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Show HN: The simplest geohash implementation under the sun (mro.name)
24 points by mro_name on June 14, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments


I can't figure out how to generate a hash. There's no right-click functionality and I'm not about to input coordinates when I should be able to just click the map. What am I not understanding here?


Something is even wrong with going to coordinates... I entered 53,40 and it took me to 53.437500,39.375000.

I'm guessing the hash is what ends up in the URL which is https://mro.name/g/uc


the less digits you give, the less precise your input looks, the bigger the geohash tile you're in and the bigger the difference between your input and the tile's center.

Add more digits to the input.


… and a 2 character geohash is reeeeeeally coarse. As is 0 fractional digits to lat/lon.


enter the coordinates and press enter. You are not able to click the map.


the UX focus isn't casual use but operations – showcasing mere mortals can host a webservice as a tool for themselves and others.

But feel free to add any other HTML presentation layer by modifying the XSLT and serving it from your webserver instead.


This appears to be an implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash


“ Apparently, in the late 2000s, G. Niemeyer still didn't know about Morton's work, and reinvented it” :)


It was also implemented in relational databases 30+ years ago and variants were patented by companies like Oracle and IBM. Geohashing was abandoned due to its several deficiencies as an indexing method, which still hold true today, in favor of other algorithms.

Ironically, geohashing seemed novel at the time because it was so obsolete that no modern system uses it. It is sort of like someone claiming to invent punch cards for programming.


indeed, history repeating. There's a nice talk by Jonathan Blow how technology declines and has to be re-invented over and over again: https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk


yes, 'Powered by' https://mro.name/g/about explains the details.


An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...


I'd go so far as to say that any code based on discrete numbers has rounding induced discontinuities, naturally. And with variable precision those can be arbitrarily large.

Take decimal integer representations like 999 and 1000 – they 'look' very different unless you decode them (what we all are use to on the fly). The distance is just 1 but they're in two different buckets in terms of 1e3.


Under the sun sounds so weird, should be something like - stopping the sun


It's an old idiom


lol, how so?




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