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None of the discussion I've seen here so far has raised what I think to be a much more important point: there should be an extra level of indirection between me and my physical mailing address. In other words, there should be a DNS for physical mailing addresses. That way my publicly visible "host name" wouldn't reveal where I actually live (makes it harder for burglars to find me) and if I move I only have to update my real physical location in one place (my "name server") rather than with everyone who wants to send me mail. Also, publicly-facing logical addresses (the analogue to "host names") could be mnemonic, and one person could have multiple aliases. So you could, for example, send physical mail to (say) "Lisper@HN".

This way no one except delivery people would care what these addresses resolved to. They could be lat/long, traditional street addresses, X-codes, whatever.

Congratulations, you have figured out what a P.O. Box is. A bit out of fashion (at least in NL) but was the standard for exactly this. Or people who were expecting to move around quite a bit.

My Dad used to have one (around the divorce of my mom), My Uncle had one, as he was abroad a lot and moved house a couple of times, and wanted a dutch address. etc etc.

As for paper email, aren't there also services that open and scan your mail for you?

Not exactly "DNS for physical mail" as you described but quite handy!

As for the obfuscation part, if the delivery people know how to resolve... so will many others. ;)

makes it harder for burglars to find me

How so? Or rather, what exactly do you mean here? Burglars don't want to find you personally. They're scoping out a property an determining if no one is home. They aren't looking though the yellow pages for potential victims remotely; they're driving around the neighborhood trying to get physical access.

> That way my publicly visible "host name" wouldn't reveal where I actually live (makes it harder for burglars to find me) and if I move I only have to update my real physical location in one place (my "name server") rather than with everyone who wants to send me mail.

This part is done by mailbox companies like EarthClassMail.com. I've used them for years, and it's wonderfully convenient to have the same postal address despite moving all over the country. Plus, if you want, they'll open specific envelopes, deposit checks for you, scan stuff, etc. I love that because as a traveling consultant, I don't wanna wait until I get home to have checks go into my bank account.

Drawbacks: there's a latency and an expense involved with forwarding packages. I tend to not use it for packages, just for regular postal mail. Anytime someone asks for an address, they get my EarthClassMail one, because I probably don't want whatever they're mailing me anyway.

How much would you pay for this? Would you also accept a small delay to receiving mail?

With enough capital it would be fairly straightforward to provide a forwarding service for this. You could also have spam filters or reject mail from specific senders, provide scans of the outside of the letters, specific delivery dates etc.

Given how we are ordering more and more things online nowadays this could be a very exciting opportunity.

> That way my publicly visible "host name" wouldn't reveal where I actually live (makes it harder for burglars to find me)

Someone has access to this database. And they're selling the data for a price inversely proportional to the exclusivity of their access. Increasingly it seems that if someone is selling data on the open market, this information is increasingly available to bad actors such as burglars.

So it just seems like a very bad form of security by obfuscation. There are definitely things to be said about generally decoupling your physical location from your mailing address if you frequently move, however.

I like your proposal. I was just thinking about this problem recently too. In an era where people are becoming more privacy conscious online, they can make reasoned decisions about how much of their data they shield from megacorp$ that are eager to vacuum it all up. But if you want to partake in the convenience of online commerce, how do you effectively shield yourself from providing your home address to dozens/hundreds of companies?

I wonder if there would be a market for the service you're describing today. It seems you could achieve it in the current postal system. You sign up and are assigned a unique identifier, which you use as your "Name", then ship to a local address maintained by that service, who then forward it on.

All you're doing in this case is just centralizing the trust from each individual online business to the reshipping service. Is that a reasonable first step?

What I think is interesting about this comment is it appears to be a novel enough idea that many of the replies quickly dismiss it without really seeming to grok it.
This. I relocated a couple of times recently, and am about to relocate again. I too contemplated about a similar service. Personally I'm not too worried about the privacy aspect as much as about the pain of notifying every single service provider when I change my address.

It does open up some interesting use cases. E.g., when I go on vacation then hold off delivery, if it's from Amazon then deliver it to such and such a post box etc. I'm not sure about the market size though.

