Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries | Hacker News Reader

Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries

what3words.com

46 pointsCarolineW55 comments

Another reminder that a proprietary system from a for-profit company should not be used as the basis for addressing in any country.

Here's some good reporting on the company: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/the-m...

How is this convenient?

"doors.aware.secure" gives you no indication of where it could be, especially when the neighbor is "hotel.leans.poetic"

If it's not meant for humans, then why not use GPS coordinates which are even more precise?

Not to mention, I'm sure there will be insensitive randomly generated strings like "muddy.ashes.pardon" https://map.what3words.com/muddy.ashes.pardon

what3words is a large hash table mapping 3x3m squares of land with the key being a unique three word phrase and the value being the 3x3 grid square. That's really all it is. Oh, by the way, if the service goes down, everything grinds to a halt because there is no backup analog system (maps, etc).

It's a solution searching for a problem, and existing mail and building addressing schemes are far superior to it.

It's easy for humans to memorize, though I don't know exactly what that's worth...

When all you need now is '123 Fake St, 12345' to get a map of a location and directions to it on your phone, not much. You can locate '123 Fake St, 12345' without a phone, so it wins.

As others have pointed out, lots of places in underdeveloped countries don't have street names and numbers.

As others have pointed out, and I quote, "a proprietary system from a for-profit company should not be used as the basis for addressing in any country."

So it'd be easy for everybody to contribute their address and GPS coordinates to an open database. Eventually it'd be usable enough that most people wouldn't need to access the paid for DB.

ehh, muddy.ashes.pardon maps to US Holocaust Memorial Museum... (https://www.ushmm.org/) insensitive for sure, is that just a coincidence?

Apparently this discussion has been on here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11896883

from the website, https://what3words.com/about/ :

> Street addresses worldwide are inaccurate, unreliable and don’t exist at all in many places. Poor addressing is expensive and frustrating, hampers economic growth and development, restricts social mobility and affects lives.

> Street addresses can usually identify a building, but aren’t accurate enough to help a courier or taxi driver find the correct entrance. This results in delayed or failed deliveries, and numerous ‘where are you’ phone calls.

oven.likes.zips is much easier to communicate and memorize than 40.7484° N, 73.9857° W (location of empire state building).

Yeah, because "350 5th Ave, NYC" is just so hard to communicate...

Exactly. City it's usually obvious. With an address you need to memorize street and number, 2 things. With 3 random words, there's no hint to remind you of what it might be. With an address, at least you could say it's on Main St. if you don't remember the whole address.

Is it correct to assume the implementation isn't open and only what3words can resolve 3words to location and vice versa? What happens if they close down, would my mailing address no longer be resolvable? What happens then?

If you'd like to visit my office its at atomic.pipes.rods.

We don't publish a list of all the words, so this isn't available for download.

https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875-C...

It looks like they've got that covered: "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. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences and documentation to ensure that any and all users of what3words, whether they are individuals, businesses, charitable organisations, aid agencies, governments or anyone else can continue to rely on the what3words system." -- https://what3words.com/pricing/

Is the code and documentation placed into escrow with a third party to ensure that this happens?

So what happens in the case that England (their place of business) issues trade embargos with any of those countries?

Not particularly reassuring, can't someone just create an open system with a similar concept and release the mapping.

When someone told about what3words, they also told me that they made money by selling shorter or more pleasant word pairings to whoever was willing to pay, but the only reference to that I could find is [0]. Having that requirement would make it much more difficult to build such a system.

Apart from that, it's basically "just" geohashes with a different (population-density based) encoding.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/08/what3words/

Those were called One Words. That was their old businesses model and abandoned/pivoted.

>can't someone just create an open system with a similar concept

There's a pretty good, working parody at http://what3fucks.com

And that system maintains a hierarchical relationship, you and your neighbor share the first n words. Makes much more sens e

What if they don't keep their word? A lot will come to depend on this.

Geohash is patent free btw. I am sure something can be done here as well.

The what3words algorithm has a patent pending though[0]. Let's see if it will stand up to geohashes as prior art.

[0]: https://www.google.com/patents/US20160073225

And this https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...

As the OpenStreetMap community has documented[1], this is unfortunately very much not open, and it is a real shame that a country would entrust something so public as addressing to a foreign, closed system.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words

Can using a block chain a good solution for it?

Of course! Blockchain is the solution for everything! /s

Sorry I have a limited understanding of blockchain but what I meant is since people are already downloading the what3words app, using blockchain integration everyone can pick their own unique 3 words and the whole chain records who the address owner is. This way it becomes indestructible because if i understood correctly everyone has a copy of blockchain making it decentralized.

Only maps 2d space, so I'm not sure how they deal with apartment buildings and high rise offices.

Because anyone can pick whatever 3m square portion of the building they want to, it seems it would make mail sorting harder...a bundle for one specific building.

