Why Bother with What Three Words? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#221

Post by eruci » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

feb wrote: post #194

eruci wrote: post #21

I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org. The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA . The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.

A few weeks ago, I hoped 3geonames could become a standard. But it has some painful limitations: The system picks very unusual names. For example STOCARDA-KRRABA-SIPLA is in Germany, but doesn't use the German name of the city. (For those wondering, Stocarda means Stuttgart in Venetian according to Wikipedia.) That makes it harder to use for locals and can hurt the feelings of people in some regions. Also using citie…

A new version will address the issue of local names. It will also solve the problem of crossing national boundaries via the integration of OSM admin{} polygons. And add support for elevation up to +-18000 meters.

The documentation is quite sparse, I agree. I hope to find some time to deal with that also.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#222

Post by doctorRetro » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

So W3W is effectively domains for lat/lon and/or street addresses. This feels like an idea trying desperately to justify it's existence. Or to paraphrase, the answer to a question no one asked. Reviewing the critiques of this concept only seem to reinforce that.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#223

Post by glonq » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

hartator wrote: post #155

To be fair, I haven’t heard about W3W until this post.

Ditto, and I've worked with GIS for over a decade.

Heard of plus codes, though. Which is definitely what I'll use if/when I need something more human-friendly than lat&lon.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#224

Post by jnaddef » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #191

jnaddef wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a form of "foot in the door" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique . If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.

Not a marketing person, but there also has to be value in the lowest possible bar to begin participating, and then a higher one later to increase engagement with public price menus. "Call now for sales pitch" is not that: it means secret deals and whatever they can haggle out of you. Look, even this dinosaur got it right: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-manage...

You are absolutely right, there is actually a whole panel of different techniques that aim at getting you accept offers you would not accept straight on.

I believe as a consumer it is important to be aware of those different manipulation techniques so you can step back and take a rational decision.

For example in case of call for sale, it should trigger an alarm telling you to walk away. If you have a high interest in the product and want to call anyway, make sure to know what price you are willing to pay BEFORE calling and do not commit to anything during the call.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#225

Post by mdonahoe » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

turc1656 wrote: post #195

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…

"If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period..."

I think it is interesting that you say that, because I see this system as DNS system on top of IP.

So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name.

Which begs the question: would a better system involve letting people pay to register names that point to latlongs? There is a free tier that are an open-source list of names for the entire globe, but companies could pay to have names like "free.tacos.here" point to their locations.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#226

Post by mirimir » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #219

mirimir wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF? "captain.water.water" => ~90 minutes from Louisville, Kentucky "captains.water.water" => island in the North Atlantic That's crazy. I mean, " . .water" should be a contiguous area. With "*.water.water" a contiguous part of it.

The non-proximity of W3W locations with similar identifiers is intentional; it's meant as an easy way to perform error checking. The concept is that you state your location, and if you state it wrong, or the other person gets it wrong, the mistake will be obvious because the small change to the identifier results in a location extremely distant from you. The system pretty explicitly considers all squares equal, witho…

OK, I see that.

But (and maybe I'm just too cynical) the huge benefit for W3W is that it's much harder to reverse engineer the identifier-assignment code. So only W3W can generate valid identifiers.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#227

Post by TimTheTinker » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

I work for Esri, a pretty large GIS company. From where I sit, I think W3W's idea could be implemented better in less than a week, and then plugged into existing GIS workflows as needed.

I suspect some large company or consortium like OGC will eventually build something similar using a geographic coordinate system like WGS84 instead of Mercator, and release it as an open database (perhaps with an open API and an open-source reference implementation). At that point W3W would only continue operating because of vendor lock-in to their proprietary named grid cell database.

(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#228

Post by glonq » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

Anderkent wrote: post #91

IshKebab wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps now includes plus codes which are open so I don't think W3W stands a chance anyway. Not should they. It's an idea you can implement in half an hour. It doesn't need to be a commercial business.

I'd still rather remember/type/say three words than something like 5P56+4Q. I'm really surprised that no one thinks pronounciability has value.

Words do have value, but what W3W takes away from you (money!) has more value.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#229

Post by romwell » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

mchannon wrote: post #220

romwell wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR: see [3] for an overview of how plus codes work. ----------------- >Plus Codes have little application outside building addressing. This claim needs some arguing. >If I tell you I'm at 4CFM+JW, come get me, you're going to be pretty helpless, because I didn't include the city. So why would you tell me that? Either include the city, or use a longer plus code that includes the city . Example from the spec[1]: >>N…

>So why would you tell me that? Either include the city, or use a longer plus code that includes the city. Or I could just use a system that doesn't have that drawback. Plus codes aren't awful. I just find room for improvement. > This is by design; some symbols were omitted to avoid having words in codes (which, as TFA discusses, can be problematic, e.g. some places might not be happy with codes that have EVIL in the…

>Or I could just use a system that doesn't have that drawback.

Which drawback? All systems have the drawback that if you don't say the entire address, you don't get the entire address.

>So what you're saying is only an open source..

I was not talking about that (for that matter, plus codes are free/open source). I was just explaining why you ran into this problem: "4CFM+JX works, but 4CFM+JY?". It wasn't obvious to me why "Y" is not a valid plus-code character either until I read the spec.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#230

Post by glonq » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

reallydude wrote: post #150

asow92 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure downvote me for asking you to be accountable for your dispositions.

> .@what3words is bad technical idea > ethically terrible too. I don't understand how someone would hold this tweet up as anything but an echo of their own opinion. There's nothing technically or ethically wrong with the product, despite a few pages of rambling about what they think is right or wrong, morally.

It could have easily been designed to work both offline or online. But it only works online. That's a bad technical idea.

And "open washing" is ethically terrible. So is patenting an idea that takes a weekend to code. So is pushing an unnecessarily expensive system onto vulnerable third-world countries that need a solution to their addressing/geolookup problems.

So yeah. Terrible.