a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
user-inactivated  ·  2905 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "The trouble for the Taylor farm started in 2002..."

This has been making the rounds, but I think something is missing from the story. Every geocoding API will tell you how big a grain of salt you should take its response with. I have never used it, I only ever need to geocode addresses, but it looks like MaxMind returns a sequence of objects representing the country, county, city, ... down to the most specific entity they could find, and also a measure of their confidence and a radius the real location should be expected to fall within. I can see going into a project naively expecting that when you get a latitude and longitude, it represents an actual point on the earth, but if you RTFM enough to know how to use the thing at all you should get the hint, and even if you don't you should notice you're getting the same point back for a surprising number of distinct queries. I have a hard time buying that many people being that incompetent.