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Comment by mfontani | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

Sure, there are other concerns here.; the "unhash impossible" being the largest.

Yep, and I didn't make this clear in my previous reply but I think your example would actually prove very useful for specific applications. Just not for the uses I was imagining in my head, I guess... :)

> * if one needs a DATA CONNECTION to find out their current w3w address, they can damn well find the GPS coordinates

Not arguing your other points (in fact, I agree), but if you have the app installed on your phone, you do not need a data connection to find your current w3w address.

It's also a lot easier to remember (and verbally communicate) 3 words than long/latitude. If I'd just legged it down a mountain to tell the police where my injured friends are I'd have a low chance recalling the numbers (assuming I wasn't able to write it down for some reason).

You have some device complex enough to tell you the words, surely it can store them. Same for OLC or any other scheme more complex than Lat/Long (and even then it's not the early 90s anymore).

True. But who knows why I can't store the data in this abnormal emergency situation. Maybe I left the only working device with my friends. It doesn't really matter, 3 English words are still easier to remember and communicate than codes.

I agree with these points, and yet:

"Humberside Police also used the system to find a group of foreign nationals, including a pregnant woman in labour, who were trapped inside a shipping container at a port.

The port had over 20,000 containers and we knew that we needed to get to them quickly," said the force's control room supervisor Paul Redshaw.

The group were told to download the app and they were soon found.

There is no doubt in my mind that these incidents could have had very different outcomes had we not been able to use what3words," Mr Redshaw said."

The emergency services see something very useful here. Is there a better way to do it? Lat/Lon numbers just don't cut it.

If that's an actual story and not PR. What I see: a full-metal enclosure AKA shipping container, and yet a GPS fix is obtained? Pull the other one.

Hell, I struggle to even get a cell signal inside one of those things.

I have a lot of trouble believing that story.

The quote is from a serving member of police staff. Should be easy to verify.

https://twitter.com/redshaw27

There are further cases mentioned in the article from other police forces.

- South Yorkshire Police used it to find a 65-year-old man who became trapped after falling down a railway embankment in Sheffield.

- North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service found a woman who had crashed her car but was unsure where she was.

- Humberside Police were able to quickly resolve a hostage situation after the victim was able to tell officers exactly where she was being held.

If these are all completely made up, and have made it past the BBC, then I'm rather surprised.

EDIT: I think this must be the incident: https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-new...

(The report mentions a substantial search, and in particular commends the actions of good doggo PD Logan: https://twitter.com/HPDogSection/status/1103713458334416896)

These do sound plausible; my issue was with the shipping container aka Faraday cage.

As you say, that article specifically mentions they were found by a police dog! I guess w3w's PR team "forgot" to mention that.

Anyway, all these cases highlight the need for a much better way for emergency services to automatically receive GPS coordinates from calls - not for some wannabe rent-seeking proprietary app.

This exists. https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...

Grid refs do a good job in the UK. Two letters (which can be omitted if you know roughly where you are) and 6 digits get you to a 100m square, 8 digits to 10m and so on. That's the system the police use as the base truth, and any other system - what3words or Lat/Long - will be converted to OS grid refs with some loss of accuracy due to different projection models.

Maps show the grid as an overlay every 1km so the position is easy to read.

* earthquakes shifting you a meter or so are a really big deal, reprinting stationery would be low on the scale of things you're caring about.

* translations so often don't work in a one-to-one fashion, it'd be risky to expect them to do so.

* this is a big deal.

* had you read the article, it specifically explains that you don't need a data connection to determine the address. Also, GPS coordinates are a terrible way to pass locations between humans, numbers are easy to transpose, mess up, forget.

Re translations: Sure. But is the expectation "I'm passing a set of words, of course it doesn't translate", or "I'm passing a location, of course it's the same location regardless of language"? (IDK)

> translations so often don't work in a one-to-one fashion, it'd be risky to expect them to do so.

That's hardly a point in What3Words' favor. They dragged words into it where previously there were only numbers so now they're responsible for finding a solution to the problem of words' cultural specificity. I don't think "our coordinates contain zero information that crosses linguistic boundaries" is a good solution to that problem.

That move "let's have a disparate set of dictionaries that don't map to each other" is especially confusing.

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