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

I&#x27;ve implemented geohashes before. The algorithm is not difficult, and pretty straight-forward to understand… and not the sort of thing I&#x27;d call out to a separate service over the network for. It&#x27;s a pure computation that will take <i>nanoseconds</i>; is that worth involving the Internet and a third-party API?<p>Edit: well, some of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geohash.world&#x2F;about.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geohash.world&#x2F;about.html</a> makes it sound like a pet project for learning purposes. In which case, anything goes, I guess? But I&#x27;m still not sure if it&#x27;s only a pet project?

I honestly don&#x27;t understand why anyone would use Geohash? Because it&#x27;s one number instead of 2?<p>The short definition is &quot;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.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s another way to &quot;use a short alphanumeric string&quot; and &quot;get greater precision with longer strings&quot;: &quot;37,122&quot;, &quot;37.7,122.4&quot;, &quot;37.77,122.41&quot;, &quot;37.774,122.419&quot;<p>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, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geohash.world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geohash.world&#x2F;</a> doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s wrong with coordinates themselves?

Why hop the network for this?