But physical addresses are physical address, they specify a place, not a person. We'd have to set up a paralell system, and expect the government to be able to fund and handle both... Yeah, they can't do either for the current system...
Here in the US it’s incredibly easy to find where anybody lives if they are registered to vote. You can plunk my name into the Idaho voter website and it will spit my address out, no fuss.
This.

For the past 10 months I've been travelling constantly staying at hotels, AirBnb's etc and in a lot of cases not having the permanent physical address is very inconvenient. I've tried multiple solutions but none of them work well. Yes, there are companies that offer "virtual mailboxes", but I can't ship any packages to them.

Earthclassmail.Com is a virtual mail box.
You still need an easy way to tell people how to get to your physical address to visit you.
Have we finally reached the point where people no longer know what a phone book is? :D
Obligatory reference to the Fundamental theorem of software engineering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...

Good for them -- it's their town after all!

My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name and insisting that we grandkids address letters to her by name. As far as I know they always arrived. There was no number on the house or letterbox. I went by a few months ago (somebody else lives there now) and there's a number on the letterbox.

My in-laws live in a village in Germany (a little south of the town in this article) with only two streets, referred to as "am Berge" and "im Dorf" (on the hill and in the village) and though the house numbers are not unified as in this article's case, there is no actual street sign -- but by "name" it's pretty obvious which is which.

> My grandmother's house (in Australia) was assigned a house number (in the 70s?) but she refused to use it, continuing to give her address as the house name and insisting that we grandkids address letters to her by name. As far as I know they always arrived.

-My parents once received a postcard addressed simply to their first names - period. No last name. No street. No town. No postcode. No nothing.

It goes to show that:

a) Norway is, as such things go, a pretty small country with at least one postal clerk bored enough at work to do a little bit of investigating, and:

b) Having a central database in which every Norwegian is required by law to be registered with the address of his or her residence does have its benefits for the less privacy-conscious. (This was pre-internet everywhere, and they were not listed in online yellow pages or similar - so someone must have made a query to the folkeregisteret database along the lines of 'Is there a $male_name which lives with $female_name anywhere in the country?)

This is a textbook case of tyranny of the majority. The people who aren't inconvenienced by the current status quo vote to preserve status quo. The few people who are inconvenienced aren't numerous enough to change the status quo. In the end nothing is done to solve the problem.
Good for the 60% of the 69% of voters that showed up and voted against street names. Less good for 40% of 69% voters that showed up and voted for street names. And probably 'meh' for 31% of voters that didn't care enough to show up.

Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up. People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

As the mailman had to visit every house, and did it every day, he'd soon learn the idiosyncrasies of selfish people who refuse to label their house.

I used to deliver pizzas. If she'd ordered one, it wouldn't have arrived. "Joes Cottage, Long Lane", is a completely pointless address, it forces the person attempting to find it to investigate on average 50% of the houses on Long Lane. Given that only about 1 in 10 hours had a number visible at night from the car - especially in the rain - this would be pretty much impossible to do.

It's silly. If every village gets to do its own scheme we'd have chaos.

The standard street names + numbers scheme works well, it obviously works better than their "numbers only" scheme, it should be adopted.

This is a good example of humans' inherent bull-headed conservatism and hostility to change. The desire to keep something the same, simply because that's the way it is, regardless of the downsides. I actually saw someone defending this as the villagers preserving their "cultural distinctiveness" - people believing it's a key part of their identity that they have an awkward error-prone addressing system in their village! It's quite something.
Where I was brought up had no street number, just a road and house name. Was an utter pain having to actually describe to everyone who visited drive along the road (not included in street directories), look for a side road, then look for a particular speed sign, then turn, oh and if you can't find it call from the phone box in the town which had a map of the roads (but not houses) nearby (20% did). Eventually got RAPID numbers which gave a grid co-ordinate and then finally rural addressing where you got a house number which started at 1/2 at one end and then incremented by 2 every 20m along the road. So much easier.

However I've seen the Japanese system and that works only because there are maps everywhere telling where to find each house and every house has a nice white lettering on blue plaque in exactly the same style so it is easy to spot. Also people stick their names on letterbox/house so you can be sure. The only problem is you have to get on the right street and in roughly the right area which makes for complicated directions for the taxi driver, but for post/courier deliveries it works well. [Mind you a Japanese GPS will do addresses, but for some reason a party of foreigners seemed to cause it not to work with some drivers, no problem I brought my own GPS and can give directions!]

