8 ms·

What3words divides the world into squares, each with a unique three-word address

19 points by JonoBB 7y ago

mruts 7y ago
Uhh, okay. This is already a solved problem, it’s called GPS. I can see this would be useful as an address system, but using it for the police to find you? Doesn’t make much sense.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  This is based on GPS. The three words are a hash of the coordinates; this seems more user-friendly and less error-prone than "14.1234567,50.35466, wait, no, 50.53466, or is it -50.53466,14.1234567?". As opposed to e.g. the Maidenhead locator, this has the properties of a hash - in other words, isn't trivially reversible, and you need the w3w company to provide you with the location, each and every time (jackpot!).
  - Freak_NL 7y ago
    > "14.1234567,50.35466, wait, no, 50.53466, or is it -50.53466,14.1234567?". All of which are fine for someone lost in X mountain range. The operator on the other side will know whether -50.* or 14.* is latitude or longitude. Also, you would just read the numbers from your screen, no ambiguity there.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      Thank you, thank you. You have demonstrated the flaw perfectly: didn't even notice the swapped digits, which would send SAR to someplace plausible yet far away.
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        I'm at steeple, bound, force... People? No steeple ... S as in Sam, steeple. Was that mound or found? B as in boy, o as in Oscar, u as in unit.... Ok, steeple, boy, Oscar... There is a reason the military alphabet exists and all numbers are pronounced as is (except for the occasional Niner to avoid confusing nine with 5)
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure long-pressing your location in Google Maps and reading out two numbers is a fair bit easier than downloading a new app that you've never heard of.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      Sure, network effect and all that. OTOH, I distinctly recall being told of a new search engine I've never heard of, I think it was called "Google". Everything was new and unknown once ;)
      - Piskvorrr 7y ago
        @IshKebab: Okay, I went ahead and tried. GMaps gives you both the GPS coordinates and the Open Location Code. That's significantly better than complaint above "it's popular because it's popular". Fair point.
- julienreszka 7y ago
  It's faster to read than long lat and it probably uses gps. The innovation is in the user friendly hash table of Geo locations
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    And apparently it has to feed 100 employees (what are they even doing?) I doubt that's true for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code and so I'd be less concerned about incentives changing over time (also, it doesn't need a central maintainer for the hash map).
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      3 employees to maintain the system. 97 employees doing sales, marketing, and PR.
    - julienreszka 7y ago
      Olc Isn't as user friendly as three words
      - pgeorgi 7y ago
        It's the same letters around the globe though. If you have a bunch of folks exchanging the following 3 Word Addresses, you better hope they get it textual in a medium that allows copy & paste - in which case OLC is no worse off. 语焉不详.思潮.眼球 (962CWVRJ+9X) ज्ञात.महाकाय.भौहों (9G4729FC+39) (58H58WHV+GX) القول.تفريق.لأهتم เคี้ยว.สมุนไพร.ผัก (9F4MG95X+7M) штанишки.вытер.разбавлять (8GW3XJP2+RV) And then there's terms of use: - For 3 Word Addresses you (hopefully) get "a non-assignable, non-transferable, non-exclusive and revocable licence". (note: revocable) - And worse, with the list above I might have violated their ToS: "Further, you must not publish (yourself or via a third party) any list or database of 3 Word Addresses with 3 Word Address Locations". - It's also not allowed to provide a service that translates a 3 Word Address into something else (such as OLC or GPS coordinates) so they could be used with software or devices that happen to use different schemes: "you may use any 3 Word Address in any way that you wish, provided ... you in no way use 3 Word Addresses or 3 Word Address Locations to provide or seek to provide a product or service the same as or similar to any product or service provided by us" - Finally, if they ever decide to shut down their server, all your 3 Word Address are gone as "any copying, re-utilisation, extraction, reproduction or redistribution of the what3words Materials ... is expressly prohibited".
- j_4 7y ago
  "You can build such a system quite trivially", etc. Turning a long numeric sequence into a memorable phrase easy to input with both text and speech solves a real problem.
mfontani 7y ago
Oh dear... * earthquakes and the like _shift locations_ on the crust. The "w3w" address you had for your house isn't at that "w3w" address anymore since that last big quake. Reprint stationery? * no translation between the English w3w and the Spanish, French, Italian, what-have-you. They're different words altogether. No back and forth. * It's not open * if one needs a DATA CONNECTION to find out their current w3w address, they can damn well find the GPS coordinates, too. As a bonus, they don't need a data connection to do that... See also: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-words/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...
