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Comment by turc1656 | Hacker News Reader

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 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart.

If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related.

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

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!

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.

Just checked that by changing last phrase in Polish, than changing language to English. It doesn't work:

"plomba.rewelacja.oczy" => "exclaim.mainland.engages"

"plomba.rewelacja.fasada" => "dare.lawn.sleepy"

Not necessarily. While Ulaanbaatar does have street numbers and such, they're not well-known and are basically never used when giving out directions/advertising. It's more like: The "yellow building to the right side of the big department store". Official addresses also rarely use street names, it's more like: Flat #5, Apartment #2, Microdistrict #4, Sukhbaatar District.

So in reality everyone just uses Post Office Boxes for mail, who often just call you and say mail's arrived and charge 400 tugrug.

That said, no-one I know has even heard about what3words, aside from those who read the initial press release. And I'm from Mongolia.

Hey, weird ask, but I am going to be visiting Mongolia in 3 months with a small group of online pals. Want to be friends? My email is on my profile!

What Three Words has a couple YouTube videos about Mongol Post's usage of W3W addresses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM3foOLQwS4

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.

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....).

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.

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.

I actually had a virtual mailbox for a while. I don't currently, in part because I am in housing, in part because I'm chronically short of funds.

But maybe I should get one again at some point. Maybe that would help with some of mail/address issues.

I wonder if this will be the future of the USPS Online Mailing thing where you get pictures of your mail...

Just register with an email, things are autoscanned and sent to you with a PGP key you provide.

That would be convenient, but it won't happen.

What you will get is a web application you get to sign into to actually get your mail, and you will receive a notification mail in your regular email inbox stating that you have received mail (but not from whom, or what the subject is, because that is privacy sensitive information), so that you know that you should go and get it yourself via the web application.

This is what every digital 'inbox' that isn't email has done thus far. This is in fact exactly what the Dutch government has done with their digital inbox which is intended to replace physical letters from services like the revenue service and municipalities. Thankfully that monstrosity is optional (for now).

The USPS already offers a service that will scan and email the outside of your mail, so you at least can usually see who it is from.

Number two sounds like DNS for physical locations.

Wait, you can favorite comments on HN? How?

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."

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.

This is why you have space filling curves.

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

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.

Yep. I saw a talk a while back about Uber sharding their caching layer by geohash

Which are great right up until you cross boundaries. IIRC there's a big boundary in Google's S2 that divides Toronto in half.

That’s also a problem when mapping a circle to a straight line. The band Rush sang “you can’t have something for nothing...”

See also this 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.

I wonder if space filling curves are used in the Python GIS stack for radius queries.

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.

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.

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

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/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

I'm not sure why that first plot wouldn't be considered continuous. There's a pretty clear positive correlation, which should be more pronounced with a non-log scale y-axis, and more pronounced as you increase the order of the curve.

I'm confused about the second plot; what order is the curve? It seems weird that there are no points between 10^12 and 10^156.

The second graph has a huge jump because the left side of the area I'm taking points from is a boundary between two very distant parts of the curve. In any space filling curve you will be able to find arbitrarily large jumps like this.

The difference would be more pronounced on a non-log scale, except the huge numbers at the top of the range would squish the graph down so you couldn't see what was going on.

The first graph isn't just not continuous, it's not even 1-1. (I'm ignoring the fact that is also discrete so that any formal sense of 'continuity' can't exist. Even if you tried to make it continuous by filling in the gaps it would be impossible.)

Unfortunately I think we're talking past each other and this is not the best format for technical discussion.

Agree with your main issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code solves this quite nicely, and also the OP's issue of W3W being non-free.

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.

> 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 ?

The NATO alphabet was built to solve nearly exactly this problem. It's quite verbose (by design).

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.

> 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?

"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.

> 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.

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

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.

"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.

> 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.

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?!"

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.

Mercedes seems to be using it: https://what3words.com/2019/02/all-you-need-to-know-about-me...

That is a good idea, but after thinking about it for a bit I think it would be a very hard thing to create.

Exactly my thoughts. The whole concept is just so insanely useless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

This exact use-case is debunked in article linked.

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-...

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

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...

Every internet capable device has GPS, iploc, or both. This is just adding an extra step to the process that requires a bunch of button pushes and lip flapping.

Or in other words, if someone on a 911 call has time to open their text message app, click a link, wait for a page to load, find the important text, and read it aloud, then they have time to open their text message app and hit the "send my coordinates" button.

How about creating an app for emergency calls, which will automatically send your location?

Finland has done it, see https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.digia.suomi...

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