The article doesn't say if there are maps available, if they are then fine, otherwise I'd vote for street names. Not sure if having a random house number (German) instead of a road name (my former situation) is better or worse.

OT: Since we like discussing Google Maps vs OSM quality here at HN. This is just one example where OSM has the lead:

- https://www.google.de/maps/@52.844593,9.1547416,15.75z

- https://maps.openrouteservice.org/directions?n1=52.843476&n2...

This is actually quite common around here. In Austria you have e.g. Schlitters and Alpbach that also don't have street names and they are even bigger than Hilgermissen.

Related: use caution with Google Maps in Austria. Here e.g. it suggests you to go through a steep mountain road (in current weather it's likely not passable without chains) instead of taking a normal street: http://imgur.com/a/If4aMI7

This has always been the norm for rural places in E.g. Sweden, sometimes even with hundreds of houses.

I worked extra some weekends doing delivery, and in the age before good maps and smartphones, this usually meant driving to one random house in the village and asking where house 123 is.

This is entirely common in Japan, few streets have names. Although, almost the whole country does it, so it’s somewhat more accepted than one town.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

I remember reading a about a snobby put down, I think it was between officers in the British Army, where someone was made fun of "as his house has a number"...
Interesting, I've seen the same thing in Iqaluit, Nunavut, in the mid/far north of Canada. Each of the roads have names but the house numbers aren't re-used on each street. There's only one building 626 in Iqaluit. People don't really know/use the street names, preferring to refer to just the number of the house. Even the taxi drivers don't seem to like using them.
Why not go with GPS coordinates? :)

Anyway, I suspect this is more a vote against change, than a vote against the concept of street names.

My current address has no street name, just a house name and village name. Technically, there is a street name, but no-one uses it because it's the main street through the village.

I really don't see it as a problem: the local postman knows every house, and these days with GPS the postal code gets delivery drivers within a few yards without a problem. In fact, a post code and flat/house number or name is technically enough to identify any property.

Reminds of Bhopal, a city in India. People there are very fond of numbers. You see people getting on a bus and buying a ticket for "aath number" (number 8) or even "saade paanch" (five and half). You are right, thay are names of places. Not feeling well? get youself checked at "baara sau pachas" (twelve hundred and fifty). Yes, that is the name of a public hospital. It took me a while to get used it.
> Those advocating the introduction of street names pointed to postal and courier companies and holiday accommodation guests, who often struggle to find their destinations because consecutive house numbers are not always close to each other.

No, they struggle because their employers are treating them like shit. It's not like they never struggle unless there's no street names and consecutive house numbers. I often take packages for my neighbours when they're not home and I am, and when the couriers express their heartfelt gratitude I kinda feel bad, the whole situation is fucked up. And where I live, people have no issues finding a house, but every second counts, and adds up to make the difference between a shitty day at a shitty job, and a hellish day at a hellish job. It stinks.

So I would vote against street names, too, just on the basis of not giving an inch to pretending street names are the issue. Pay people by the hour for doing their job correctly, and then let it take as long as it takes, then we can talk.

Openstreetmap has two street names though (but not for the "main street").
Another nightmare for programmers.
The cause for confusion with the house numbers in that town seems to be that the houses are not numbered sequentially with respect to their location.
People just don’t like change.
Interesting that there is a number 13 and a 13A, unlike some tower blocks that allegedly have no floor 13.
Wouldn't a German town vote "nein" to Street names?
thats how you get Venice
Why is scrolling broken on the mobile version of that site?
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
This is the sort of thing (a town with no street names, only numbers) that would have been a big problem 20 years ago, but not an issue at all today.

Back in the days when people would use paper maps to navigate, you'd never find house number 17 unless you actually called the guy and he told you to turn left at the pharmacy. Today, your satnav will know where the place is and will stop you right in front if it, regardless of whether #'s 16 and 18 are half a mile away.

So there will have been a small window of time between when the town expanded enough to have a few wacky outlier house numbers that nobody could find, and when Google Maps fixed everything.

Today, they may as well just leave things the way they are.