3-word code is address of 57M 3-square-meter patches on earth's surface | Hacker News Reader

3-word code is address of 57M 3-square-meter patches on earth's surface

nytimes.com

39 pointsaj758 comments

The big problem with what3words (leaving aside the disconjunction of individual areas) is that the data is their IP and you’re not allowed to reuse it for your own purposes (http://developer.what3words.com/api/licence/)

Kinda defeats the entire purpose then doesn't it?

Their purpose is making money, not improving peoples lives.

Right, but how do they expect to get adoption at-scale if usage is tightly constrained and pricing is opaque?

Currently that's the "???" before "Profit!" but I'm sure they'll figure something out.

Seems they missed the golden opportunity to treat keyword sets as the adwords of location. Who wouldn't want to live at: banana.capitalone.waterslide?

What exactly _is_ the purpose?

Rough location: Country , City , Street.

Exact location: Latitude , Longitude.

I think the purpose is making the latter as easy to remember and recite as the former.

And what stops anyone from spending a few days making a similar, public domain 3 word addressing system?

Patents? https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO14... and https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014170646A1

FWIW, looks like the US version is only an application (meaning that a patent might not issue).

Discussion from yesterday about a free open source alternative:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12260958

http://xaddress.org (Note: not https)

Also: http://www.what3fucks.com/ http://www.what3ikea.com/ http://www.what3pokemon.com/

etc…

Nothing new, except a stupid "non-optimal" idea. All the useless info a brain has to remember: the adress next to me ? I'm in "foo bar baz", so next to me should be "foo bar buz" ? No, it's "blih blah bloh". Nobody will remember it.

"Kicks Pasta Steer" is pretty funny and I would remember it. But there's far more mundane and hard to remember ones. I can remember the number just as well.

And by the same reason, nobody will give your parcel addressed to foo bar baz to your neighbor at blih blah bloh, would they?

No, but they could give it to foo bar bay which is 3 thousand miles away.

Why do you need to remember the address next to you?

I think the point was that you cannot derive the address next to you from only the address you are at plus logic.

What 3 Fucks is by far the most functional of the word-as-address systems I've seen: it uses common words, and adjacent places have adjacent addresses.

It still has the problem of multiple similar words in its dictionary, but I think this could be solved by including more non-curse words. Many clean words become suggestive when adjacent to curses, so the addresses would still be filthy enough to be memorable.

[For Mr. Hutagt, providing people with an easy, free system to be found is “one of the more common, basic human rights.”]

I'm curious how useful three random mid-level english words are to a common mongolian nomad as a navigation system

Maybe the three word code is localize to the Mongol language (the article mentioned what3words adding support for the language).

I'm also curious about how many nomadic people have smartphones with a data plan to be able to generate their address.

Probably more have smart phones than we would expect but not enough to justify this.

Edit: in fact if they all have smartphones you might as well just use gps coords

It supports Mongolian and other languages with a separate dictionary (http://what3words.com/ top right you can select a language)

Yeah, tried it (see my other comment in the thread). So, assuming I live at kicks.pasta.steer and someone in Mongolia wants to write me should he use:

kicks.pasta.steer or хуучныг.зүүлт.суурилах or ones.necklace.based-on or цохилтын чадваруудаар.гоймон.чиглэх ?

I'd guess same with existing addresses (street name, city name, country name): you write what the local postman can best read. In the API the language parameter is optional so I'd say whatever system/app/website translates it to coordinates both languages work.

So if my front door is steers.pasta.kicks and the end of of my driveway is effort.army.blur, there's really no rhyme or reason to it.

It seems like it should act more like web domains, so my city would be "park", my neighborhood would be "lung" and finally down to my street and house being one of the small blocks inside that. Honestly, making it 4 words seems like you could really break it down in a logical way.

Agree. One could use the word2vec vector space to determine close relations between neutral words, so it would make intuitive sense as well.

But that would make it harder to remember. "Was it apricot.bubble.morose or apricot.bubble.dejected ?"

I think part of what I like about this idea is that the vectors inside a larger vector would be the same across larger vectors, for example the very bottom left corner vector is "apple" across all larger vectors. Eventually perhaps we would all even start to recognize vector locations. What if each vector name was even categorized, so you knew that fruits were in the bottom left area of a block, and sports names (i.e. baseball, basketball, etc) are in the top right area of a vector.

Silly, maybe, but I like the idea of people having a general idea of what area something is in based solely off word usage.

This was on the front page yesterday, seems rather similar: http://xaddress.org.

Indeed, xaddress lists alternatives on its readme (including what3words): https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/blob/master/README.md#a...

And more importantly xaddress.org is open source under an MIT license. There is no claim of intellectual property on each address like what3words.

That discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12260958

Hopefully with context, which of these you meant will be obvious.

https://map.what3words.com/eyebrows.conforms.zebra https://map.what3words.com/eyebrow.conforms.zebra https://map.what3words.com/eyebrows.conform.zebra https://map.what3words.com/eyebrow.conform.zebra

Actually 9-square-meters (3 by 3 meters squares)

... and 57 trillion of them, not 57 million

Like I said on the other post yesterday, fun, but a "solution" looking for a problem. We already have addresses. They work.

You have an address, most readers of HN have one. The article is about people in Mongolia not having addresses

"a stand-in for the more common addressing convention of house number, street name and postal code, which never quite caught on in Mongolia, one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries"

Cool idea, but how do you deal with flats or multi-stories? What about mail distribution - how do you group items for the same area?

