
| abuse vector for a dataset like this.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > Would open address data create privacy risks? No. Unlike
| opening up more sensitive datasets such as personal location,
| releasing address data - a list of the physical places
| recognised by the government - carries few new legal or ethical
| risks. Many other countries are doing this, including those
| with strong privacy regimes. Open address data could only
| create new risks if it were linked and used with other
| datasets, and these risks should be managed in that context.
| The harms created by the lack of access to address data are
| more pressing.
|
| https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ee7a7d964aeed7e5c507...
| mrweasel wrote:
| How exactly would that be abused? Denmark have a website where
| you can enter any address, or an address close to where you
| want to be and then let you select the right house on a map.
| The same site will show you the owners, the purchase price the
| taxable value, size, number of bathrooms, stuff like that. I
| used it to find the address of a friend when I needed to ship
| him a present and I only roughly knew where he lives.
| shakna wrote:
| Australia also has ours locked away privately. You can purchase
| access, but...
|
| You also need to sign a contract that you won't make the PDF, or
| anything you derive from it, publicly accessible. (At least, that
| was the case the ladt time I did).
|
| [0] https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-
| communications...
| tim-- wrote:
| Isn't this G-NAF? https://geoscape.com.au/solutions/g-naf/
| shakna wrote:
| Not quite. G-NAF is a government owned enterprise, separate
| to the privitised but government body of Australia Post.
|
| G-NAF is the equivalent to the UK's National Address Gazette.
|
| It's a separate body of data, that sometimes disagrees with
| the "source of truth" that is Australia Post, and all the
| post systems that rely upon them.
|
| For example, it took two years for G-NAF to notice that
| Winter Valley, Victoria, is not within 3356, but actually has
| its own brand new post code of 3358.
| memorylane wrote:
| I think g-naf is freely available...
| samwillis wrote:
| Sadly I don't think this would happen, particularly if Ordnance
| Survey is responsible, all their data is paid for access.
|
| We have a very different model for access to data produced by
| government agency use to that in the US.
|
| USGS Topographic maps: public domain / free
|
| UK OS Topographic maps: paid access, and it's not cheep
|
| US National Weather Service: Public domain / free commercial use
|
| UK MetOffie: Payed access for commercial use
| scraplab wrote:
| OS does release a large volume of open data, but yes, the vast
| majority of the good stuff is not open.
|
| https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open
| normangray wrote:
| I remember asking a USGS person about this. They remarked that
| the other difference was that, compared with the OS, the USGS
| data was a bit rubbish (I may be paraphrasing).
|
| The USGS is funded by some shard of the US federal budget, and
| does commendably good stuff with the budget it gets; it's there
| for both high-minded and commerce-supporting reasons. The OS is
| now (in a sequence of reorganisations from 1990 to 2015) a
| private company with a government-owned golden share, and is
| expected to be revenue-positive. The fact that it has more
| money per square metre of country, means that it's able to be
| _very_ thorough, mapping down to the level of individual bits
| of street furniture.
|
| Sidenote: the context I was hearing this included a talk by
| someone from OS describing using reasoning software to do
| consistency checking of their GIS: for example, if you find a
| river bank in the middle of a field, something has been
| mislabelled. I thought that was cute.
|
| When you buy a data product from OS, you're buying some subset
| of the layers of the database.
|
| As the other reply pointed out, some of these layers are
| available for free, and in the last few years there's been some
| review/churn/debate in the data subsets made available that way
| (I see there are more details on the Wikipedia page). One can
| form a variety of opinions on whether those subsets are as big
| as they could or should be, but there does seem to be a
| substantial point that the level of the detail in the master
| map is there because it's profitable for the company (and thus
| income-generating for the government) to develop it from
| surveys, and it wouldn't exist otherwise.
|
| I think the Met Office is organised in a similar way.
|
| There are a number of questions of principle and practice here,
| but the OS seems to me to be claimable as an example (rare, in
| my opinion) of a privatisation which has produced net positive
| outcomes.
| cuonic wrote:
| On the other side of the Channel, the French government has
| managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National
| Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the
| country along with precise GPS coordinates:
| https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale
|
| On top of the database they have provided an interface to view
| the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-
| date, free APIs to search addresses and performing geocoding or
| reverse geocoding (https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/api-doc/adresse)
| and the data is openly licensed and available to download.
|
| Feeding the BAN has been enforced by law, localities are required
| to put together and upload their "Base Adresse Locale" (Local
| Address Database)
|
| The original data was obtained from multiple sources, including
| "La Poste", the French Royal Mail equivalent, and OpenStreetMap !
| nottorp wrote:
| Even in the far right US postcodes are public info :)
| crote wrote:
| The big difference is that US postcodes describe very large
| areas. A 5-digit US ZIP code describes a town or
| neighborhood, with on average 8200 people living in each ZIP
| code.
|
| Most European postcodes are far more precise, often
| describing a single street, part of a street, or even part of
| a building. Postcode + house number is usually enough to
| uniquely identify a mailbox. For example, in The Netherlands
| on average only 40 people live in each postcode. That makes
| the dataset far more valuable for geolocation.
| dmurray wrote:
| The US also has 9-digit postcodes which usually map to a
| single building or smaller: aren't they public too?
| bluGill wrote:
| They are public, but the post office changes the last 4
| digits every few months so there is no point in telling
| anyone what yours is. These days the post office can look
| up your street address and give you all the information
| they need - which is an 11 digit bar code good for the
| next week.
| aaronax wrote:
| Based on my personal experience, I really doubt that the
| last 4 digits of the ZIP+4 are changing more often than
| once per decade or longer. I could see the delivery point
| of the 11-digit code changing every few months, but you
| are already aware of that code system so it is not simple
| confusion between the two on your part.
|
| Could you provide more information or a source?
| bluGill wrote:
| 20 years ago they changed all the time. Wikipedia doesn't
| mention this though. These days the post office can read
| the street address via computers and get the 11 digit
| code they need, so I suspect they don't need them. (for
| PO boxes the 9 digit code apparently doesn't change)
| terribleperson wrote:
| My 9-digit zip hasn't changed in at least 10 years.
| sroussey wrote:
| Mine has not changed in 25 years.
| GJim wrote:
| > GPS coordinates
|
| *coordinates
|
| There are four GNSS constellations, of which GPS is only
| one...... a statement that negates the fact ones position on
| Earth may be calculated using a variety of other means.
|
| EDIT: In response to replies below; One isn't questioning the
| coordinate system (!), rather the assumption as to how they
| have been calculated.
| arnsholt wrote:
| In this context, it's not terribly hard to divine that they
| probably mean EPSG:4326 coordinates. I was going to comment
| that one of the ETRS89 UTM zones might be easier to work
| with, but on second thought the data almost certainly
| includes the DOMs if not the TOMs, so a global coordinate
| system is probably best.
| manarth wrote:
| The BAN provide fields `long` and `lat` which are WGS84,
| and also `x` and `y` which are coordinates expressed in
| "the appropriate local CRS" (without much elaboration on
| what that would be).
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not to mention that "latitude" and "longitude" cannot
| uniquely describe an address, regardless of the datum or
| ellipsoid. Maybe that is not the intent of storing the
| coordinates. Lat/Lon says nothing about floor number in a
| multi-story apartment.
| willyt wrote:
| That would be the French national grid system, no? The UK
| has the ordnance survey grid which is based on the OSGB36
| datum. I'm pretty sure France will have a similar
| national datum to create their own local grid coordinates
| as planning and building works needs to be done in a more
| accurately aligned local datum than WGS84.
| wongarsu wrote:
| For mainland France it's reasonable to assume the French
| national grid. But what about French Guiana in South
| America or Mayotte in Southern Africa (an island north of
| Madagascar)?
|
| France still spans the globe, with many places treated as
| equals to the French mainland.
| defrost wrote:
| There are many _ways_ to calculate an earth position, sure -
| to name a _few_ ; triangulation from stations, LORAN, or a
| combination of the two with a frequency change and some
| moving stations such as one of the five GNSS constellations.
|
| There are _many_ coordinate systems; these days in 2024 it is
| almost universal to calculate _from_ various stations _to_ a
| WGS84 position, in that _coordinate system_ and using that
| _geodetic datum_.
|
| Back in the day, there were _many_ datums in common use,
| based on a plurity of reference ellipsoids, with a multitude
| of pojections in common use.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_ellipsoid#Historical_Ear.
| ..
|
| To this day there are several thousand indexed earth
| coordinate systems:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSG_Geodetic_Parameter_Datase.
| ..
|
| https://epsg.org/home.html
| pjc50 wrote:
| Like "Hoover", "GPS" is now a generic term for positioning
| systems.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Fun fact: the word Nero (nero) means water in greek. The
| actual meaning is fresh (I think it's the source of the word
| "new" too). It turns out, that many years ago you meant
| something else than fresh water by saying just water, so you
| have to be specific when you're talking about fresh water. In
| ancient greek water is udor (hudr, think hydro, water) and
| fresh water is nearon udor (neron hudr). Sometime in the
| past, the ancient Greeks were sick of saying 2 words to say
| water. So they dropped the second one.
|
| Something similar happens with GPS coordinates. People are
| just saying GPS when they mean coordinates. even though the
| logical thing to do is drop the GPS (neron) and just say
| coordinates (hudr).
|
| Personally, I think that language is just a bunch of symbols
| that have no real meaning. Each symbol means something only
| in a context, no matter how broad or specific. I would argue
| that it doesn't matter which word is more logical to use
| because logic is just a part of the context.
|
| But you are right.
| stef25 wrote:
| Very cool. Nice effort by France.