- vinay427 7y ago
  Also, it's not hierarchical with most and least significant words, so changing any of the words would send you some indefinite distance from where you're trying to go. Open Location Codes (in Google Maps, for instance) seem to solve all of these problems except for not having arguably memorable words. It also doesn't change in line with earthquakes or other shifts, though I would argue that's a benefit more than a drawback. You can even omit the first few most significant digits by listing the municipality (where those exist) making it somewhat compatible with existing political divisions. In places with poor addressing, I regularly have to send Google Maps location links, and this provides an open alternative that can be easily transferred onto paper or spoken through a telephone.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    That's a feature, IMNSHO. "I'm in the general vicinity of Wherever, Midsommer, UK, my code is horse.battery.staple" checks out, whereas "battery.horse.staple" is supposed to be halfway around the world, and thus unlikely to get confused.
    - vinay427 7y ago
      I suppose it depends on the specific application. If I were talking to emergency responders and they happened to mishear part of the message, I'd much prefer the chance that they have an idea of my vicinity than having a likely infeasible number of possible word combinations, a few of which might provide reasonable locations if it were possible to check them all. In other words, your example would hold true if they heard and remembered the three words correctly in the wrong order, but that's not a gamble I'd want to take particularly if the API to check codes is restricted.
Freak_NL 7y ago
Just a proprietary algorithm looking for public problems it can claim to solve. Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. See previous discussions on HN for more background. Their one success story is how they managed to get the Mongolian postal services to adopt their tool. Can you imagine someone lost on a mountain side telling the emergency operator that he is located at 'snake.apple.dimwit' and getting asked to please just give coordinates or even a rough idea of where you might be in terms of local names, because the What3Wordsⓒ database is down?
- another-dave 7y ago
  > Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. I think now is the time to oppose it rather than ignore it. I agree in principle re: open source solutions, but if you're stuck in a forest in County Durham, as per the article, and the police say "download this app and give us the 3 words for your location", you can't get into a discussion about how it would be better to use an open standard and not a proprietary solution :) What I mean is, this is already gaining traction so ignoring feels like it just cedes the ground to it as a closed platform — to me it seems similar to Facebook et al: early days, you decide to ignore it as a closed platform, but because of network effects it's now much more difficult to try and get everyone to move to something like Mastodon. If police forces and postal services are starting to integrate this into their workflows, now's the time to try and push the discussion to the open source alternatives and raise the problems of this — it's disappointing that the BBC article reads like a press release rather than any attempt at critical analysis. With pseudo-science they'll do "balanced reporting" and give the other side but here no counter argument!
why-oh-why 7y ago
How many times is this gonna be posted? It’s basically spam at this point. Don’t use proprietary solutions to already-freely-solved problems
- mosselman 7y ago
  What free solution is there that does this?
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Oh, this is free-as-in-beer all right (at the time of writing). Free-as-in-speech would be, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code Or even the venerable Maidenhead Locator, even though it's not well specified for high location precision.
    - mosselman 7y ago
      Thanks, Open Location Code looks like a great solution. https://plus.codes/6PJ4CWRW+H3 https://plus.codes/6PJ4CWRW+H3 for anyone who wants to play around with it. Although I must say that '6PJ4CWRW+H3' is still harder to communicate than horse.cow.sheep for example. That is the clever thing about what3words, the design of the addresses. What I like about Open Location Code is that adjacent squares have a similar name.
      - Piskvorrr 7y ago
        Well, I like how the code can be shorter when using a location (I see "CWRW+H3 Segamat District, Johor, Malaysia") or unambiguous and terse when using the full code ("6PJ4CWRW+H3").
- londons_explore 7y ago
  They have VC funding and a big PR team... They're probably going to win by paying big companies like Facebook to promote what3words usage with the public.
andylynch 7y ago
This got me thinking- even though we now have Advanced Mobile Location rolling out in the EU, UK, and US, it would be a win if your phone could show your location (grid reference/lat long) when making an emergency call - AML will pick this up and send it automatically, but this could be a good fallback and timesaver.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FartyMcFarter 7y ago