From the article, it seems that it is best-applied in situations where the following constraints apply:

1. No existing national addressing system exists.

2. Streets are not named (or do not exist).

3. The address space to be described is extremely sparse.

4. Mailing addresses are transient (i.e. buildings move, as tents, vehicles, etc).

A dense apartment building in an urban area is unlikely to be described by any of these constraints.

As mentioned elsewhere, these problems can also be solved by latitude/longitude coordinates. However, this simply provides a friendlier "hostname" convention to a numeric backend.

The article does feature a picture from somewhere in Nigeria, featuring a cluster of high rise buildings, and one of their 3 word addresses pointing toward them.

I’ve never thought about this, but what3words could be hugely helpful for me. My house is essentially located between two streets, and the street name in the address isn’t the actual street where my mailbox is or where you’d enter the gate, so loosing packages is common and it’s hard to explain to friends how to find me

I used to live on an alley with a 1/2 in the address, people always had trouble finding it.

It seems like what3words is precisely as helpful as standard coordinates, with the exception that coordinates don't depend on a proprietary company.

It seems to be me to be roughly analogous to the hostname <-> IP mapping; they both describe the same place, but one is more memorable and easier to communicate.

This company seems a far cry from ICANN, however.

Have you ever tried to memorize a precise coordinate?

It's basically just a DNS system (providing friendly names) for GPS coordinates (which, like IP addresses, are numbers and are hard to remember off the top of your head).

I think it's kind of dumb that it requires a company to run, though. There are around 170,000 words in the oxford english dictionary. If you take any combination of three random words, you would have a grand total of 170,000 x 170,000 x 170,000 possible permutations, or 4,913,000,000,000,000 possible permutations.

If you only took the top 50,000 most commonly used words, then you would have 50,000 x 50,000 x 50,000 = 125,000,000,000,000 possible permutations. That's 125 trillion combinations.

Guess how much disk space a word list of 479,000 words takes up? Oh, only 4.5 megabytes. (see: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words)

It would be extremely easy to build an index of words, number them, then correlate them to GPS coordinates, all with a simple client-side algorithm.

There is literally no reason at all why this needs to be a single company in control of this. It could be a completely open source project, maintained by the community. And it wouldn't need servers, because all you would need is a small client-side app that would convert the numbers of your current GPS coordinates to/from the word list combos (which would only be a couple megabytes in size). This could be easily distributed as an android or ios app that would run completely offline.

I was comparing various encoding methods for a project not long ago, and one of the most informative was this article:

Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems (https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...)

That article has it's own biases and factual inconsistencies (not sure if intentional or just due to neglect). For example the article claims what3words doesn't work offline. It does.

Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap founder and what3words employee on why what3words is a good thing: https://stevecoast.com/2016/03/25/why-i-like-what3words/

A what3words employee saying what3words is a good thing? Especially one whose position is literally called Chief Evangelist[0]? How shocking.

Conversely, (as another HN user pointed out), OpenStreetMap's opinion of what3words is quite negative: "what3words is a commercial, non-open, patented location reference schema. Open data advocates (such as the OpenStreetMap community) would generally advise against adopting it at all."[1]

0. https://www.directionsmag.com/pressrelease/5831

1. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words

I'm not affiliated to map code http://www.mapcode.com/ but they also have a similar idea.

What I like about their approach is that you don't run the risk of your business having a silly sounding address.

Its time someone starts an initiative to build a database of these locations outside of what3words. Once a location (3 words) is added, translated into a lat lon, it just a matter of looking it up.

Only 57 trillion 3x3 meter squares to resolve...

Yes, its good to have a closer look at the numbers involved :-)

I found the habitual part of Earth to be 24,642,757 square miles [0]. A square mile = 2589988.11 square meter [Google].

So that comes close to 7.1 trillion locations. It results in 7000 Gb for each byte stored.

This makes me wonder if there is some kind of algorithm is involved. The location names seem randomly but might not be. Maybe its only random for the superficial observer. Which could mean with a sufficient big enough sample the algorithm can be found. Maybe even a relative small dataset with locations close to each other could work already.

[0] = http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/land.html

Yes, it's probably just some hashing function mapped to words.

But they do map the entire earth, including oceans.

7 countries, all plagued with rampant corruption, adopted a foreign, proprietary addressing scheme as part of their central infrastructure.

Hmm. author.alien.error.

Or appeal.appear.ledge.

I'm really glad that these folks are succeeding, they've been at it a really long time. They contacted us when I was on a non-profit board that ran an event a few years ago, and it was obvious that it was a great idea that we had no way of implementing. Now that everyone has a phone with them all the time, they're past that barrier.

I hope that they get great success.

This is a terrible idea, and it makes me sad that it is having any success at all, limited though it may be.

Yep, agreed. I might think a little better of it if it were entirely open (or anything other than some weird idea someone had for a way to make a few dollars) but I still have trouble trying to come up with reasons why this might be a good idea.

It's not obvious to me how this is a good thing at all. Can you explain your reasoning?

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