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Comment by jjbinx007 | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea is pretty good but the execution is terrible.

We had a tyre blow out on a motorway in Scotland and I had to try to describe to the breakdown company where we were. I knew the name of the motorway by looking at Google maps but the area around us was utterly featureless and there were no nearby landmarks I could use to describe our location more accurately.

I had the W3W app so tried to tell them the location using that but unfortunately the wind and traffic noise made it nearly impossible for them to understand the words clearly enough and then I realised they didn't have the app at their end anyway.

The best way to sort out the problems with W3W is for a better system to replace it. That system needs to be open and widely adopted - it's crazy I can't send my location easily to someone without asking what apps that have on their phone.

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> We had a tyre blow out on a motorway in Scotland

All UK motorways have location signs posted every 500m (coupled with distance marker posts at 100m intervals) that are specifically designed so drivers with breakdowns can report their position...... not to mention the (free) orange SOS landline phones every 1 mile which, if used, will automatically report your position. (a little arrow on the marker post points to the nearest SOS phone; you are never more than half a mile from one).

You had to learn this for your driving test :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_location_sign

EDIT: My mistake, only England has adopted the driver location signs. The rest of the UK makes do with the distance marker post system (and SOS phones if needed).

>You had to learn this for your driving test :-)

I passed my test a decade before they were introduced.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but don’t longitude and latitude already solve this problem? They are extremely accurate, and don’t require a specific app.

Long/lay are indeed accurate, but are cumbersome to communicate verbally. In the parent comment you are responding to, loud wind and other background noise would make accurately transmitting a long string of numbers equally if not more difficult.

Unlike lat/long, which requires precise addressing, words can have an inherent error-correction mechanism built into them, wherein the listener may not hear the entire word, but can piece it together. This admittedly is of less use for W3W where the word sets are random and not related to each other. That said, if you were in receipt of a garbled w3w code, you could theoretically narrow down your search parameters using the parts of it you heard.

That’s maybe giving w3w more benefit of the doubt than deserved, though.

Numbers are also spoken using words, and the words for digits 1-9 have fairly distinct sounds with the possible exception of five and nine. W3w's advantage is more in the small number of words required.

I can't think of many use cases where w3w would be more convenient than an app/protocol for simply transmitting your GPS location to another person. Maybe if you had a GPS connection and mobile signal but no internet connection.

> W3w's advantage is more in the small number of words required

Digits have ten words. If five and nine are confusing, imagine trying to guess if the person meant flower, flour or floor, and guessing according to their accent.

If one to ten is confusing, you can always find 10 or 100 very distinct words to replace digits or pairs of them. You could also press numbers on your phone's keypad, or even send them as morse or binary.

> imagine trying to guess if the person meant flower, flour or floor

I'd hope that w3w's word list is built to avoid this potential confusion, but I could be wrong.

> you can always find 10 or 100 very distinct words to replace digits or pairs of them

True, although if you wanted to spread news by word of mouth of a secret gathering in the woods, then having just three words for the location is easy to remember and transmit.

Beyond those very niche edge cases, I don't really see much point.

The article you are replying to is invalidating those points.

Well lat long is the standard for marine operations and a mayday call uses it. In order to get a marine radio licence you have to demonstrate that you can correctly transmit a mayday. It works OK in noisy conditions because we say it in a standard format that everyone is expecting. E.g “My position is North five four decimal six three one East zero zero six decimal five two niner” this should probably be taught in school, my kids were taught basic CPR in primary school here so I don’t see why this couldn’t be taught this too.

Do you have decimal degrees or degrees minutes second? Did you remember the "-" sign? Is Lat and Lon in the right order?

Thus, geocoding, like MGRS or Plus Code.

Plus Codes works well, and Google Maps tells you the plus code for any location.

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