|
| For a while I played around with that kind of data here in
| Belgium, it's not easy to get it all standardized and "usable".
| mormegil wrote:
| We have the same in the Czech Republic (Registry of territorial
| identification, addresses and real estate;
| https://cuzk.gov.cz/ruian/RUIAN.aspx (sorry, Czech only)). I
| would even expect it to be the case in more EU countries, cf.
| the INSPIRE directive.
| gabesullice wrote:
| A cautionary example of how data meets reality...
|
| My address in France is listed in the BAN... but only to the
| granularity of my street number (e.g., 123 Main St.).
|
| Unfortunately, that number corresponds to at least 7 different
| structures, 5 of which are apartment buildings.
|
| Of those 5 buildings, each has multiple stairwells with their
| own door and no line of communication between them--they might
| as well be separate buildings.
|
| My particular building has 8 levels with 2 flats per level. No
| flat has a door number or letter, meaning I must say 'Nth
| floor, door on the right' to give directions to a visitor. And
| I could not receive mail until I affixed my name to my postbox
| on the ground level.
|
| None of that is in the BAN as far as I can tell.
|
| Finally, on OpenStreetMap, the coordinate for the the street
| number address in the BAN actually corresponds to an island in
| the street that happens to face a private road that enters the
| property. There is more than one entrance :)
| tomsmeding wrote:
| That sounds like chaos. Who thought constructing multiple
| apartment buildings without any kind of sensible post code or
| address was a good idea? Sure, this being reality BAN does
| not apparently meet reality, but it does sound like someone
| had the opportunity to keep reality sane here, and they
| didn't.
| gabesullice wrote:
| Agreed. This is a pretty typical case though, not a fluke.
| God bless the french postal workers. Don't invest in any
| drone delivery services here any time soon :P
| Ekaros wrote:
| In Finland in similar case, each stair well has own letter
| and each apartment has different number. So those are used
| always with the street house number.
|
| Though the later case is bit messy with cross roads. As
| building can have two different addresses. Or same complex
| of multiple building have two different addresses for each
| building. With in my case one having A-C and other D-F
| stairwells... Oh, and numbers also are not restarted at
| least sometimes.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I live in Finland nowadays, and this system is nice.
|
| I moved from Scotland where there are frequently
| buildings containing multiple apartments - tenements -
| there are there are two systems for the labeling of the
| apartments.
|
| The first is the obvious one, "flat 1", "flat 2", "flat
| 3" (often this would be written after the number of the
| street - so flat six at number seven example road would
| be called 7/6 Example Road).
|
| The second approach is the more physical layout. I used
| to live in "TFL, 7 Example Street". "TFL? Top flat - left
| side". You get "GFR" for "Ground-floor right", and
| similar examples. This worked really well if there were
| three floors to a building (top floor, middle floor, and
| ground floor) but the confusion got intensified if the
| building were higher.
|
| There were times when you'd enter your postcode into an
| online service, ordering a home delivery for example, or
| setting up a new electricity contract, and you'd be
| presented with one/other of these systems. And broadly
| speaking it would always be the same. When I lived at TFL
| it was *never* called Flat 6, although I'd often enter it
| as 7/6 Example Street a time or two just to keep the
| posties on their toes!
|
| To be honest most of the time the postal delivery people
| were smart, if I got mail addressed to "Steve, 7 Example
| Road" it would end up at the correct apartment. Either
| because the postal delivery person knew - they tended to
| have fixed routes - or one of my neighbours would do the
| decent thing and redelivery if it was sent to them in
| error.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think it means more towards that Uber Eats never works
| for that BAN than local post office have no clue and snail
| mail fails. GP didn't say the latter is the case.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > but it does sound like someone had the opportunity to
| keep reality sane here
|
| What is "sane" about reality? People want a place to live,
| they don't care about government databases.
| Propelloni wrote:
| This sounds like bad design by the property developer and a
| sloppy building authority. The first is corroborated by the
| lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing?
|
| The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I
| assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there
| on it is the building authorities job to check building plans
| and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they
| are usually lettered. It's the developer's job to mark the
| buildings and entries. Sloppy work, all around. So sad.
| myriadoptimum wrote:
| Depending on where you are in France (especially places
| with lots of housing stock being older buildings), it's
| common (if not the norm) for there to be no unit numbers
| and to direct people to apartments by floor number / door
| position relative to stairwell.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That doesn't surprise me, same thing in Germany. However
| having multiple buildings with the same house number
| (without distinguishing letters) sounds like the much
| worse oversight here
| taejo wrote:
| Though at least in Berlin it's pretty common for multi-
| family houses to have a separate wing (Seitenflugel) or
| rear house (Hinterhaus) that are reached by entering the
| street door of the front house (Vorderhaus) and then
| exiting through a door behind the staircase into a
| courtyard before entering the second building, and at
| least in some cases each building has its own set of
| mailboxes, all with the same address.
|
| I regularly have the problem that deliverers don't read
| my delivery note and don't listen to what I say on the
| intercom, and go all the way to the top of the front
| house before realising I'm in a different building
| altogether.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| That may be because Code Civile allowing(used to
| allow)((par 664?)) ownership of floors.
| gabesullice wrote:
| You could be right, but I think it's a little beside the
| point.
|
| The challenge illustrated in the blog post is that it's
| practically impossible to build a really accurate address
| dataset since the real world is messy for the reasons you
| listed. Just like falsehoods programmers believe about
| names [1], you shouldn't put much faith in anything that
| claims to normalize addresses either.
|
| As other commenters have said in the replies, my situation
| is not uncommon in Europe.
|
| As they say, 'the map is not the territory.'
|
| [1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-...
| Propelloni wrote:
| Good saying!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, but it's not reason creating such database, or for
| not using the standard one from your place.
| wongarsu wrote:
| As long as it shows that your address corresponds to that
| plot of land it's still a perfectly accurate address
| dataset. Your address just kind of sucks. That doesn't
| make the dataset less accurate, just less useful.
|
| Still a lot better than some other parts of the world
| though. In Asia you sometimes have addresses that boil
| down to the nearest landmark and a phone number for the
| mailman to call
| gopher_space wrote:
| > it's practically impossible to build a really accurate
| address dataset since the real world is messy for the
| reasons you listed
|
| Different entities will have orthogonal needs when it
| comes to your address. First responders want a door, the
| post office wants a mailbox, assessors want a plot
| number, etc.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I don't know what's usual in France, but it's usual in
| Germany for apartments to not have numbers. You have to put
| your name on your mailbox, and there's no way to address
| something to someone who doesn't live in the apartment. If
| you're filling out government forms, you sometimes have to
| put in something like "third floor left side" so they know
| where you actually live.
| growse wrote:
| Same in Iceland I think. No name on the door? No mail.
| dhosek wrote:
| Costa Rica doesn't have numbers on the buildings, and
| many streets lack street signs, if not names. You'll have
| addresses like "50 meters north of the old church" or
| "behind the banana stand."1
| jll29 wrote:
| Britain also has "dwelling designations" like "3FL"
| (third floor left) commonly used to describe unnumbered
| flats (which may well have numbers or not). I suspect
| this way of referring to flats is unofficial, but it is
| commonly seen on letters.
| inphus0rian wrote:
| apartments in france often (if not always) do not have unit
| numbers. i always thought it is to preserve anonymity.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Would not the opposite be true? If you have to write your
| name out just so the mail can find you, you are less
| anonymous than if you just have a number that gets mail
| directly to your mailbox.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Yeah wait how is it the BAN's fault that you don't have
| unit numbers, that's like complaining that you never
| receive your letters "just because" your house just fully
| doesn't have any street address and the post office needs
| to figure it out better without any involvement on your
| part.
| gabesullice wrote:
| Because datasets like the BAN exist to document how
| actual people and places are to be addressed. People and
| places don't exist to be addressed by the BAN.
| immibis wrote:
| > the lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing?
|
| Everyone in Germany. Units are identified by the surname of
| the person who lives there. If there's more than one person
| living there, too bad, pick one or write them all.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > This sounds like bad design by the property developer and
| a sloppy building authority.
|
| This sounds like every day reality.
|
| > Sloppy work, all around.
|
| It's a system that explicitly relies on the cooperation of
| several independent entities. You were never going to
| achieve anything better than this.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| Frankly, that just sounds like a fire code / building code
| issue. Are these "apartment buildings" legal for habitation,
| with actual legal separate apartments, and not some weird
| subdivision/subletting situation?
|
| In every place I have ever lived, having a clearly marked
| addresses and door numbers for apartments is required by the
| fire code. If there's an emergency that requires a fire or
| ambulance response, smoke in the air, etc, then "Nth floor,
| door on the right" is not a good thing to be explaining over
| the phone.
| gabesullice wrote:
| > Are these "apartment buildings" legal for habitation,
| with actual legal separate apartments, and not some weird
| subdivision/subletting situation?
|
| Yes. In fact the 'residence' (the conglomeration of
| apartment buildings) is considered one of the nicer, more
| desirable, places to live in the city. In the US, each
| apartment would be called a condominium [1], i.e., most are
| individually owned and not rented out.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium
| playingalong wrote:
| In several countries in Western Europe there's hardly a
| tradition of apartment numbers in multi-apartment
| buildings. Instead the apartments are identified by family
| name of the owner. Or the main person living there. Or the
| person who used to live there some time ago. Or some guy
| backpacking in Asia and (illegally) subletting the
| apartment.
