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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Clever, but not very practical. Addressing and city/state/country names are very well ingrained into our culture and have real-world meaning. We can understand the general location of an address just by reading it. w3w takes all context out of location names, and forces you to map it with a tool. I don't see how that will improve anything.

As you can purchase a one word name for a specific location, this really just looks to me like someone trying to quickly make a buck with a clever idea, similar to the "milion dollar homepage".

If they did have a more meaningful intent, it is not communicated well enough for me to have received the message.

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You're commenting from the perspective of someone who comes from a culture with addresses. Most of the world doesn't have addresses.

Try to go to a meeting in India. It typically involves three or four phone calls to find the place.

You really think most people live at locations without addressing systems? How can we even prove that?

The only locations I'm aware of that that is true are: very poor parts of Asia, Africa, India, and maybe some of the favelas of Brazil.

With essentially all of North America, South America, Europe, and much of China, along with all of Japan, Australia, being covered by an addressing system.

I'd wager 2/3 of all people live in a location with normal addresses.

It's the other way round - "two thirds of the world’s population is without a postal address,” Charles Prescott, Executive Director at the Global Address Data Association

50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, [address verification] may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’- UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION

“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank

That's around 4 Billion people without an address.

There's a world of difference between "an addressing system" and one that is effective.

Try to go anywhere in India by using the address. You will find it challenging.

As a substitute for:

  10 Downing Street
  London, UK

... I see your point. However, as a substitute for:

  Latitude: 51.503363
  Longitude: -0.127625

... I would argue that "slurs.this.shark" is a significant improvement. (plus it's mildly entertaining!)

This is more accurate than old school addresses. 3x3 is interesting as its the space a single person would stand in. So for instance in delivering a pizza, I'm in the back/front yard - this is better.

I always felt just stringing together latlong works, and can already be instantly typed into google maps, etc.. 41.9483,-87.6556

Maybe a DNS like system that translates friendly names to this string of characters eliminating the need to remap the world and replace what latlong already gives us.

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