This is a repost of something that was posted today already : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702995
What3words: The app that can save your life
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#22Whether this article is a puff piece, i think is less important (though it sure seems it to me). The important aspect here is that for some people GPS is failing them; and to me it's an UI/UX problem. For example...Why do developers use text names for variables in their programs, and why don't they just use binary - which are clearly more precise? If this is in fact a proprietary thing, then I really dislike that. If…
Nearby locations have radically different 3 words - thus it is useless for distances and small typos can lead to arbitrarily large errors.
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're in the UK, moving the area by hundreds of miles would be obviously detectable. If you said to the operator "I don't know where I am, somewhere in the New Forest" and then you gave them a long/lat in Newcastle, they'd know to check again. Given that phone towers connect emergency calls to local dispatchers, even saying roughly where you are isn't necessary. Long-lat are highly effective precisely because alm…
And if you're in many places globally, particularly the backwoods, you could displace or misread a digit, point out a location well away from your position, and still be pointing at "a forest". Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes. Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I sa…
> Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.
You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a 5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight problems.
Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not proprietary and harder to mess up.
> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission.
This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#24If you're looking for a compact addressing system, have a look at the Google-developed, openly-available plus codes. https://plus.codes/
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#25Whether this article is a puff piece, i think is less important (though it sure seems it to me). The important aspect here is that for some people GPS is failing them; and to me it's an UI/UX problem. For example...Why do developers use text names for variables in their programs, and why don't they just use binary - which are clearly more precise? If this is in fact a proprietary thing, then I really dislike that. If…
Nearby locations have radically different 3 words - thus it is useless for distances and small typos can lead to arbitrarily large errors.
You mean like if the following GPS location is uttered verbally to, say, a first responder: 40.7485452,-73.9879575 ...you likely would end up in midtown NYC...while if i verbally forget to include the "-"...then i end up in Kyrgyzstan? ;-)
I'm teasing you of course (all in good fun). But you certainly make valid points: what3words isn't perfect...But, i still stand by the point that it's a novel approach, AND that there's an opportunity here (here, i mean an opportunity for the betterment of society, safety, humanity, etc., less about "business opportunity").
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#26If you're looking for a compact addressing system, have a look at the Google-developed, openly-available plus codes. https://plus.codes/
TIL! Thanks for sharing this!
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearby locations have radically different 3 words - thus it is useless for distances and small typos can lead to arbitrarily large errors.
You mean like if the following GPS location is uttered verbally to, say, a first responder: 40.7485452,-73.9879575 ...you likely would end up in midtown NYC...while if i verbally forget to include the "-"...then i end up in Kyrgyzstan? ;-) I'm teasing you of course (all in good fun). But you certainly make valid points: what3words isn't perfect...But, i still stand by the point that it's a novel approach, AND that th…
There are many alternative systems that are open and based on algoritmes. The only downside of those: they do not have massive VC money backing them to do the marketing. But then again, in the end these VCs will need a massive return. Guess who will pay for that ;-)
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearby locations have radically different 3 words - thus it is useless for distances and small typos can lead to arbitrarily large errors.
You mean like if the following GPS location is uttered verbally to, say, a first responder: 40.7485452,-73.9879575 ...you likely would end up in midtown NYC...while if i verbally forget to include the "-"...then i end up in Kyrgyzstan? ;-) I'm teasing you of course (all in good fun). But you certainly make valid points: what3words isn't perfect...But, i still stand by the point that it's a novel approach, AND that th…
nothing wrong with the basic idea of using words, but this implementation serves as a hash to obfuscate locations through a closed standard. One could form a grid per word and make it finer in steps, but then people would understand buffalo is US, banana is NYC, and bogus is midtown, and be able to use the system without the whatthreewords service... thinking about it we do have those words already, US.NYC.midtown would work just fine...
Re: What3words: The app that can save your life
#29This reads exactly like a press release from W3W, the private entity. I'm not clear on why the BBC thought it would be within their rights to publicise it in this way, other than they didn't know they were basically advertising a product (NOT doing so is a cornerstone of the BBC philisophy). It's also entirely unclear to me why the emergency services dispatchers wouldn't just ask a caller to read out their GPS locati…
I'd be interested to know if BBC checked any 999 call handling centres to see if this was common advice.