| riquito wrote:
| On the bright side, you know about this and you could
| potentially suggest and follow any changes, which would be
| impossible without a single source of truth
| ikr678 wrote:
| Australia is similar, howeve, irrespective of how perfect your
| national addressing standards are, companies ingesting this
| data providing any sort of to-the-premise service still have to
| mash and clean and dissect it to fit whatever legacy system
| they are running.
|
| I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom
| network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014
| and employs 3 ftes to manually create and delete addresses
| because the old address import tool broke.
| rtpg wrote:
| So many Australian sites use some data source that has an old
| name for the building I'm in, and sites are so convinced
| their address databases are right that I can't do anything
| about it! Mildly frustrating
| ethbr1 wrote:
| In the US, I had a family member's address change zip codes
| (approx similar to larger area postal codes) and associated
| city.
|
| It took a surprising amount of time to cascade through
| systems, as in years.
|
| I think we're at +8 years now, and Google Maps still has
| the old zip and city. Which means many websites do too.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Is there a a reason this hasn't been pushed for at the EU
| level?
| lukan wrote:
| Next step, automatically feed all the roads, speed limits,
| temporary blocks/construction sites automatically into OSM or
| similar accessible data.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Sad to see a reasonable article with a "This one weird trick
| could save..." as an ad inline, pointing back to his own page. I
| tend to think of such ad tactics and wordage to be associated
| with used car salesmen. Certainly, with scams.
| tomstuart wrote:
| That's the joke.
| bbarnett wrote:
| If I call some place I've never heard of before, know nothing
| about, my first interaction with them on the phone shouldn't
| result in "Oh my god, these people seem like scammy used car
| salespeople!"
|
| If your assertion is true, that it's a joke, it's going to
| backfire. That's because that call is the equivalent of
| what's happening here. I called, and the person on the other
| end ... thinking it a joke, funny, did their best to convince
| me that they're scam artists.
|
| That's what's happened here. I know nothing about this
| website, and this was my first impression. And no... my
| initial reaction isn't "Hmm. This website seems scammy and
| lame. Maybe I should spend my time investigating to determine
| if I'm right or wrong!". If I did that, I'd spend my entire
| life looking at scammy websites... I have better things to
| do.
|
| Like I said, it's a shame to see this on what seems to be
| reputable website. But I literally stopped reading, and moved
| on to other things when I saw it. The website owner should
| take that into account.
|
| (And indeed, I may be some small ratio, 2% of users, but it
| could be higher. It could be a lot higher. Or it could
| obviously be 0.2%. But that's a bold move, putting a big "I'm
| a scam artist!" sign on a website, first engagement is going
| to bite.)
|
| Heck... if I was Google, any page with "One * trick" on it
| would be downranked.
|
| TL;DR don't put a massive sign on your website that reads
| "I'm a scam artist, clickbait website!"
| jstanley wrote:
| It pattern-matched "scam" so you classified it as "scam"
| and absolved yourself of doing any further thinking.
|
| If something pattern-matches "legit" are you equally blase
| about sticking with your snap judgment and absolving
| yourself of doing any further thinking?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Snap judgement? I cite my phone call scenario, which this
| parallels.
|
| Should I.. what? Call back and see if they laugh and say
| "Oh no, we're not really used car salespeople, what was a
| just a good joke!". Why would I, or anyone do that? Yet
| this is apparently a "snap judgement" and "not thinking"
| to you?
|
| So why would I spend time trying to determine if the
| people which purposefully acted as scam artists and
| clickbait boneheads on websites, are actually playing a
| joke? What's in it for me? As I said, I'd have to do this
| for _every single clickbait website_.
|
| I don't read clickbait websites, and I'm not going to
| take the time to see if it was all a big jolly joke.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| It hardly requires a huge amount of investigation to see
| that's not a scam link. It literally has the blog authors
| name attached to it, along with a post date and a "read the
| full story"link that has the same web address as the blog.
| It's just a few seconds work to see it's legit.
| bbarnett wrote:
| You're not fully getting it. I said with clarity that I
| know it's pointing back to his website. But any website
| with a click-bait title of 'One small trick" or some
| such, is a scammy, clickbaitish site.
| DHolzer wrote:
| Any negative aspect of media from the past can, and often
| will, be transformed into a positive trait in future
| media.
|
| People embrace vinyl records in an age of digital music.
| They take photos with analog cameras even though everyone
| has a phone in their pocket. Musicians use the harsh
| artifacts of MP3 compression as creative effects in their
| music. The examples are countless, and they all emerge
| precisely when the media that once produced these
| unwanted artifacts becomes obsolete.
|
| If you haven't noticed this shift, I suggest you learn to
| recognize it quickly. Otherwise, you might miss out on
| great content because it doesn't make it past your mental
| spam filter.
|
| And if you don't want to adapt, that's fine too--just
| don't tell others how to manage their websites.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Nothing you cited has anything to do with emulating scam
| artists and clickbait boneheads, and trying to claim
| acting like a clickbait artist is all the rage, is
| invalid.
|
| However, your commandments to not provide my opinion,
| predicated upon your opinion, is the gold standard in
| ridiculousness.
|
| Way over the line.
| robin_reala wrote:
| For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not
| (for example) a town or region.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The British mail addresses are pretty interesting. We quickly
| learned that, as you say some postcode have just one or two
| houses, which may not have numbers, but names.
|
| I'm sure there is a "falsehoods programmers believe about
| addresses" somewhere.
| darrenf wrote:
| https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-
| believe-a...
| mrweasel wrote:
| Amazing. For a e-commerce site I argued that we would save
| ourself a lot of trouble by simply making the address field
| one large text field, rather than attempt to making a form
| that would work for every country and city (looking at you
| Mannheim).
|
| But apparently that would make data analysis to
| complicated.
| bojanz wrote:
| There is a middle ground and some common patterns that
| can help.
|
| The address field names are fairly standardized[0] and
| Google has an open dataset (used by Chrome and Android)
| describing which countries need which fields[1].
|
| I have an older PHP library[2] and a newer Go library[3]
| that build upon this, while crowdsourcing fixes (since
| Google hasn't updated their dataset in a while). The Go
| library allows me to serve all address formats and state
| lists in a single HTTP request, which can then power a
| very fast JS widget.
|
| [0] Initially by the OASIS eXtensible Address Language
| (xAL) which trickled down into everything from maps to
| HTML5 autocomplete.
|
| [1] https://chromium-i18n.appspot.com/ssl-address
|
| [2] https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing
|
| [3] https://github.com/bojanz/address
| wiredfool wrote:
| Ireland can have: Foo House Townland
| Large town somewhat nearby where the mail comes through but
| only tangentially near the actual house County Bar
|
| Where Townland is optional.
|
| There's a bank address in my town: PTSB Kennedy Road Navan Co
| Meath
|
| Kennedy Road is about 2 blocks long with ~ 30 shop fronts,
| and there are numbers on all but one of them.
| dmurray wrote:
| > Where Townland is optional.
|
| Not really optional in most cases if you're not actually in
| the "large town somewhat nearby". I would say the large
| town part is more optional.
|
| You're not going to get post delivered to "Lakeview, Cavan,
| Co Cavan", but you should be ok with "Lakeview,
| Killeshandra, Co Cavan".
| wiredfool wrote:
| Kilshandra is a town, the townland for Lakeview would
| likely be "Portaliff or Townparks". Though to be somewhat
| fair, Lakeview in Kilshandra is really only unique vs
| things like "Pond View", "Lough View" or "Yet another
| body of water view".
|
| In Meath, there's a House address near Garlow Cross where
| it's Foo House, Johnstown, Co Meath, but Johnstown is 7km
| away or so.
|
| For those who have not been near there -- It's karst
| topography with basket of eggs hills where the water
| table is above ground in many of the valleys.
| maccard wrote:
| Except when it doesn't, of course! This [0] post has some
| examples of interesting post codes. They're really more just a
| collection of addresses that are usually near each other, but
| require you to know the area. So much fun!
|
| [0] https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/what-are-fun-
| postcodes-...
| jasoncartwright wrote:
| There are some fun 'special' ones. Banks, governmental, BBC etc
| and... because UK... football teams.
| https://www.ukpostcode.net/special-postcodes-wiki-3.html
| tialaramex wrote:
| Well, how many buildings, and of what sort, varies enormously,
| but yes it won't be a whole town or region.
|
| Most of my street is a single post code. Once upon a time it
| was a street of single family dwellings, so that's maybe a 3-4
| dozen homes, but this is a city suburb so densification means
| some of those homes were modified and cut up to form flats, one
| large family home becomes six smaller homes - and some were
| purchased, knocked down and replaced by buildings which don't
| look out of place but aren't what they were before. I live in a
| purpose built four storey block, but it's designed to _look_
| superficially like a big house, the bottom floor is below
| street level (it faces out over the hill), the top has only
| loft-style windows at the front like somebody did a loft
| conversion.
|
| It's all still one postcode though, so I share a code with
| maybe 100+ households. Recoding is disruptive and it's not
| really worth it, so they mostly don't do it.
|
| Remember for actually delivering the post the postcode is just
| a convenient human readable part of an address, the machines
| (with occasional human help) turn any arbitrary address into a
| unique destination code, and then that's literally barcoded
| (albeit not in a code you're used to from like UPC etc.) onto
| the post. So for the Royal Mail the postcodes not being as
| descriptive as they were fifty years ago isn't a big problem.
|
| Take some mail you've received, preferably over several days
| and study the outsides carefully. Two fluorescent orange bar
| codes have been jet printed onto the mail during sorting. The
| upper code is "just" a temporary unique ID, every piece of mail
| in the sorting system is issued a code, when they run out they
| start over, this helps with debugging and statistics. The lower
| case is in some sense the successor to the postcode, it'll be
| identical for every item delivered to the same address and
| distinct for other addresses. In fact it's encoding the
| "Delivery Point" which is what PAF handles, the location to
| which the Royal Mail employee delivers mail.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM4SCC
|
| The use of these "real" postcodes also enables the Royal Mail
| to more readily accede to impractical "vanity" postcode
| requests. If the rich people in this part of Dirt Town think
| they ought to have postcodes from the adjacent and posh
| sounding Upper Niceton, RM can allow that, because in reality
| their teams are working from the purely numeric code which will
| still treat all these new "Upper Niceton" homes as being where
| they actually are, in Dirt Town.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > The upshot of the research then, is that building an accurate
| database is really hard. OS concludes that it would have to check
| the 4.2m bad addresses manually to make its PAF-less database a
| viable dataset that would actually be useful.
|
| The secret to the Royal Mail's success with the PAF, and the
| reason why only the Royal Mail can maintain the PAF, is that the
| Royal Mail has people walking and driving to all those delivery
| points six days every week.
|
| Compare the Freedom of Information requests to Royal Mail from
| OpenStreetMap contributors concerning the locations of post
| boxes, which were refused ultimately because that information was
| handled only by local sorting offices.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Maybe they can use the TV detector vans used for TV license
| enforcement to collect the data, if they're already surveilling
| every single building in the country on a daily basis!