Have operators implemented things like Android ELS? https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-it-works/ https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...
stefco_ 7y ago
Others have pointed out many weaknesses of this product already, but one seemingly annoying issue is homophones in the context of verbally communicating your location. They use a 40k word dictionary; surely there are tons of homophones in there. And there are surely more homophones outside the dictionary (which would just give an error when queried through their API). When you call some delivery service and ask them to find you at course.serial.flower, they could end up querying one of: - coarse.serial.flower - course.cereal.flower - course.serial.flour - coarse.cereal.flower - coarse.serial.flour - course.cereal.flour - coarse.cereal.flour If these homophones are used in the dictionary, the other person will get an effectively random location on earth. If the homophones are not in the dictionary, they will get no result from the API. In practice, you'll either need to be extra careful about specifying locations this way, or you'll need to provide extra location data like zip/city/etc. as error-correcting code. But at that point, it seems like you're not much better off than you would be with conventional addresses or LAT/LON coordinates for common use cases.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I think they've filtered most of these, or at least pushed them out of populated areas and into the middle of oceans.
chrischen 7y ago
So one of the main criticisms is that there is no need for this to be a proprietary thing rather than an open standard. So, why hasn't someone made an open DB of 3 words?
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Stuff like that exists - Google's Plus Codes, the old and reliable Maidenhead Locator system, etc. The business model here seems to be "we need to market the system aggressively (see article) - if we make the system open, we can no longer profit from it". In other words, an open system will IMHO languish in obscurity due to lack of marketing funding.
pepper_sauce 7y ago
The UK already has a well known system of coordinates called the British National Grid (BNG). You'd be hard pressed to find a map printed in the last ~80 years that doesn't have BNG coordinates in it. Replacing it with a new proprietary, closed system that can only be accessed from app is a terrible idea.
newsbinator 7y ago
I'm concerned that I selected English (US) as my language, whereas English (UK) might have a completely different set of words. Emergency services would have to be using the same flavor of English as the victim.
tomhoward 7y ago
Discussed on HN when launched 5 years ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198
reustle 7y ago
Reposting my comment from the duplicate earlier: Reminder that you should avoid what3words. Still unfortunate that some governments fell into using them. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-.... > The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission. > If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents. > You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!
Normille 7y ago
Oh dear. Now the BBC have been infected with the insanity: https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever/ https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever/
nathanaldensr 7y ago
This company is still around? Amazing.
jlawson 7y ago
A lot of people seem to be down on this, citing GPS and other traditional numeric systems. But I think this is much better for police specifically. For reasons that are not about data or systems so much as physical practicality. Consider circumstances like these: A panicked hairdresser lost in the forest. An old person with progressing dementia; forgot where they were. A kidnapped child trapped in a room or locked in a car. Anyone in a burning building who can smell smoke. Try any of these situations when the cellphone is at 5%, or when the call keeps dropping, or when you can barely hear because it's so loud, or barely see, or you're drunk, your hand is broken, you're on drugs, you're dehydrated, you're hypothermic, you're bleeding, you're surrounded by buzzing insects... Now think about the physical practicalities of a numbers system like GPS. To use any numerical system, you're talking about memorizing a string of eight or ten digits off one app and then reading them into a phone call. Yes, it may be possible to go on speaker and minimize the call app (if nobody is hunting you) but lots of people can't figure that out on their best day, much less in life-threatening situations. You have to be able to memorize it when you're afraid of death or shivering in the cold outside. Maybe the call gets disconnected and you have to go back, oh shit I closed the app, what was the number, oh I mixed up some numbers near the end, oh my god.... Almost anyone can remember three words without trying. A child can do it and my grandma can do it. Even if you get disconnected, it won't be hard to remember the words even minutes later. You can't miss a number, you can't transpose the numbers by accident because if you make a mistake it'll be obvious since the words aren't adjacent in the grid (for this reason). It's incredibly practical for the physical and mental constraints of a police situation, and that's why they use it.

