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The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803

• foxylad 8y ago
  Agree with your main issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code solves this quite nicely, and also the OP's issue of W3W being non-free.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very insightful. I have a (useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map stuff.
  • turc1656 8y ago
    Thank you. I know you weren't arguing. And it wasn't rhetorical - I really did want to know who uses it because I've never heard of it. Thanks for the info.
  • retroafroman 8y ago
    I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows the Latin alphabet, but reading and writing is all in Mongolian Cyrillic, so it doesn't even make sense that way. In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.
    • chrisrhoden 8y ago
      It is localized to other languages, as explained in the article. One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.
      • duskwuff 8y ago
        > One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality. And there's no publicly documented way to convert between the localizations. It's not even clear that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the word lists!
        • rtkwe 8y ago
          It's clear in the article that the lists don't map so you can't even translate between them without going back to W3W and running it through their stuff. > So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier > Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!
          • duskwuff 8y ago
            It's no great surprise that the words don't translate. But what I'm asking is it's possible to infer a word-to-word mapping along the lines of English French ------- ------ mile = embouchure crazy = adjuger shade = saladier or if the mapping is weird enough that even that doesn't work.
  • mjevans 8y ago
    Wouldn't it be a lot better to do the following: * Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them. * Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!) (maybe even for different kinds of data-packets) * Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT you first have to authenticate as a legal entity (person or registered organization / business) that authentication data is hard coded on to the envelope. This way if someone is abusively sending things they can be targeted by a class action suit/etc.
    • DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I wish we would make it possible in the US to use an email address as an address for purposes of things like having a bank account and pick up things like debit cards in person from any branch of that bank if you are traveling, homeless, whatever. I rarely get any important physical mail these days. But I still run into issues over address problems (ironically, more now that I am back in housing than I ever did while homeless: https://writepay.blogspot.com/2019/02/mailing-address-drama.html https://writepay.blogspot.com/2019/02/mailing-address-drama....). My life is mostly online. I was a military wife for a lot of years and moved around a lot. Lots of people have very physically mobile lives these days. Yet, we haven't adapted our systems to this reality. We want to tie everyone to a physical address for a long list of things, as if we are plants who can't move from this one location or something. I don't know what the answer is, but, wow, I sure wish we would come up with better answers than acting like this is still the 1950s and everyone will work for the same company and live in the same house for decades and we can each be found in some particular location all the time.
      • photojosh 8y ago
        In Australia you can get a PO Box and pay a bit extra to have everything coming there scanned and emailed to you. Obviously wouldn't work for id cards though.
        • 8y ago
  • coryfklein 8y ago
    Wait, you can favorite comments on HN? How?
    • DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Click on the timestamp of the comment. It will give you additional options, including "favorite." Upvotes will privately bookmark things you like. Favorites are public. I use them occasionally to actually have some hope of finding something again. But if you don't want people to know, then don't use "favorite."
• snowwrestler 8y ago
  Seems like the obscurity of the W3W approach is part of the strategy, which is to "own" positioning and extract a tax from it. If you can extrapolate positioning deltas from the coordinates themselves, then you don't need to hit the API as much.
• TruffleMuffin 8y ago
  This actually has a usage for emergency services. People call and don't know where they are. This app can let the operator send them a text with a link in that they follow and can communicate very effectively the precise location. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912
  • jjeaff 8y ago
    Why not just send them a link that notifies the operator of the exact location, immediately after they click the link and load up their location?
  • nfg 8y ago
    This exact use-case is debunked in article linked.
    • interestica 8y ago
      No, the writer's misunderstanding of that use case is explained in the comments. Emergency services don't have sms/mms service. The W3W service would presumably use SMS to get location. (phone sends lat/long coords via sms, gets 3 word response). SMS tends to be more reliable than a data connection in areas with a poor connection (remote, or interference). This is doable right now - having some sort of data-to-emergencyservices gateway does not exist. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-words/#comment-98099 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...
      • fundingshovel 8y ago
        Why not just build an SMS gateway for emergency services with GPS coordinates and call it a day? It seems like the important bit is the gateway, not the 3 word response
        • interestica 8y ago
          Yes. That would be awesome. But it doesn't exist. And a third-party/private company doesn't have the ability to do that without govt partnership. What they can do is develop a completely separate system with a sustainable business model and basically demonstrate how it can piggy back on existing emergency systems regardless of the capabilities of said system (ie one doesn't need to know if the 911 system is the "upgraded" version or make that determination during an emergency). Also, in many cases a phone is not able to use (or has limited use) of data during a phone call. An sms would be able to go through concurrently. Imagine being on a 911 call. They ask you to click the W3W button (built in? Next to other on-call buttons?) and read out the response. Not a w3w shill - but I think there's a use case for the emergency system that uses sms and it is usable right now and doesn't require any system wide upgrades. The only potential upgrade would be at the OS level just to simplify (button addition). The ideal would be having the DB of W3w words locally so that it doesn't need the SMS gateway. Or having a completely open system...