From the website of the company the article is about (http://what3words.com/) it seems they're targeting the use case of those without "adequate existing addressing".

So an as MVP accurately/deterministically identifying the location you live could be super valuable, going beyond that in the ways you described would be SUPER useful but maybe even this would be enough to add value!

Whether this is the right method of doing it is another question.

What I've seen in quite a few flats is that at the entrance floor there's a floor plan with names, so if you know to whom it is addressed and you have the right building you can deliver it. I've even seen more curious scenario's on islands in Greece for example where all you need to know is the person's name and the town they live in, the mailman does the rest since they make it their business to know who lives where :).

People can get very creative when it comes to these things. There's a very common concept of "old lady surveillance" in the Mediterranean where the elderly sort of function like a bottomless address book if you ever need to get directions and can usually complement a police report too, since they just tend to observe everything going on in their neighbourhood.

As far as mail distribution goes, I think since you can reverse the lookup to find the actual geographical location you could do that in a mail distribution centre and bundle things up for delivery, much like postcodes are used.

Or how does 911 know which fire company to notify when you call and say your house is on fire? When the right fire truck is en route, which street do they turn down to reach you?

Or when you ask the local pizza parlor, "Do you deliver to my address?", how long does it take anyone to figure out the answer to that question?

Or when you want to take a taxi from point A to point B, and the small local taxis charge flat fees between different neighborhoods -- as many do -- how do they give you a fee estimate without plotting both points on a map?

Addresses need to be more useful than GPS coordinates as well as more memorable, or else you've just turned every-day life into the sport of orienteering.

Misspelling will be oh-so-costly.

As I understand it, it is designed to put common misspellings/close-spellings of the three word phrase (eg. cat.mice.dog vs. cat.mice.dogs) in totally different parts of the earth, so that it is immediately obvious on lookup that you have the wrong address.

Someone shared these on Facebook, 300km distance between Chicago and Gradn Rapids:

https://map.what3words.com/help.driver.lost https://map.what3words.com/driver.lost.help

It's a scam. The media should really stop repeating press releases.

If you mix up words or misspell a place one usually ends up somewhere unplanned. 600km between Springfield, Texas (Jim Wells County) and Springfield, Texas (Anderson County). Half around the world if you mistype a coordinate (or mix up latitude and longitude or forget a minus sign).

Yes, wrong coordinates are much easier to detect. The 300km are too small to be clearly wrong, imagine a package being delivered from the East Coast.

Heh, that's actually an interesting point. There might be some redundancies but there's a reason for the current country-city-street-number system in use for most places: Maybe you get the address number wrong, but you won't get the country or even city wrong. With coordinates, type a 1 instead of a 7 and you're in a different continent. Type "peek" instead of "peak" and you might be on the other side of the world.

I wonder how much of that has been considered in that system. Easy-to-misspell words, people not wanting "idiot.lives.here" as their home address, etc. I suppose a lot of effort was put into getting this right. But this is a start-up, not a a centuries-old, established system.

For non-Enlgish speakers, they have just substituted numbers with letters. And for English speakers, I wonder if they will be willing to use it when their business is in infected.shit.hole or something like that.

what3words hires language consultants (based on the jobs page) so less common and longer words are in the middle of the Pacific for example. The word 'shit' isn't in the dictionary though there's probably funny/insulting/unfortunate combinations out there. A business can simply use a nearby 3-word code which sounds better, I mean there are 8 other 3-word codes just 4m away.

I think the one advantage this has over the usual GPS coordinates is it's easier to communicate over various means than a long string of numbers.

This service looks interesting: http://locate.world/

It still has problems with "closeness" - here are two buildings close to where I live, both on the same side of the same street, maybe 20m of distance from door to door:

1SCQU7 TMWV1V

My UK (previous) address

100 HD1 3BQ

Mongolia is one of the 22 countries in the world that Britain did not invade, so unfortunately they don't have the benefit of the British post code system :)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9653497/British-have-inva...

I am an Italian expat. I know from first hand experience (i.e. by trying to send a postcard to a friend) that some rural area of Sardinia do not have a postal address (even if there is a house there, not a nomad's hut that can be disassembled and moved).

Guess what? People living there can apply to have a P.O.Box at the closest town, where you can send them any kind of stuff and they just have to go to town (something they have to do regularly to shop at a supermarket or see a doctor) and check if there is anything for them.

I am sure it worked fine in the past for a lot of other countries too, and probably still does in places like NZ or Australia.

It also has the nifty advantage that even if you do live in a nomad's hut and so may happen to wander away from your original "address" of case.nightmare.beige your post office will stay there, and your post will be there, too, waiting for you to come and pick it up.

What's the revenue model?

From the article "Mongol Post, the country’s largest mail provider, has licensed the system from What3Words"

Pricing page: http://developer.what3words.com/pricing/

Interesting bit there: "If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology or make arrangements for it to be maintained by a third-party (with that third-party being willing to make this same commitment), then we will release our source code into the public domain."

So I googled Mongol Post and this comes straight from their homepage:

САНХҮҮГИЙН ТАЙЛАН, ТАТВАРЫН ТАЙЛАН ХҮРГЭЛТИЙН ҮЙЛЧИЛГЭЭ

Therefore I go on what3worlds page, and they display prominently a pin at coordinates kicks.pasta.steer - without touching anything else, I change their site language... now the same pin is set at: хуучныг.зүүлт.суурилах which according to Google Translator would be existing-ones.necklace.based-on.

I think this will not work "flawlessly" as soon as you need it to identify a point which is not in your own homeland.

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