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Comment by daleharvey | Hacker News Reader

A location near me

geohash: gcuvz30z w3w: drift.march.donor

I had to switch tabs 3 times to copy across the geohash since the page I found it on wouldnt let me copy and paste, I remembered the w3w immediately.

I am 100% against something like a global addressing standard being owned by a single company, however the amount of people ignoring w3w's extremely obvious utility and pointing to pluscodes, geohashing, grid references, geocoords etc is pretty tiring.

We have a standards body for emojis, cant we just agree on an open w3w implementation.

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Nelson is right. A bunch of us have played around with designing our own human friendly geohash scheme.

If you divide earth up into 4m x 4m cells using something like the S2 projection, you can uniquely address these using phrases of 3 words drawn from a database just under 32,000 words. The S2 projection ensures that the words in the higher levels of the hierarchy will change quite slowly. In most local contexts there will be only a single commonly repeated word. In a small number of more exceptional points there'd be just 2 or 3 unique values in use. So in practice you could use longer addresses and a smaller dictionary if you liked. This is probably a good idea for ergonomic reasons, as we can pick a set of words that are readily translated between languages, weed out any that are overly similar, etc.

I never uploaded the code anywhere, and it's on a laptop that died, but I busted out a toy version of the above in an afternoon a couple years ago just for fun. I used 4 word addresses and a database of about 2,500 of the most common english words.

W3W's entire value proposition is that they should earn a global rent off the use of addresses vs the above. It's absurd. And they intentionally avoid hierarchical organization of the addresses specifically to make it necessary to use their app/service to look crap up, which makes their service hilariously worse than the scheme described above.

With an S2 style hierarchy people will intuitively begin to recognize the common words in their living area at each level, and can use them in conversation without even consulting software. This is completely impossible with W3W's scheme.

The problem isn't figuring out a good scheme. Most of the people on this forum can manage that in a couple hours. The problem is the same with all other standardization efforts: getting a critical mass of people who give enough of a crap to use the standard.

This is an area where Google could ship something in maps and it'd have a decent chance of adoption outside of it. If you work on maps consider pitching a more ergonomic version of plus codes.

> I remembered the w3w immediately.

But in what situation is this useful? How is it more convenient or useful than a regular address? Even if you’re somewhere where there are no addresses, and you need to describe a location that has no other descriptive characteristics, isn’t it a lot easier to just drop a pin/bookmark on the map in your smartphone? Especially considering you can’t reasonably run the algorithm without a digital device of some kind.

But in what situation is this useful?

On the phone? There's a bit I don't like about W3W, but efficiency of communication is their killer feature.

Classic example is emergency services.

Having the ability to turn your location into three words that will easily survive communication over a phone with dodge signal is very useful.

You could argue that that lat/lon or a street address should be fine. But memorising a two sequences of numbers, then repeating them accurately over a poor phone line is hard.

Street addresses are also hard, there’s frequently not a nearby road sign, or worse, the road name is ambiguous (your city may have multiple streets with the same name). Hell there’s no guarantee that the emergency services even have your street name in their database if it’s a new street, or it’s name was changed recently.

So basically any scenario where you need to transmit a location accurately between two parties who are operating two different mapping systems, and communicating over an unreliable comms link (phone, radio etc), is a good use case for W3W. W3W is like the phonetic alphabet for locations.

Personally I hate the fact the W3W are extracting rents from this services. But I can’t deny the utility of their service.

That’s honestly incredibly far-fetched. I need to have a GPS and a device that is able to do the conversion from lat/long to words. Given that prerequisite there are about a dozen better ways to solve the issue. Both me and the emergency services in the area need to know what these word codes are, or we’re spending time explaining that in an emergency situation. The ability to use it offline is nice but assumes that I prepared for that ahead of time.

Not to mention that a 40000 word word list has a lot more room for misremembering and mishearing than spelling out a sequence of digits. If it had used a word list that was designed to be easily recognized by sound, had no plurals etc, that would have been a different thing.

Also, emergency services are local, but this system wastes bandwidth on being able to describe any location in the world.

> Not to mention that a 40000 word word list has a lot more room for misremembering and mishearing than spelling out a sequence of digits. If it had used a word list that was designed to be easily recognized by sound, had no plurals etc, that would have been a different thing.

Not only that, the word list is localised in different languages, and those are untranslatable as each locale uses a different coefficient table.

Transferring the location from one place to another

So aside from the fact that my address has around a 50/50 success rate with people trying to find it (My address is a building + street name that has a mirror building + street name across the other side of a motorway)

Transferring the address, the obvious example people give is emergency services but this applies to so many situations, I volunteer with a litter picking group and they have found w3w extremely useful to communicate locations, you "can" transfer a pin but you need those devices set up to do a transfer already, with w3w I can check the website for the location on my way out the door and enter it to my map on the way, people who arent setup as contacts can transfer it without having to trade phone numbers etc.

Its hard to understand how someone could not find a way to easily memorize and communicate a specific location a very useful thing?

Which is absolutely fine in a non-critical scenario such as picking litter, or finding your mates at a festival. But, as the article demonstrates in detail, there are too many possibilities for error, which in a life or death scenario we cannot afford. Emergency services often deal with exactly that kind of scenario.

It makes sense more in some countries than others.

In Japan, for e.g. there are no street numbers.

In the U.K. we have postal codes that generally refer to a street. But they sometimes can be only a portion of a street, sometimes they’re a building, sometimes they’re a large business who might be across multiple sites. At other times (usually rural) they’re very very long roads, so sticking the address into a Sat Nav takes you to that road but not the point on the road that you want to travel to. Because the system is so mixed, 99/100 nthe address is absolutely fine, but occasionally it isn’t. I agree dropping a pin is more useful though.

Ireland had no postal codes at all until recently.

Japan has a perfectly functioning addressing system that works more or less like street numbers. It seems complex to outsiders, sure, but somehow this advanced country seems to get along just fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

Postal codes aren't addresses in most places; they're an overlay system on top of addresses to make it easier for the post office to route mail. They're great! And there's absolutely no reason why a country should pay eternal rent to What3Words to use their proprietary code system when they can develop their own.

> cant we just agree on an open w3w implementation.

They don't want that to happen, at least not an open source implementation. They want to be in the position of Pantone and colour.

Why 3 words? Why not 4?

Because it is enough to provide sufficient accuracy.

Why not 4 words and a smaller, less error-prone word list?

Only with a ridiculously long word list containing plurals and words people can't spell.

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