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| As censorship for FOIA requests is done manually, it may be
| beneficial to request the missing figures directly without noting
| you have them in a censored context. Censoring is subjective, so
| that would at least draw out either the figures or a
| justification.
| nly wrote:
| Unfortunately the British mindset these days is to either rent it
| out or sell it but, whatever the hell you do, don't grow it.
|
| Somehow these idiots managed to strike a deal to keep the
| sovereigns figurehead on stamps (which has no economic value
| whatsoever, and actually the Crown should be compensated for
| this) but, in this data age, didn't safeguard such a critically
| important database to e-commerce
|
| It's like selling off the Tower of London because you can't
| afford to repair the roof and forgetting you left the crown
| jewels inside
| TechTechTech wrote:
| For comparison, in the Netherlands all postcode data is open
| data, including detailed building outlines as well as almost all
| other related information.
|
| See https://app.pdok.nl/viewer for most datasets.
| Muromec wrote:
| This creates a very special Dutch thing --- my neighborhood had
| the roads on the map before the map itself was updated to show
| landmass instead of the body of water.
| anticensor wrote:
| Same in Turkey, except the map data is subject to certain
| limitations.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I wonder if all the houses on disconnected long islands
| without roads in Vinkeveense Plassen have postal codes? It's
| hard to get a pizza delivered there.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2307079,4.9365182,1869m/data.
| ..
| jorams wrote:
| In the PDOK viewer linked above you can enable the
| "Adressen" layer[1] and it will show markers on everything
| that has an address. Everything that has an address has a
| postal code, which is listed in the details if you click
| the address. (There might be an exception with an address
| but no postal code somewhere, I'm not sure, but not here.)
|
| [1]: https://app.pdok.nl/viewer/#x=124175.54&y=471068.96&z=
| 11.290...
| crote wrote:
| This also leads to some very _interesting_ issues, as third
| parties who automatically ingest the data have a habit of just
| reading the docs and making the wrong assumptions about what it
| means in reality.
|
| One example I often encounter myself is Google Maps trying to
| geolocate my address (city, street name, house number), and
| then reverse-geolocate that into my postcode. Which sounds like
| it would work - until you realize that the postcode polygons
| can _overlap_. I live in a building where (roughly) each floor
| has its own postcode, so whenever I try to fill in my address
| on a website which uses Google 's API, it'll "helpfully" auto-
| fill or "correct" my postcode from 1234AB to 1234AZ. It'll
| essentially pick a random postcode, because all of them share
| the same coordinates!
|
| That's Really Really Bad, because the postcode plus house
| number combination is supposed to uniquely identify a mailbox:
| it's only a matter of luck that the house numbers aren't reused
| in the set of postcodes used for my building. They could've
| just as well reused the numbers at the individual building
| entrances...
| agolio wrote:
| I am a bit surprised by how hard this article makes out the
| problem to be.
|
| Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the
| right incentives, which the government will be able to offer.
|
| Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must
| surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to
| private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?
| darrenf wrote:
| How would crowdsourcing solve this problem?
|
| > _Oh, and it wouldn't even be legally allowed to include, er,
| postcodes, as they are specifically owned by Royal Mail_
| moring wrote:
| How does OpenStreetMap solve it? OSM, more specifically OSM
| Nominatim, shows postcodes. Example: https://www.openstreetma
| p.org/search?lat=53.151778&lon=-1.16...
| darrenf wrote:
| I didn't know the answer so I looked it up. Nominatim gets
| postcodes from Ordnance Survey:
| https://nominatim.org/release-docs/3.4/data-sources/GB-
| Postc...
|
| Specifically Code-Point Open:
| https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/products/code-point-open
| which is updated quarterly, and in turn gets the postcodes
| from Royal Mail.
| moring wrote:
| It seems to me that you can download the postcode list
| freely:
| https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/CodePointOpen
|
| Something is missing here. If OS already has that data
| _from RM_ and can make it available freely, why would
| they need to build another database?
| RossM wrote:
| I can't find any good information post-privatisation, but at
| least before 2013 the postcodes themselves were copyrighted
| by Royal Mail (likely Crown Copyright as with government
| data). There were attempts to enforce this in 2009[0]. I
| suspect the copyright is now owned by Royal Mail Group Ltd.
|
| That aside, a practical issue is that Royal Mail still
| retains the rights to _allocate_ new postcodes for any new
| properties. Yet another failure of this particular
| privatisation.
|
| [0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2009/10/06/uk-royal-mail-uses-
| copyr...
| ascorbic wrote:
| > Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must
| surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation
| to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?
|
| They licence it from Royal Mail
| normangray wrote:
| Probably, but not necessarily.
|
| The article points out that the PAF is kept up to date by
| virtue of thousands of postmen and postwomen physically
| visiting the rows in the database on a daily basis, as part
| of normal business, and logging updates. That level of
| routine maintenance is what any non-PostOffice PAF
| alternative would have to also do.
|
| Amazon, and probably Google Maps, are two of the very small
| number of organisations which _might_ have the resources to
| build this postcode->GPS mapping, as a sideline to their
| current business.
|
| They probably do license the PAF, of course, but they
| illustrate the sort of scale required to assemble that data
| independently.
| 8A51C wrote:
| I was a postie for a short while. A particular row of
| houses had no number 63, 61 and 65 were next door to each
| other. I always wondered if I posted something to 63 would
| it land in my sorting rack? Sadly I never tried, but I am
| fairly sure it would have. I often observed manual
| intervention to resolve addresses, from years of collective
| postie knowledge.
| ascorbic wrote:
| They allow you to search by postcode, so they license at
| least that much.
| epanchin wrote:
| Google will surely have a PAF license?
| andrewjl wrote:
| There's a writeup linked to in the OP comments about how this can
| happen.
|
| https://www.centreforpublicdata.org/blog/freeing-the-paf-our...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Off topic but this is a bizarrely weird take:
|
| > Sadly because of the NIMBYs, this map doesn't include a London
| version of The Sphere.
|
| "NIMBY" implies they're objecting to something useful and not
| actually that bad, like a solar farm or a mobile phone mast or a
| housing estate. Not a giant advertising billboard.
| lol768 wrote:
| I think it's a joke.
| robinhouston wrote:
| This is a long-running battle. Those with long memories may
| remember the skirmish 15 years ago, when a small group of
| developer-activists set up a website that allowed free access to
| postcode data (ernestmarples.com, named after the inventor of the
| modern British postcode system).
|
| Needless to say, it was rapidly shut down following threats of
| legal action by Royal Mail.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/05/ernest-ma...
|
| https://blog.okfn.org/2009/10/05/ernest-marples-uk-postcode-...
| michaelt wrote:
| The postcode-to-coordinate data is now freely available as
| "CodePoint Open"
|
| So there's already data for people who want to know postcode
| AB10 1JL corresponds to the area around 57.14677,-2.09873
|
| The PAF is a more detailed data source, as seen in
| https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode which can tell you
| that AB10 1JL specifically covers the addresses
|
| 102-104, Union Street, Aberdeen
|
| 82, Union Street, Aberdeen
|
| Timpson Shoe Repairs Ltd, 86 Union Street, Aberdeen
|
| Smart Mobile, 88 Union Street, Aberdeen
|
| 92 Union Street, Aberdeen
|
| 98 Union Street, Aberdeen
|
| The PAF is useful if you want to provide a "quick address
| entry" option on your website - and to validate address data.
| But if you just want postcode-to-location conversion, that info
| is already available.
| robinhouston wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. I'd forgotten that
| ernestmarples only offered postcode-to-location lookup: it
| was a long time ago.
|
| I suppose this is encouraging! It shows that the forces of
| openness are gaining ground in this battle.
| NeoTar wrote:
| Some context, for people not located in the UK - A full British
| postcode typically aims to cover around 15 buildings (sometime a
| single building, sometimes a street of 50 houses). This is in
| contrast to many other postal code systems which cover relatively
| broad areas).
|
| Or to put it another way -
|
| UK - 2,643,732 codes, 1 code per 25 people,
|
| USA - 41,700 codes, 1 code per 8000 people,
|
| Germany - 8,200 codes, 1 code per 10000 people,
|
| This means that post-codes are often used as a proxy for an exact
| location - e.g. if I am going to visit a relative, I can enter
| their postcode into my sat-nav, and be confident that _most of
| the time_ I 'll get to within a hundred meters of their location.