19 points by JonoBB 7y ago

Uhh, okay. This is already a solved problem, it’s called GPS. I can see this would be useful as an address system, but using it for the police to find you? Doesn’t make much sense.

Piskvorrr 7y ago
This is based on GPS. The three words are a hash of the coordinates; this seems more user-friendly and less error-prone than "14.1234567,50.35466, wait, no, 50.53466, or is it -50.53466,14.1234567?". As opposed to e.g. the Maidenhead locator, this has the properties of a hash - in other words, isn't trivially reversible, and you need the w3w company to provide you with the location, each and every time (jackpot!).
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  > "14.1234567,50.35466, wait, no, 50.53466, or is it -50.53466,14.1234567?". All of which are fine for someone lost in X mountain range. The operator on the other side will know whether -50.* or 14.* is latitude or longitude. Also, you would just read the numbers from your screen, no ambiguity there.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Thank you, thank you. You have demonstrated the flaw perfectly: didn't even notice the swapped digits, which would send SAR to someplace plausible yet far away.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      I'm at steeple, bound, force... People? No steeple ... S as in Sam, steeple. Was that mound or found? B as in boy, o as in Oscar, u as in unit.... Ok, steeple, boy, Oscar... There is a reason the military alphabet exists and all numbers are pronounced as is (except for the occasional Niner to avoid confusing nine with 5)
- IshKebab 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure long-pressing your location in Google Maps and reading out two numbers is a fair bit easier than downloading a new app that you've never heard of.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Sure, network effect and all that. OTOH, I distinctly recall being told of a new search engine I've never heard of, I think it was called "Google". Everything was new and unknown once ;)
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      @IshKebab: Okay, I went ahead and tried. GMaps gives you both the GPS coordinates and the Open Location Code. That's significantly better than complaint above "it's popular because it's popular". Fair point.
julienreszka 7y ago
It's faster to read than long lat and it probably uses gps. The innovation is in the user friendly hash table of Geo locations
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  And apparently it has to feed 100 employees (what are they even doing?) I doubt that's true for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code and so I'd be less concerned about incentives changing over time (also, it doesn't need a central maintainer for the hash map).
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    3 employees to maintain the system. 97 employees doing sales, marketing, and PR.
  - julienreszka 7y ago
    Olc Isn't as user friendly as three words
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      It's the same letters around the globe though. If you have a bunch of folks exchanging the following 3 Word Addresses, you better hope they get it textual in a medium that allows copy & paste - in which case OLC is no worse off. 语焉不详.思潮.眼球 (962CWVRJ+9X) ज्ञात.महाकाय.भौहों (9G4729FC+39) (58H58WHV+GX) القول.تفريق.لأهتم เคี้ยว.สมุนไพร.ผัก (9F4MG95X+7M) штанишки.вытер.разбавлять (8GW3XJP2+RV) And then there's terms of use: - For 3 Word Addresses you (hopefully) get "a non-assignable, non-transferable, non-exclusive and revocable licence". (note: revocable) - And worse, with the list above I might have violated their ToS: "Further, you must not publish (yourself or via a third party) any list or database of 3 Word Addresses with 3 Word Address Locations". - It's also not allowed to provide a service that translates a 3 Word Address into something else (such as OLC or GPS coordinates) so they could be used with software or devices that happen to use different schemes: "you may use any 3 Word Address in any way that you wish, provided ... you in no way use 3 Word Addresses or 3 Word Address Locations to provide or seek to provide a product or service the same as or similar to any product or service provided by us" - Finally, if they ever decide to shut down their server, all your 3 Word Address are gone as "any copying, re-utilisation, extraction, reproduction or redistribution of the what3words Materials ... is expressly prohibited".
j_4 7y ago
"You can build such a system quite trivially", etc. Turning a long numeric sequence into a memorable phrase easy to input with both text and speech solves a real problem.

