Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

W3W is a nasty rent-seeking operation. They have invented a flawed solution looking for a problem and are using lots and lots of dubious PR to try and get it mainstream so they can then start charging for the use of their stupid algorithm.

Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses. Their most frequent angle is someone contacting emergency services but somehow can't figure out his location, and W3W comes along and magically saves the day. The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly?

View on HN

While I agree that W3W is a nasty rent-seeking operation, I do think that in broad strokes the location-as-words concept could be useful.

> The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly?

Think about verbal/handwritten transmission and mental/handwritten storage. It's not easy to transcribe "41.022755, -73.913102" or remember it. "medium.axed.hobby" is much easier. Copy/paste doesn't always work well on phones, and doesn't work at all across devices.

There are other open standards such as Plus Codes, but I actually disagree that (what it looks like to me) a hash-based system (which is more or less what W3W is) is better than a numeric system like GPS coordinates.

41, -73 (removed all decimals from your example location) still gives me the general location that it's somewhere in New York. My understanding is that removing a word from W3W completely invalidates it as it's like a hash.

Incomplete GPS coordinates can be augmented by other information. W3W doesn't look like it can, if your phone cuts out before you said the last word of your W3W to the emergency dispatcher you're screwed. If your phone cuts out before you said the last few decimals of the GPS coordinates the dispatcher still has a chance of finding you.

The purpose of W3W not having nearby locations have similar words is because of transmission errors. They're pushing it in the UK at the moment having got several emergency services on board, and in that context if you say to, say, Norfolk Police call handlers that you're at bamboo cheese elephant and that shows up as somewhere in the middle of the Pacific they know they got a transmission error pretty much instantly and can ask for clarification. Although it'd be nice maybe to have soundalike tools in the search so it can say "hang on maybe they meant this place".

Two conflicting needs really - as it stands, W3W is incredibly good for simple transmission by voice, but it's awful for giving you clues to geographic proximity.

I have to say, I don't think W3W is actually that great for simple transmission by voice. It doesn't seem like they've put in any effort at all to avoid similar-sounding words. I did a few searches on the word list and found a bunch of groups with very little effort:

* pace, placed, plates, pays

* blush, plush, brushed, brushes

* crave, craved, chafe, safe

* inks, mink, pink, pinks, kinks, link, wink, winks, think, thinks, blink, brink, blinks, clinks, slinks, rinks, drinks

* yappy, happy, nappy, snappy, sappy, strappy, scrappy

I kind of just stopped searching for each of these groups, I'm sure there's more for each one.

If I can find sound-alikes this easily, just by probability there are going to be similar-sounding adjacent locations.

I'm also not convinced that geographic proximity versus transmission accuracy is a tradeoff we need to make.

One very simple solution would be to add an error-checking word, which is essentially a fast-hash of the first three words. I'm not convinced given what we know about memory with regard to numbers, that three words is somehow the ideal number--storing four words in short- or long-term is not noticeably harder to me.

I wrote a short Python script which cross-references the W3W word list with a homophones list[1], and found this:

    census,senses
    choral,coral
    clairvoyance,clairvoyants
    collard,collared
    confectionary,confectionery
    disburse,disperse
    epic,epoch
    equivalence,equivalents
    hurdle,hurtle
    incidence,incidents
    incite,insight
    incompetence,incompetents
    independence,independents
    innocence,innocents
    instance,instants
    intense,intents
    lightening,lightning
    ordinance,ordnance
    overdo,overdue
    parse,pass
    pokey,poky
    precedence,precedents,presidents
    purest,purist
    recede,reseed
    sari,sorry
    senses,census
    variance,variants
    verses,versus

Those aren't sound-alikes, they're straight-up homophones. If we cross-referenced against a list which contained sound-alikes, I'm sure we'd end up with a much larger list of collisions.

EDIT: This is the script:

    with open('word_data.txt') as f:
        words = set(l.strip() for l in f.readlines())

    with open('homophones.txt') as f:
        for l in f.readlines():
            l = l.strip()
            homophone_group = (h.strip('*') for h in l.split())
            filtered_homophone_group = tuple(h for h in homophone_group if h in words)
            if len(filtered_homophone_group) > 1:
                print(','.join(filtered_homophone_group))

The `strip('*')` bit is needed because my copy/paste into homophones.txt pulled in some asterices(sp?) and I didn't want to go through and fix them manually.

[1] http://homophonelist.com/homophones-list/

> 41, -73 (removed all decimals from your example location) still gives me the general location that it's somewhere in New York.

I think it would be hard to overstate how useless this data is rounded that far. 41.022755, -73.913102 is almost a two hour drive away from 41, -73 according to Google Maps, and that "drive" starts with you swimming a tenth of a mile to shore. Even if you round better (round -73.913102 to -74) we're talking about a 6.9 mile drive that will take 15 minutes. With different examples (anywhere which is close to _.5 for both coordinates, i.e. -73.5, 41.5) the distances are going to be even larger.

Rounded to two decimal points, you're at a point where the accuracy is probably good enough for most purposes, but now you're looking at 41.02, -73.91, which is clearly harder to transmit over the phone than "medium.axed.hobby".

> Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses.

I guess you just described marketing. It's frustrating but if you want to sell to non-niche markets, you need to lower the standards to make it work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com