|
| This doesn't work so well in rural area or on large estates where
| the access point may different from the location, leading to
| places sometimes advertising a different postcode to put into
| your sat-nav (e.g. of where the site entrance is) to that of the
| location itself.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Hence why a house number and postcode constitutes a complete
| address in the UK, we've sort of already got What Three Words
| with "a number and 5-7 characters" - not quite as catchy though
| beardyw wrote:
| We needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond
| Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW
| either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.
| sideshowb wrote:
| If only we had a system of national grid references since,
| say, 1936
| beardyw wrote:
| They were only interested in What Three Words. Didn't
| want anything else, sadly.
| sideshowb wrote:
| I know - my van broke down recently, had the same
| experience even though I could describe the location
| exactly by intersection of roads, or grid reference.
|
| As I had a smartphone they did at least have a link I
| could click which would give me my w3w location, which I
| had to read back to them.
| xnorswap wrote:
| If you drop a pin in google maps it shows you the lat/lon,
|
| e.g. 51.5010392, -0.1423616
|
| 7 decimal places of lat/lon is approximately a centimetre.
| mjlee wrote:
| To save some maths during a crisis - 3 is ~100m, 4 is
| ~10m.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Lat/long coordinates and metres are actually linked quite
| closely: the metre was originally defined as "the arc
| from equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km". That
| is, 90 degrees is 10,000 km.
| jameshart wrote:
| And if the French had had their way, we'd use grads not
| degrees and latitude would instead be 100 grads per
| 10,000km, so each grad of latitude would be 100km.
|
| That kind of sanity was, of course, unacceptable to the
| rest of the world.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The French were really into decimalization for a while.
| They tried decimal time (10 decimal hours per day, each
| 100 decimal minutes, each 100 decimal seconds), and a new
| calendar with equal 30-day months (the extra days at the
| end were national holidays, in September in the Gregorian
| calendar). Also 10-day 'decades' instead of weeks.
| growse wrote:
| Or a plus code, which is a little less precise, open, and
| a little easier for humans to transmit than a latlng.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Centimetre, and after the next big earthquake are all
| numbers off, sometimes even by several meters. Now what
| you do? New addresses for all, or wrong numbers to new
| buildings?
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Not really a problem in the UK
| xnorswap wrote:
| This was in the context of needing to give a location for
| an ambulance, not for addressing things.
|
| It's an ephemeral location for an ephemeral need.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Now what you do?
|
| When the ambulance arrives wave your hands and say "over
| here!". So they can do the "last several meters" of
| navigation by homing on your visual presence.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the best case your GPS is off by far more than the
| worst case GPS. There are GPS receivers that can get you
| to within 2cm, but they cost thousands of dollars and are
| not used in phones.
|
| In the context of navigation that is good enough - if you
| are within 100 meters you can look to see your
| destination.
| fire_lake wrote:
| There should be a free and open government backed
| alternative to W3W. Outrageous for a private company to own
| such a thing.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Why didn't they just use Advanced Mobile Location? I called
| in a fire for a fallen tree in the middle of the field and
| they just asked if it was next to where I'm standing.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| w3w has been sold to most UK emergency services to deal
| with that exact scenario. I know Richmond Park well, and
| it's hard to direct anybody to anywhere in it using
| addresses, so it makes sense.
|
| The problem is that w3w is privately owned and has multiple
| issues with it, as well documented elsewhere.
|
| They could invest in a solution that allows for an OS grid
| reference to be discovered by sending you a link (a bit
| like they do with w3w), or some other open (already paid
| for) reference. That still has limitations if you don't
| have a smart phone with GPS on it, but I'd argue it's
| better than what they have right now.
|
| Of course none of this solves for the fact the most useful
| location dataset in the country is the PAF, and we can't
| use that without spending a small fortune on licensing it.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > What Three Words
|
| W3W's closed, proprietary scheme is arguably worse than the
| PAF - as seen on HN previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183533
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I noticed that W3W showed up in a number of places, typically
| on advertisements, at least around London. Is it used
| universally across the UK? I don't know of anyone using it in
| the US aside from a few enthusiasts. I had forgotten about it
| until a few weeks ago when we were visiting London.
| wordofx wrote:
| Singapore - 1 code per building.
| mtmail wrote:
| Similar in Ireland, the last country in Europe introducing a
| postcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_th
| e_Republ... They didn't learn from the UK and the postcode
| data is also closed.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Yep, one code uniqely identifies a block/building. The only
| thing it doesn't identify is the unit number.
| yardstick wrote:
| > sometime a single building
|
| Fun fact- some postcodes cover only a fraction of a building.
| There's buildings where 3 postcodes are used. Same street
| number, same main entrance, but different post codes.
|
| Edit: A 2-postcode building example is "M3 7GW" and "M3 7GX",
| both go to 55 Queen St, Salford.
| NeoTar wrote:
| Apparently the worst case in the opposite direction is the
| University of Warwick, where a single postcode (CV4 7AL)
| covers 5000 individual residences (so probably about 5000
| people given these are likely to all be student rooms, and
| sharing a room is uncommon in the UK).
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| Though tbf (assuming they haven't changed it since I left),
| Royal Mail's responsibility stopped at the post room. The
| individual residences were delivered by UoW staff using a
| pigeon hole type system; anything larger than a letter and
| you had to go to the post room to pick it up.
| creesch wrote:
| Dutch post codes actually do specify the street.
|
| It's four digits and two letters. The digits cover an area (can
| be a city, town, neighborhood) and the letters cover the
| specific street or part of the street. Technically, they cover
| a range of house numbers, which in 99.9% of the cases is (part
| of) a street.
|
| So just like in the UK a postcode is enough to get you pretty
| close. A postcode and house number will get you to the front
| door.
|
| To get back to the article. I always feel like the UK manages
| to take privatization of public services to a next ridiculous
| level. This being a good example.
|
| Another one is the rail network where the company that owns all
| the infrastructure and is responsible for maintenance
| (Railtrack) was fully privatized and even stock listed. This of
| course did not go very well in as far as actually properly
| maintaining the network. Resulting in it being nationalized
| again where now Network Rail is responsible.
|
| In the Netherlands the company that owns all rail
| infrastructure and is responsible for it (ProRail) is a private
| company but with just the government as a shareholder. Meaning
| it is still effectively a public company, so things did result
| in such dire conditions as the UK.
| pas wrote:
| the problem with UK privatization is the same as with
| California PG&E ... it's private in name, but the incentives
| are all bad.
|
| there was (is) no point for optimization on costs as the
| profit was a fixed percentage (so it ended up quite the
| opposite) instead of a price cap. (ideally the cap would be a
| simple formula based on input prices, to at least make the
| lobbying transparent. sure, this also has a built in profit
| percentage, but the important difference is that the profit
| is not fixed, so the private company is incentivized to push
| the costs down.)
|
| see https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/energy-bell-the-sketch-of-
| an-i...
| shiandow wrote:
| In the Netherlands the situation wasn't too far removed from
| the situation the UK is in now. The postal codes are managed
| by a private company (PostNL), and while the details are
| scarce and hard to find there was a fight between them and
| the government party responsible for managing addresses over
| who got had the rights to the postal codes data (see [1] for
| the current truce).
|
| [1]: https://www.geobasisregistraties.nl/basisregistraties/do
| cume...
| svpk wrote:
| The USA does have zip+4 which is an extension on the zip code
| system and sounds like it's about as specific as the UK one.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| In some cases, your zip+4 is uniquely your address, too. My
| townhouse was a new development and after complaining for
| over a year that I wasn't able to sign up for Informed
| Delivery, I was assigned a new unused +4.
|
| That said, most people don't use the +4 when getting
| directions or the like, it's just used for postal service.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > it's just used for postal service
|
| Even then, to my understanding the USPS has for some time
| now not relied on zip codes at all. They have a really good
| address database, they match on that, and then stamp the
| mail with a routing barcode at the origin post office. The
| zip code is extra, mail flows just fine if you leave it
| off.
| TomK32 wrote:
| 8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts.
| According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are
| currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a
| lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own
| postcode) to none living in a demolished village of
| Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two
| people living in a district that had no postcode until the
| problem was fixed in 2015. Yes, they forgot Gutsbezirk
| Reinhardswald (a quarter the size of Frankfurt/Main) which is
| almost all forest but has a forester hut with two people. There
| are even four Austrian villages that also have a German
| postcode in addition to their Austrian one, and a swiss one.
| There are even still four-digit postcodes with no five-digit
| update in use: Feldpost, the Germna army postal service.
| NeoTar wrote:
| Sorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many
| German postal codes are there"!
| coder543 wrote:
| FWIW, one of the only English-language sources I can find
| on Google claims around 8700 are in use:
| https://www.spotzi.com/en/data-catalog/categories/postal-
| cod...
|
| Don't know where this discrepancy is coming from, but ~8k
| to ~30k is quite a jump.
| heywoods wrote:
| This might help explain in-part the discrepancy.
| Perplexity.ai[1] also says 8,200 German postal codes. I
| set Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the LLM settings on Perplexity
| but it looks like it might use a ChatGPT model for the
| initial search of sources? At least we can see what it is
| sourcing to fetch the value of 8,200. Interestingly,
| asking Claude 3.5 Sonnet directly at claude.ai returned
| 16,000.[2]
|
| 1. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-german-
| postal-code... 2. "There are approximately 16,000 postal
| codes (Postleitzahlen) in Germany. These five-digit codes
| cover all areas of the country, including cities, towns,
| and rural regions.
|
| To break it down a bit further:
|
| 1. The first digit represents one of 10 postal regions.
| 2. The second digit typically represents a sub-region
| within that area. 3. The last three digits identify
| specific delivery areas or post offices.
|
| It's worth noting that the exact number can fluctuate
| slightly over time due to administrative changes, urban
| development, or postal service reorganization. However,
| 16,000 is a good approximation for the total number of
| German postal codes.
|
| Would you like more information about how the German
| postal code system works or its history?"
| devmor wrote:
| Please don't regurgitate LLM output without disclosing it
| up front. We can all go get fake data and make up stories
| on our own if that's what we want.
| rivo wrote:
| Some larger retail stores in Germany ask you for your
| postcode during checkout, presumably to learn a bit about
| their customer base. I don't mind telling them mine, there
| are about 16K people with the same postcode. But I'm pretty
| sure I would not tell them if I was one of the two forest
| rangers in Reinhardswald. (And yes, I do pay cash whenever I
| can.)