mfontani 7y ago

Oh dear... * earthquakes and the like _shift locations_ on the crust. The "w3w" address you had for your house isn't at that "w3w" address anymore since that last big quake. Reprint stationery? * no translation between the English w3w and the Spanish, French, Italian, what-have-you. They're different words altogether. No back and forth. * It's not open * if one needs a DATA CONNECTION to find out their current w3w address, they can damn well find the GPS coordinates, too. As a bonus, they don't need a data connection to do that... See also: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-words/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-...

vinay427 7y ago
Also, it's not hierarchical with most and least significant words, so changing any of the words would send you some indefinite distance from where you're trying to go. Open Location Codes (in Google Maps, for instance) seem to solve all of these problems except for not having arguably memorable words. It also doesn't change in line with earthquakes or other shifts, though I would argue that's a benefit more than a drawback. You can even omit the first few most significant digits by listing the municipality (where those exist) making it somewhat compatible with existing political divisions. In places with poor addressing, I regularly have to send Google Maps location links, and this provides an open alternative that can be easily transferred onto paper or spoken through a telephone.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  That's a feature, IMNSHO. "I'm in the general vicinity of Wherever, Midsommer, UK, my code is horse.battery.staple" checks out, whereas "battery.horse.staple" is supposed to be halfway around the world, and thus unlikely to get confused.
  - vinay427 7y ago
    I suppose it depends on the specific application. If I were talking to emergency responders and they happened to mishear part of the message, I'd much prefer the chance that they have an idea of my vicinity than having a likely infeasible number of possible word combinations, a few of which might provide reasonable locations if it were possible to check them all. In other words, your example would hold true if they heard and remembered the three words correctly in the wrong order, but that's not a gamble I'd want to take particularly if the API to check codes is restricted.

Freak_NL 7y ago

Just a proprietary algorithm looking for public problems it can claim to solve. Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. See previous discussions on HN for more background. Their one success story is how they managed to get the Mongolian postal services to adopt their tool. Can you imagine someone lost on a mountain side telling the emergency operator that he is located at 'snake.apple.dimwit' and getting asked to please just give coordinates or even a rough idea of where you might be in terms of local names, because the What3Wordsⓒ database is down?

another-dave 7y ago
> Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things. I think now is the time to oppose it rather than ignore it. I agree in principle re: open source solutions, but if you're stuck in a forest in County Durham, as per the article, and the police say "download this app and give us the 3 words for your location", you can't get into a discussion about how it would be better to use an open standard and not a proprietary solution :) What I mean is, this is already gaining traction so ignoring feels like it just cedes the ground to it as a closed platform — to me it seems similar to Facebook et al: early days, you decide to ignore it as a closed platform, but because of network effects it's now much more difficult to try and get everyone to move to something like Mastodon. If police forces and postal services are starting to integrate this into their workflows, now's the time to try and push the discussion to the open source alternatives and raise the problems of this — it's disappointing that the BBC article reads like a press release rather than any attempt at critical analysis. With pseudo-science they'll do "balanced reporting" and give the other side but here no counter argument!

why-oh-why 7y ago

How many times is this gonna be posted? It’s basically spam at this point. Don’t use proprietary solutions to already-freely-solved problems

mosselman 7y ago
What free solution is there that does this?
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Oh, this is free-as-in-beer all right (at the time of writing). Free-as-in-speech would be, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code Or even the venerable Maidenhead Locator, even though it's not well specified for high location precision.
  - mosselman 7y ago
    Thanks, Open Location Code looks like a great solution. https://plus.codes/6PJ4CWRW+H3 https://plus.codes/6PJ4CWRW+H3 for anyone who wants to play around with it. Although I must say that '6PJ4CWRW+H3' is still harder to communicate than horse.cow.sheep for example. That is the clever thing about what3words, the design of the addresses. What I like about Open Location Code is that adjacent squares have a similar name.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      Well, I like how the code can be shorter when using a location (I see "CWRW+H3 Segamat District, Johor, Malaysia") or unambiguous and terse when using the full code ("6PJ4CWRW+H3").
londons_explore 7y ago
They have VC funding and a big PR team... They're probably going to win by paying big companies like Facebook to promote what3words usage with the public.

andylynch 7y ago

This got me thinking- even though we now have Advanced Mobile Location rolling out in the EU, UK, and US, it would be a win if your phone could show your location (grid reference/lat long) when making an emergency call - AML will pick this up and send it automatically, but this could be a good fallback and timesaver.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

