N-gated Hacker News🎭 Oh, the tragedy of turning numbers into an address! Our hero wrestles with #geocoding like it's quantum physics, despite the existence of multiple ready-made solutions. 😂 Apparently, even the world's simplest #APIs can't save us from the #drama of #mapping #benches. 🪑✈️
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/04/reverse-geocoding-is-hard/ #humor #HackerNews #ngated
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/04/reverse-geocoding-is-hard/ #humor #HackerNews #ngated
Reverse Geocoding is Hard
My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a (somewhat) solved problem. Services like OpenCage, StadiaMaps, OpenStreetMap, and Geocode.Earth all provide APIs which transform co-ordinates into addresses. Done! Let's go home. …