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Interesting, is the German postcode not used for
| transaction validation? I know the American payment
| processors definitely use ZIP codes for validation - see
| anecdote 1.
|
| That said, there are definitely situations where the
| payment processors don't require the ZIP code - see
| anecdote 2.
|
| Anecdote 1: When I worked in food service as a kid, I used
| card terminals that connected directly to a phone line. I
| remember a couple of times when I entered the ZIP code
| incorrectly - the card terminal would print out a receipt
| with an angry message saying the transaction got rejected.
| So, I _know_ they were using the ZIP code to validate the
| transaction.
|
| Anecdote 2: With those same card terminals, you could skip
| the ZIP code and it would run the transaction as usual.
| But, my manager always told me not to do that. Maybe I
| never asked him why, or maybe I forgot his answer.
| Regardless, I don't remember why we he required us to enter
| the ZIP code, even when it didn't seem to be necessary.
| lilyball wrote:
| The answer to anecdote 2 is probably that if the seller
| chooses to skip validation measures on the transaction,
| then they become liable in the event the transaction is
| deemed fraudulent.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > is the German postcode not used for transaction
| validation?
|
| No. The only time I have ever been asked for a post code
| was when a petrol pump in the US demanded my zip code. I
| have no idea what it meant, I just put some random zip
| code for the general area I was in and it was accepted.
| I've never been asked for my post code in Europe; I can't
| speak for the whole of Europe though, just UK, Spain,
| Ireland, Portugal, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy,
| Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway.
| quesera wrote:
| ZIP codes are used as a "something you know" factor in
| payment card processing.
|
| The card is (for card-present transactions) "something
| you have". And the ZIP complements that. ZIP code is
| optional, but the merchant gets a data integrity score
| back from the network ("AVS/address verification service
| response", from no match to full match), and can
| accept/decline the txn at their discretion.
|
| Because it's optional and at merchant discretion, all it
| really does is give the merchant some additional
| ammunition when disputing a chargeback. And of course to
| build a demographic database.
| mywacaday wrote:
| You can put Ireland at the top of the list, one postcode for
| every address, every house has one, every apartment has one,
| every building has one, even some old ruins have one.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds like the IPv6 version of postcodes. ;)
| mywacaday wrote:
| except they did it with 7 characters :)
| dghf wrote:
| Yeah, but Irish posties mean you don't actually need them.
| You can just put stuff like this on the envelopes:
| Your man Henderson That boy with the glasses
| who is doing a PhD up here at Queen's in Belfast.
| Buncrana Co. Donegal Ireland
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33581277
| logifail wrote:
| > Irish posties mean you don't actually need them
|
| I worked as a postie for a few weeks as a Christmas job
| when I was at Uni a looong time ago.
|
| My GF used to write to me regularly (yes, writing letters
| was a thing back then), we came up a nice scheme: instead
| of using my actual address she wrote to a made-up non-
| existant address _but with a valid postcode_ ( "501 Any
| Street, Town, AB1 1AB" on a street with only a dozen
| houses) that was in one of the streets I'd be sorting
| letters for/delivering to.
|
| Worked like a charm, would find her letter waiting for me
| in the pile to be sorted when I rocked up at the sorting
| office at 5am.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| And in Ireland 1 postcode (eircode) for 1 address. Very handy.
|
| Having said that, they took their time, postcodes were only
| introduced a few years ago!
| shiandow wrote:
| For what it's worth in the Netherlands you have about 1 postal
| code per 21 addresses. Typically one code is a street or the
| even/odd half of the street.
| sib wrote:
| US 9-digit postcodes ("ZIP+4") were introduced decades ago
| (1983?) and are publicly findable online given an address.
|
| The US also has a full 11-digit address code that is printed
| (by the USPS) on mail in a bar code when you mail a piece. This
| should take the mailpiece to a unique address.
| zeristor wrote:
| Case in point, going to a funeral the post code for the
| crematorium was for a 2km stretch of road, and going by foot I
| realised my folly and so had to run to make it time.
| maccard wrote:
| At least the Uk has the the defence that postcodes are 60 years
| old and that the legacy cruft that comes with that is part of
| life.
|
| Meanwhile Ireland introduced Eircodes less than 10 years ago,
| chose an opaque format that uses a central database that you have
| to pay for access to for anything more than a handful of lookups,
| only covers homes (so you can't give an eircode of a park, or a
| walk). It's pretty much what you'd expect to be designed by a
| modern government.
| chgs wrote:
| I'd expect a modern government to design something as clear and
| well regarded as the GDS stuff in the U.K.
|
| I'd expect a corporation like ibm etc to design the total mess
| we see with any large project
| jetbooster wrote:
| Sadly I feel GDS is more of an outlier than the rule.
| willyt wrote:
| Transport for London is a pretty tightly run ship. Only
| capital city in the world that doesn't receive operating
| subsidy for its public transport. Not that that is a good
| thing necessarily as the tube is expensive to use relative
| to Paris or Berlin but a pretty impressive achievement
| considering the ancient complexity of the whole thing.
|
| Scotrail is run by the Scottish government and has been
| steadily electrifying the Scottish rail network and because
| of the slow and steady nature of the work, between them,
| Network rail and the OHLE contractors they have got the
| cost for this down to 5 times less per km than typical UK
| costs previously e.g. the great western main line.
|
| The moral of the story is get good people, give them
| stability and a clear goal and they will do great work. It
| doesn't really matter if they are working for the
| government or the private sector.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Essentially the same deal in Ireland, with Eircodes. They were
| originally created as private dataset with ownership, and now you
| have to license access to it to use it.
|
| Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per
| building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so
| adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.
|
| The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and
| apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a
| large number of Eircode <-> addresses for a project, this is
| definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to
| just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a
| house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem
| that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the
| eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional
| addition)
| NeoTar wrote:
| I was impressed when I first heard about the objectives of the
| Eircode system, but it seems the implementation is lacking.
| wiredfool wrote:
| The implementation was captured by a private party.
| closewith wrote:
| Eircodes also aren't used by An Post, to add insult to injury.
|
| > The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone
| out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number
| that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid
| Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and
| eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)
|
| The HSE National Ambulance Service (NAS) National Emergency
| Operations Centres (NEOCs) have a GIS package that resolves
| Eircodes (and other traditional and colloquial addresses) to
| actual buildings and building entrances in real-time, which
| actually quite impressive. The directions can be transmitted to
| ambulances and other assets in real-time and has reduces delays
| in clinical services due to address confusion enormously since
| 2016.
|
| So the country is capable. Eircode is what we chose as a
| country, not what we were limited to.
| ascorbic wrote:
| As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when
| privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do
| at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government
| decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law
| that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of
| millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite
| apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining the data. At a time
| of cuts of budgets this would be a hard sell.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| > If the government decided that it does want to do this, it
| can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without
| paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal
| Mail.
|
| You can pass the law, get sued and pay whatever the PAF is
| worth. But that's just.. fair? The govnerment spent 5 mio just
| for a survey concluding that it's impossible to recreate the
| PAF. So hundreds of millions sounds like a good deal.
| scott_w wrote:
| Just to be clear: UK Parliament is sovereign. If it passes a
| law forcibly legalising it, the privatised Royal Mail can sue
| the government but would need to find an international treaty
| obligation to win. Even then, if Parliament flagged it and
| said "we're ignoring this treaty in this case" then the
| courts are bound to the law, not treaty obligations.
|
| If it has knock-on impacts in other areas, it's hard to say,
| but that's separate to the law.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR covers exactly this, so
| the Supreme Court (and ECtHR if it came to that) would
| probably find in favour of Royal Mail if this were to be
| done without compensation.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The court would make a "declaration of incompatibility"
| with the ECHR which leaves it up to Parliament to change
| the law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_incompatibil
| ity
| keyringlight wrote:
| Another part to this is that there's a certain amount of
| cooperation between Royal Mail and councils street numbering
| and naming. Councils are the first authority over new
| streets/locations, changes like a property being split or
| merged (i.e. landlords converting to a property of multiple
| occupation and not telling them for various reasons, and then
| residents have issues getting post), residential/commercial,
| etc, and then that gets passed onto Royal Mail to update the
| PAF. If there's an issue with an address you've got to check
| with the council first, so there would be some good fit for
| centralization there.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Obvious solution is for the councils to start charging
| extremely high fees to Royal Mail for such cooperation.
