Show HN: An API to encode and decode coordinates using Geohash

  • I've implemented geohashes before. The algorithm is not difficult, and pretty straight-forward to understand… and not the sort of thing I'd call out to a separate service over the network for. It's a pure computation that will take nanoseconds; is that worth involving the Internet and a third-party API?

    Edit: well, some of http://geohash.world/about.html makes it sound like a pet project for learning purposes. In which case, anything goes, I guess? But I'm still not sure if it's only a pet project?

  • I honestly don't understand why anyone would use Geohash? Because it's one number instead of 2?

    The short definition is "A geohash is a convenient way of expressing a location (anywhere in the world) using a short alphanumeric string, with greater precision obtained with longer strings."

    Here's another way to "use a short alphanumeric string" and "get greater precision with longer strings": "37,122", "37.7,122.4", "37.77,122.41", "37.774,122.419"

    That seems so simple and universal and has been a standard since before our great grandparents were born, time to disrupt it to save a couple of bytes?

  • Did you reimplement the algorithm, or are you just redirecting the result from the geohash.org api?

  • FYI, https://geohash.world/ doesn't go anywhere (for example, clicking in the logo on the top left of the linked page)

  • When I see services like this or W3W, I cannot understand what is the goal? What's wrong with coordinates themselves?

  • Why hop the network for this?