FartyMcFarter 7y ago

Have operators implemented things like Android ELS? https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-it-works/ https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...

stefco_ 7y ago

Others have pointed out many weaknesses of this product already, but one seemingly annoying issue is homophones in the context of verbally communicating your location. They use a 40k word dictionary; surely there are tons of homophones in there. And there are surely more homophones outside the dictionary (which would just give an error when queried through their API). When you call some delivery service and ask them to find you at course.serial.flower, they could end up querying one of: - coarse.serial.flower - course.cereal.flower - course.serial.flour - coarse.cereal.flower - coarse.serial.flour - course.cereal.flour - coarse.cereal.flour If these homophones are used in the dictionary, the other person will get an effectively random location on earth. If the homophones are not in the dictionary, they will get no result from the API. In practice, you'll either need to be extra careful about specifying locations this way, or you'll need to provide extra location data like zip/city/etc. as error-correcting code. But at that point, it seems like you're not much better off than you would be with conventional addresses or LAT/LON coordinates for common use cases.

londons_explore 7y ago
I think they've filtered most of these, or at least pushed them out of populated areas and into the middle of oceans.

chrischen 7y ago

So one of the main criticisms is that there is no need for this to be a proprietary thing rather than an open standard. So, why hasn't someone made an open DB of 3 words?

Piskvorrr 7y ago
Stuff like that exists - Google's Plus Codes, the old and reliable Maidenhead Locator system, etc. The business model here seems to be "we need to market the system aggressively (see article) - if we make the system open, we can no longer profit from it". In other words, an open system will IMHO languish in obscurity due to lack of marketing funding.

pepper_sauce 7y ago

The UK already has a well known system of coordinates called the British National Grid (BNG). You'd be hard pressed to find a map printed in the last ~80 years that doesn't have BNG coordinates in it. Replacing it with a new proprietary, closed system that can only be accessed from app is a terrible idea.

newsbinator 7y ago

I'm concerned that I selected English (US) as my language, whereas English (UK) might have a completely different set of words. Emergency services would have to be using the same flavor of English as the victim.

tomhoward 7y ago

Discussed on HN when launched 5 years ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198

reustle 7y ago

Reposting my comment from the duplicate earlier: Reminder that you should avoid what3words. Still unfortunate that some governments fell into using them. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-... https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-.... > The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission. > If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents. > You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!

Normille 7y ago

Oh dear. Now the BBC have been infected with the insanity: https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever/ https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever/

nathanaldensr 7y ago

This company is still around? Amazing.

jlawson 7y ago

A lot of people seem to be down on this, citing GPS and other traditional numeric systems. But I think this is much better for police specifically. For reasons that are not about data or systems so much as physical practicality. Consider circumstances like these: A panicked hairdresser lost in the forest. An old person with progressing dementia; forgot where they were. A kidnapped child trapped in a room or locked in a car. Anyone in a burning building who can smell smoke. Try any of these situations when the cellphone is at 5%, or when the call keeps dropping, or when you can barely hear because it's so loud, or barely see, or you're drunk, your hand is broken, you're on drugs, you're dehydrated, you're hypothermic, you're bleeding, you're surrounded by buzzing insects... Now think about the physical practicalities of a numbers system like GPS. To use any numerical system, you're talking about memorizing a string of eight or ten digits off one app and then reading them into a phone call. Yes, it may be possible to go on speaker and minimize the call app (if nobody is hunting you) but lots of people can't figure that out on their best day, much less in life-threatening situations. You have to be able to memorize it when you're afraid of death or shivering in the cold outside. Maybe the call gets disconnected and you have to go back, oh shit I closed the app, what was the number, oh I mixed up some numbers near the end, oh my god.... Almost anyone can remember three words without trying. A child can do it and my grandma can do it. Even if you get disconnected, it won't be hard to remember the words even minutes later. You can't miss a number, you can't transpose the numbers by accident because if you make a mistake it'll be obvious since the words aren't adjacent in the grid (for this reason). It's incredibly practical for the physical and mental constraints of a police situation, and that's why they use it.