• mdonahoe 8y ago
  "If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period..." I think it is interesting that you say that, because I see this system as DNS system on top of IP. So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name. Which begs the question: would a better system involve letting people pay to register names that point to latlongs? There is a free tier that are an open-source list of names for the entire globe, but companies could pay to have names like "free.tacos.here" point to their locations.
  • mirimir 8y ago
    > So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name. No, it's not. It's actually more like the opposite. The domain name system is hierarchical, and W3W is clearly (and I gather, intentionally) not. IP addresses are also hierarchical, but the mapping of domain names to them is only somewhat systematic. Really, though, W3W identifiers are most like Tor onion names. Just hashes. Indeed, some have suggested replacing alphanumeric onion names with something like W3W.
    • alexbecker 8y ago
      For most users, the domain name system is only very nominally hierarchical--every domain name they see is of this form: (www.)?[random-words].com
      • mirimir 8y ago
        Really? My wife is ~70, and not all that technical, but she knows (for example) that "maps.google.com" is a Google URL. And she even knows that "mail.google.com.assholes.io" is not a Google URL. It's just anecdotal, I know. But I find it hard to imagine that most people don't understand URL hierarchies. I mean, people who use computers commonly organize files in folders. But maybe that's becoming a lost art, as most new users just have mobile devices.
• thanatropism 8y ago
  This is why you have space filling curves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve With that you can have a linear ordering of space at each scale. Rounding errors become rounding errors. I remember seeing an implementation of that on npm or some such thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
  • dgritsko 8y ago
    Geohashes are really cool, glad to see them mentioned in this thread. If you aren't familiar, you owe it to yourself to read the second Wikipedia article linked by the parent, it's a neat concept.
    • acpetrov 8y ago
      Yep. I saw a talk a while back about Uber sharding their caching layer by geohash
  • lainga 8y ago
    Which are great right up until you cross boundaries. IIRC there's a big boundary in Google's S2 that divides Toronto in half.
    • thanatropism 8y ago
      That’s also a problem when mapping a circle to a straight line. The band Rush sang “you can’t have something for nothing...”
  • Pamar 8y ago
    See also this http://www.drdobbs.com/database/space-filling-curves-in-geospatial-appli/184410998 http://www.drdobbs.com/database/space-filling-curves-in-geos... (Dr.Dobbs Journal, 1999). It explains how to easily search for "points no more than X km from Y" in a DB query without having to actually calculate distances.
    • 8y ago
• delfinom 8y ago
  Apparently some African country bought into it I think. >Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? It's literally a con job designed to create a middleman where one isn't needed. It's the modern libertarian dream.
  • mindcrime 8y ago
    It's the modern libertarian dream. There is nothing libertarian about conning people or "creating a middleman where one isn't needed." If you believe that, you have been badly misinformed.
    • sneak 8y ago
      If people use it voluntarily due to marketing, then it appears to be one of the downsides of a free market and liberty of choice working as intended. Individual actors in the market are not always rational or well-informed.
• kevinventullo 8y ago
  Mathematically, I would phrase this by saying that the mapping of physical location to (lat,lon) pair is continuous. Space-filling curves and related things like Google's plus codes are nearly as good, in that (if you squint) they are continuous almost everywhere (everywhere but the boundary of some grid). W3W on the other hand is discontinuous everywhere. I think the advantage of lat/lon boils down to the fact that everyone knows 79.999 is close to 80.000, even though they look quite different as raw text.
  • ltbarcly3 8y ago
    So you have to be careful with the terminology. Space filling curves can be a continuous mapping of the line to the curve itself. However, this does not set up a continuous mapping from the space to the coordinate system, which is also quite important. A tiny change in your coordinate will mean a tiny change in your physical position, but a tiny change in your physical position will almost always mean a quite large (and basically not predictable without doing an involved calculation) change in your coordinate.