| pkw2017 wrote:
| "without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation
| to Royal Mail" < the Royal Mail makes about PS3m/year in
| profits from selling the data. It would cost a _lot_ less than
| hundreds of millions to bring it back into govt
| ascorbic wrote:
| They made about PS18m in revenue though. It depends who'd be
| taking on the costs. If they still need to maintain the PAF
| (they need it themselves), then it's the revenue that would
| need replacing. The best solution would probably be to say
| that the OS will take over the maintenance (presumably funded
| by central government if it's going to be open data), and
| then Royal Mail will have access to the data and can be paid
| a lot less in compensation.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Why can't it be taken for free? The system and data was created
| by a publicly owned body, surely Crown copyright.
| ascorbic wrote:
| It was (stupidly) included in the assets when Royal Mail was
| privatised, so it's no longer publicly owned.
| bluGill wrote:
| I have no idea what UK law is. In the US the data itself is
| public domain, but the compilation is of data is copyright.
| Maps commonly would intentionally have errors in to detect
| copying - the error is creative work and so a copyright
| violation to copy so if someone copies your map you can sue
| them for copyright violation for not just the errors but also
| that compilation. If you take someone else's map and then use
| that to create own map off of (thus finding and fixing the
| errors) it is legal, but that is as much work as just
| creating a map from scratch.
| nimish wrote:
| > compilation is of data is copyright
|
| Not by default, at least in the US. The database has to
| actually be more than just a compilation. It's not a high
| bar to clear, but it's there. Europe and the UK have the
| "sweat of the brow" doctrine however.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Why can't it be taken for free?
|
| It can be, but that has unknown long term effects. If you do
| this it shows everyone your government cannot be trusted and
| so other good ideas will not happen because people cannot
| trust the government. We probably do not agree on what is a
| good idea so I'm going to leave this vague - whatever your
| political side there is a good idea that is suddenly
| unworkable because the government cannot be trusted to hold
| their end of the deal.
| ascorbic wrote:
| So it turns out that James O'Malley has written a post that
| addresses all the details of this already (of course),
| including several options for how it could be done affordably.
| https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/heres-the-plan-to-actuall...
| InsomniacL wrote:
| > profoundly stupid mistake
|
| Surely the PAF formed part of the sale price when privatising
| Royal Mail?
|
| So if you removed it before selling (at a lower price), or you
| buy it outright after, is there really that much difference
| making it a profoundly stupid mistake?
| willyt wrote:
| I doubt they thought about it at that level of detail. I
| think it was just sold off on the cheap through a share
| offering with an initial offering[0] of underpriced shares?
| There was some kind of scheme where a private individual
| could buy a small number of shares before they went on
| general sale. Could be wrong though.
| scott_w wrote:
| To never have given would have simply required the government
| to say "this is not part of the sale."
|
| To take it would likely require either lengthy court battles
| or legislation. Given the priorities of the Labour Party, the
| latter isn't likely to happen within the next 5 years (when
| they'd have to add it to their manifesto).
| ascorbic wrote:
| Privatisations, like most IPOs, are deliberately under-
| priced, and I'd very much doubt that the valuation of Royal
| Mail would have been affected by adding "The universal
| service provider must maintain the postcode address file and
| make it available under the Open Government Licence" to the
| Act
| petesergeant wrote:
| > it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free"
| without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation
| to Royal Mail
|
| Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it'll set
| a bad precedent that'll get brought up by the buyer the next
| time the government want to privatise something.
| aylons wrote:
| > Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it'll
| set a bad precedent that'll get brought up by the buyer the
| next time the government want to privatise something.
|
| Great, maybe they'll be more wary of taking advantage of this
| kind of blunder if they can get corrected.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| > it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free"
| without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation
| to Royal Mail
|
| Why not? Parliament has the ability to make whatever laws it
| wants, no?
| sowbug wrote:
| In the US, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution says the
| government cannot take private property for public use
| without providing just compensation. I don't know whether any
| similar right exists in the UK.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Yes, it's in the European Convention on Human Rights, which
| despite the name also covers companies' rights.
| jameshart wrote:
| I think it mainly covers the rights of the people who own
| companies, which amounts to the same thing.
| psd1 wrote:
| No mistake; Hanlon's Razor does not apply; the current
| situation is a desired outcome.
| ascorbic wrote:
| No, I'm pretty sure this one was incompetence. It came at the
| same time that the government was going all-in with open data
| in other areas, and this was a really stupid omission.
| cibyr wrote:
| Privatising Royal Mail was itself a profoundly stupid mistake.
| intellix wrote:
| it would be nice if the postal system in the UK and anywhere in
| the world supported what3words to be honest
| NeoTar wrote:
| Replacing one proprietary database with another? Is that truly
| useful?
| manarth wrote:
| Replace one proprietary format owned by a private organisation
| with another proprietary format owned by a different private
| organisation?
| duncans wrote:
| Plus, fraught with usability issues
| https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-
| su...
| askvictor wrote:
| Our company started operating in the UK recently, and some of our
| customers were very surprised we didn't charge for a subscription
| for part of our product. The idea would have no legs in Australia
| (our homeland) but is completely normal in the UK. So, new
| revenue stream for us, and some learnings about the UK culture.
| lewispollard wrote:
| It is, but at least in my experience, we do it for the 10%
| discount and then immediately cancel the subscription every
| time we want to make a purchase.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal
| Mail.
|
| Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a
| new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling
| them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and
| postcodes will become a thing of the past.
|
| The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and
| have a check digit so the number alone is sufficient for 3rd
| party logistics companies like Amazon to use it for deliveries.
| n4r9 wrote:
| The idea of the UK government attempting to do such a thing
| fills me with the utmost dread.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| When did this almost Reaganite sentiment ("I'm from the
| government and I'm here to help") make home in the UK? I know
| it's not recent: I remember similar arguments coming from the
| No2ID camp in 2005 at-least.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite a lot of it is Reaganism, via Thatcher. Probably
| dates from the Winter of Discontent.
|
| It's not entirely without merit, but only because there's a
| tendency to drastically underfund and micromanage state
| services. And things like the Post Office Horizon fiasco do
| not make the government look good here.
|
| On the other hand GDS is excellent - but that's almost
| entirely as a result of staff professionalism, rather than
| being driven by whichever ministers had the leadership of
| the civil service.
|
| An odd outcome of the ID discourse is that we now have an
| extremely high tech biometric identity system .. but only
| for immigrants.
| willyt wrote:
| 'The Post Office' is a private company. Wasn't the
| Horizon system implemented after privatisation?
| amiga386 wrote:
| No. The Post Office is not a private company, it's a
| public limited company with the government as sole
| shareholder.
|
| It was changed from a government department to a
| statutory corporation in 1969. It was then changed to a
| public limited company in 2000.
|
| Furthermore:
|
| - Post Office Ltd owns and runs Post Office Counters Ltd
| which runs the post office branches. This is the company
| that uses Horizon (since 1999)
|
| - Royal Mail delivers mail to addresses, and owns the
| Postcode Address File. Royal Mail was separated from the
| Post Office and privatised in 2013. It has never used
| Horizon.
|
| Horizon is an EFTPOS/accounting system, nothing to do
| with mail delivery. It was introduced to the Post Office
| in 1999 after Fujitsu/ICL were originally commissioned by
| government to build an accounting system for the Benefits
| Agency, and it was so awful and buggy the Benefits Agency
| rejected it, so the government asked them to retool it
| for the Post Office.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > it's a public limited company with the government as
| sole shareholder.
|
| ...isn't that PR China's business-model: state-
| capitalism?
| jetbooster wrote:
| There's certainly been distrust/mild distain for the govt
| in Scotland, Wales, and The North since Reagan's gender-
| swap, Thatcher, for broadly similar reasons Reagan is
| maligned
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| For ID cards specifically most of the hostility was towards
| Blair's specific implementation which had a wide-ranging
| database that pretty much everyone and their dog in the
| public sector and beyond would have access to. While the
| arguments are perhaps a bit weaker in the modern day where
| the government taps the internet backbones and surveillance
| is a major category of business model, there were
| definitely good arguments against Blair's proposals that
| weren't necessarily applicable to ID cards in general.
|
| I don't think it's necessarily Thatcherism that made people
| like this, just a slow erosion of trust that the government
| has the competency to carry out the tasks of a modern
| country that's accelerated as time's gone on. Anecdotally
| Liz Truss's episode as Prime Minister seemed to be the
| final straw for a lot of people's goodwill towards the
| government.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'm saying this as quite a strongly left-wing person. I am
| very much in favour of competent government intervention
| and regulation of markets. But the current government,
| probably since Thatcher, has shown themselves to be
| incapable of delivering large-scale national projects.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| But they already have. The Post Office was still nationalised
| when post codes were distributed.
| n4r9 wrote:
| True, but it's specifically the modern UK government - with
| its penchant for outsourcing jobs to ministers mates and
| bloated contractors - whose competency at large scale
| projects I dread.
| billpg wrote:
| "The government are going to reintroduce ID cards! Panic!"
| left-struck wrote:
| To have a unique id for each house is neat but I think there
| are loads of situations you'd have to account for so that there
| isn't any ambiguity in the assignment of unique ids. If any
| ambiguities exist inevitably you will have exceptions in the
| system which defeats the point. For example -Subdivision of a
| lot. -Joining of lots. -You said every house... what about two
| houses on the same lot? -What about apartments buildings? -What
| happens when one or more houses are demolished and an apartment
| building goes up? Etc etc
|
| I work in manufacturing and this sounds a lot like the problem
| of part numbering, and let me tell you, it's not a trivial
| problem and the company I work for thought it was and got it
| wrong.
| throwway_278314 wrote:
| entity resolution is hard everywhere. Because the world is
| dynamic, but the common understanding of "entity" is a static
| object.
|
| and the only perfect description of the world is the world,
| just like on a more trivial scale the only perfect
| description of what a piece of software does is to run it and
| see what it does.
|
| So the best I know is to find a level of abstraction that
| captures enough stability to be useful, with enough
| flexibility to enable the classification to adopt.
|
| In math, phylogenetic trees might be an example; think
| Dirichlette processes and exchangeable stochastic processes.
| neo1908 wrote:
| I know the UK gov has enjoyed causing a lot of chaos over the
| past few years but my god that would be on a whole other
| level...
| incompatible wrote:
| Just modify the law so that databases of postal addresses are
| not copyrightable.
| throwway_278314 wrote:
| so modify the law to deprive an owner of their legal property
| which was given to them by the law?
|
| Not sure that's a precedent I'd want set in a common-law
| country, and not sure that would hold up to judicial review
| under common law.
|
| The government made a bone-headed mistake when they included
| the postal data as an asset in the sale. The solution is for
| them to admit their mistake and pay for it. It's fiat money
| anyway, so it doesn't really cost anything. Having them abuse
| their government power to cover up their mistake is not an
| approach I endorse.
|
| Not that this hasn't happened before, think postal scandal or
| yesterday's comments on the Hawke and Curacoa
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285275
| incompatible wrote:
| It would just be a change of law or regulations.
| Governments change these all the time, and sometimes it
| costs people or businesses money.
|
| In any case, nationalisation has a long history in the UK,
| so it would hardly be setting a precedent.
| psd1 wrote:
| I'm in favour, but that leaves RM holding a database of non-
| copyrightable addresses.
|
| One way or the other, a private asset must be either
| nationalised or compelled to be released.
|
| Gradual renationalisation of the rail network was in the
| manifesto. That's not particularly contentious, as rail
| franchises have fixed terms. But the manifesto is all about
| steadying the ship, and militant nationalisation risks
| spooking investors, so whether the government has any
| appetite to nationalise anything by fiat is questionable.
|
| Nonetheless, there's public support for renationalisation;
| and, for such a low-value asset, this might be a nice test of
| the waters.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I'm surprised it is copyrightable. It wouldn't be in the US.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I'm unable to think of any reform in British history where
| 'throw everything out and start again' had successful outcomes.
| The British state runs on two principles: maximum effect for
| minimum effort, and the Ship of Theseus.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Well we already have UPRNs[0] but they're a little unwieldy for
| human use.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Property_Reference_Numb...
| KermitTheFrog wrote:
| Come on, "we've always done it that way" is a base ground of
| UK.
| willyt wrote:
| Every property already has a UPRN (unique property reference
| number). If you go on a council website and find a recent
| planning application it will be linked with this UPRN in the
| council's database. If I ever want to find a postcode I go to
| the find a planning application map and look it up there. I've
| not checked this in England, but it's definitely the case in
| Scotland. e.g. here's a random example; the entry for St
| Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow:
|
| https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/case...
| masfuerte wrote:
| You can look it up here:
|
| https://www.findmyaddress.co.uk/
| darau1 wrote:
| I hope this happens. I can only dream of the day when my country
| gets something like this.
| librasteve wrote:
| great article, this demonstrates just how bad the civil service &
| politicians are when it comes to negotiating contracts with
| private investors... or trade deals, or brexit if it comes to
| that
| sschueller wrote:
| In Switzerland anyone can use the national database of addresses.
|
| https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/official-directory-of-buil...
| justinclift wrote:
| This doesn't seem correct: The problem is it's
| not an easy dataset to get hold of, as it cost a lot of money.
| This is because the data has to be licensed from Royal Mail ...
|
| It seems to be talking about the National Statistics Postcode
| Lookup UK, which is officially published here:
| https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/7ec10db7-c8f4-4a40-8d82-8921...
|
| It's been there from at least 2017, which is when I first came
| across it.
|
| There are later version of the data set online too: https://open-
| geography-portalx-ons.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/o...
|
| The license:
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/licences
| Under the terms of the Open Government Licence and UK Government
| Licensing Framework (launched 30 September 2010), if you
| wish to use or re-use ONS material, whether commercially
| or privately, you may do so freely without a specific application
| for a licence, subject to the conditions of the Open
| Government Licence and the Framework. If you are
| reproducing ONS content you must include a source accreditation
| to ONS.
|
| If the article is talking about a different postcode address file
| though, then the above doesn't apply. ;)
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's not the https://www.poweredbypaf.com/product/paf/
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Or we can just start using https://what3words.com/ and
| geolocation.
|
| I disagree with the report, I think it's feasible with a bit of
| creativity.
|
| The government also has this:
| https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/091feb1c-aea6-45c9-82bf-768a...
|
| We could also start with an imperfect solution, offer it as a
| free API (maybe even self-hosted and communicating with other
| services p2p) and wait for users to select or insert missing
| addresses, until we eventually converge to a good OSS database.
| If it's a single service being shared by everyone, you would need
| to insert your address once and then it would be part of the
| database forever, and you would get the right result at any other
| time in the future.
|
| There is also a dirty but hard to attack option: - Start from the
| NAG - Build an opaque AI process which is hard to audit and that
| is tuned until it produces a result close to PAF but with a few
| extra errors - Sell the new database to the government,
| government open sources that - Directors get paid their share -
| Company get sued out of existance by RoyalMail - Government pays
| a few millions in 20 years, if the RoyalMail experts can prove
| anything in court
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| It blows my mind how many public services have been privatized in
| the UK. It just feels like they're selling off the shoes they're
| standing in. When their railways got privatized, the service
| didn't improve, the price just ballooned.
|
| Even in the states, the USPS has resisted privatization this far.
| For the love of god I hope it continues to. Protect our boys n
| girls in blue and tell your congressman you want postal banking.
| normangray wrote:
| Yup. The Post Office, the railways, the _water system_ , for
| heavens' sake!
|
| The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised =>
| efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between
| 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at
| serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the
| last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has
| repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive things about
| privatisation, as part of the process of Being Sensible About
| The Economy (there is a _much_ longer alternative version of
| this comment!).
|
| The US -- the world temple of capitalism -- seems to be oddly
| principled (viewed from outside) about keeping certain things
| such as the postal service, or USGS, as part of the service to
| the public realm.
|
| The one service _probably_ immune from privatisation is the
| Health Service. It 's only the most frothing-at-the-mouth
| right-wingers, the provocateurs just one step away from a
| rabies injection, who'd even admit out loud to a desire to do
| that. A politician talking about privatising the NHS would I
| think be pretty much equivalent to a US libertarian politician
| talking about privatising the armed forces.
|
| (there's a longer version of that comment, as well...)
| rswail wrote:
| The USPS is a constitutional creation. That's why it can't be
| privatized.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| To be clear, is the National Address Gazetteer open? As far as I
| can tell, it isn't, but I don't know if that's because they're
| trying to obfuscate it.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Recent history teaches that the Post Office should be the last
| company on earth to be anywhere near creating a nationally
| important IT system. Their technology team have been useless for
| decades.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The PAF is maintained by Royal Mail, a different company from
| the Post Office.
| frereubu wrote:
| I've used https://postcodes.io/ on a number of projects.
|
| There's information about it here - https://postcodes.io/about -
| which doesn't fully answer where the data comes from, although it
| mentions OS, so I presume it's based on the OS AddressBase
| product?
|
| I also wonder how complete it is now, although the sites we've
| built haven't had any issues as far as I'm aware.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| As the tenant, once, of a new build home in the UK it's not just
| the file that's important: it's the channels to _patch_ the file
| too.
|
| I spent almost a year having to enter my address manually because
| the postcode DB -- or whatever old version pets.com, cameras.com,
| and looroll.com had -- lagged behind the reality of my infill
| bungalow for seemingly forever. I'm 8 _A_ godamnit, not _8_.
| (Thank you Mrs. No8 for accepting my packages throughout those
| dark months btw.)
|
| It's just like _tzdata_. A precious resource not just because it
| compiles the history of geopolitical wallclock settings, but also
| because it is meticulously _updated_ , on time and on budget.
|
| It's all very well liberating
| PAF.v2024_08finalfinal_v3_final.doc, but who is also going to
| keep it up to date?
|
| I'm not a hater, just a realist. TFA is spot on: we'll never be
| able out compete with or recreate or leak a sufficient version of
| the PAF. It, and it's entire infrastructure, needs to be wrested
| into public hands ASAP. And we should be prepared to fund the
| updates.
| mjevans wrote:
| They could also link tax filings and a Plus Code for physical
| location: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/
| https://github.com/google/open-location-code
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Canada is in the same spot with the postal code data being for
| sale only.
|
| Relatedly and famously, Canada Post sued [0] geocoder.ca [1]
| years ago because it made available a _crowdsourced_ database of
| postal codes...
|
| Years later, the case was settled [2] but yeah. You still have to
| pay for the "real" data.
|
| [0] https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2012/04/canada-post-geocoder-
| sui...
|
| [1] https://geocoder.ca/
|
| [2] https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 (nice url...)
| ss64 wrote:
| The PAF file only returns a 9% profit (based on a 2009 report)
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090324084021/http://www.psc.go...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Why bother paying attention to all this legal mumbo-jumbo?
|
| Just have someone exfiltrate the file and post it on Anna's
| Archive. Or extract them from Open Street Map.
|
| Just bypass the Royal Mail altogether.
|
| Or just ignore the postcodes. For most private individuals an
| ordinary street address works perfectly well and is needed anyway
| even if the postcode is provided.
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