    • kevinventullo 8y ago
      Yeah, let me try to be more precise, though maybe it's worth writing down in a more formal setting because comments are awkward. Say we're looking at the Hilbert curve. I claim that for almost all physical positions, a sufficiently small change in position yields a correspondingly small change in coordinate. In the purely mathematical sense, this means something like "continuous except at points with at least one rational coordinate". In the programming sense, where everything must be approximated and you're mapping a 2-d lattice to a 1-d lattice, then it's a bit tricky to formulate, but something like: if you take the maximum distance in 1-d space between a 2-d point and its eight "neighbors", then the probability of this distance being > N should be O(1/sqrt(N)). Concretely, P(point has an adjacent point whose Hilbert coordinate disagrees past the highest n bits) == P(d > 4^n) < 4*(1/2)^n
      • ltbarcly3 8y ago
        I took a 256 square hilbert curve and took random points in it (discarding points where the euclidian distance was > 8). Here is the plot: https://gist.github.com/justinvanwinkle/22a15bb33536095b05dc9f68a87e2754 https://gist.github.com/justinvanwinkle/22a15bb33536095b05dc... Notice the Log y axis. I don't you think you could consider this even roughly continuous. This is only even bounded because I only took points within the 256x256 grid, if I let it run over say a 1000x1000 grid the hilbert distances wouldn't plot well even on a log plot. The second plot I took any random point within euclidian distance 8 from a random first point, and didn't restrict it to stay in the same 256x256 grid. 10k points total. Even at distance 1, you get hilbert distances like: 4469269309980865699858008332735282042493121940197464459241187147907254676691182325600624766055634475896677286062162016951251294270648856648811216335320387
• 7952 8y ago
  The problem with those kind of numbers is that they are easy to get wrong by a couple of digits. Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone. And guessing distances seems like a pretty unusual thing to do. Especially as latitude/longitude is a terrible system for that anyway. Small distances are very small numbers and hard to think about. It is possible to make a spelling mistake in what three words, but the mistake will be readily obvious if you know the general location. I shared your scepticism until I tried the app. The auto-complete is really slick and it just works. For sending coordinates through a human/speech interface it is just going to be more reliable. For ever other problem use another solution.
  • Anarch157a 8y ago
    > Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone. Same thing is true for words, there are words in my native portuguese that are dificult to tell from each other even in person, imagine by phone. If some one misunderstands a word and it's valid on a combination? For example (in portuguese), Paca.Tatu.Cotia (Paca.Armadilo.Agouti in english) can be misheard as Maca.Tatu.Quati (Stretcher.Armadilo.Coati in english). What if both combinations are valid, but thousands of km away ?
    • roywiggins 8y ago
      The NATO alphabet was built to solve nearly exactly this problem. It's quite verbose (by design).
    • 7952 8y ago
      But because they are thousands of km away it is easy for a human to tell which is correct based on context. And the search screen works very well. It autocorrects, gives a distance and a country flag. I understand the difficulty with speech, but that is true of any verbal communication.
  • boomlinde 8y ago
    > The problem with those kind of numbers is that they are easy to get wrong by a couple of digits. Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone. This already presupposes that the parties involved in the communication are using smartphones, so why not send the coordinates over SMS, email or any other available messaging system?
• wickedsmile 8y ago
  Apparently it's used because of the current limitations of the GPS system, it's still not accurate to 5cm. Although it's not a limitation of the coordinate system, so improving GPS accuracy to mm level resolution will make GPS coordinates obvious Oh yea house aren't that small but the vertical distance between the floors and individual apartment in the building is.
• lenticular 8y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. The whole concept is just so insanely useless.
• joshocar 8y ago
  That is a good idea, but after thinking about it for a bit I think it would be a very hard thing to create.
• michelb 8y ago
  Mercedes seems to be using it: https://what3words.com/2019/02/all-you-need-to-know-about-mercedes-benz-gps-voice-navigation-using-what3words/ https://what3words.com/2019/02/all-you-need-to-know-about-me...
• benj111 8y ago
  "1,0000" You've also (inadvertently) pointed out that there's redundancy in written numbers. Equivalent redundancy with W3W would require remembering spellings rather than a simple rule.
• austincheney 8y ago
  > Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? That is the darkest most evil sentiment to any product manager. It basically says a person cannot form an independent opinion and looks to their neighbor to derive credibility. If enough people think that way new ideas never enter the market. This is the opposite of merit.
  • JasonFruit 8y ago
    Maybe a good translation would be, "This is crap! And why are we talking about this crap, since most people haven't heard about it and it's crap?!"
  • boomlinde 8y ago
    In this case it's not looking to your neighbor to derive credibility, it's to derive utility. I mean, if I buy a hammer, I couldn't care less whether anyone else uses it. Its utility is entirely decoupled from the amount of users. In this case, you're not buying into a hammer, because utility is dependent on the number of users. If "//cat.dog.goose" means nothing to anyone around me, I can't use it to communicate a location to anyone around me. Maybe it shouldn't just be taken as "the darkest most evil sentiment" but as the general reaction consumers will have to products or services where utility is a function of adoption. With any luck, some few people will insist on using it and kickstart more widespread adoption, but that's just it: luck.