Why Bother with What Three Words? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#311

Post by sneak » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 11:30 AM UTC

mchannon wrote: post #53

W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on e…

> "I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:"

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#312

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #300

thaumasiotes wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Minor nitpick: URLs do tend to be used with the larger scope first (i.e. /resource/child/subchild). Domain names are the odd exception.

HTTP paths are not conceptually hierarchical at all; they're opaque strings.

People set them up that way in practice because they prefer thinking that way. Or, I guess, because they want to sort their URLs meaningfully. Does that happen?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#313

Post by mirimir » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 11:53 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #312

tsimionescu wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor nitpick: URLs do tend to be used with the larger scope first (i.e. /resource/child/subchild). Domain names are the odd exception.

HTTP paths are not conceptually hierarchical at all; they're opaque strings. People set them up that way in practice because they prefer thinking that way. Or, I guess, because they want to sort their URLs meaningfully. Does that happen?

That's a fair point. But the fact is that people do tend to set them up as hierarchies.

But maybe you're right that most people don't understand that, given how adversaries exploit stuff like "games.apple.com.foobar.hosting.tw". You wouldn't fall for that if you understood the system.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#314

Post by mirimir » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 11:56 AM UTC

GedByrne wrote: post #292

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.

This is a feature not a bug. If one of the words is slightly wrong, then you want it to be obvious. If the Kentucky emergency operator adds an extra s they will see that it can’t be right. With the contiguous numbering the ambulance would be close, but probably still unable to find you. See page 23 of the patent: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/docs2/pct/WO2014170646/p...

OK. But you need the W3W API to do that. Just by looking at two identifiers, without that, you'd have no clue about where they are.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#315

Post by hannasanarion » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 12:46 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #234

TruffleMuffin wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually has a usage for emergency services. People call and don't know where they are. This app can let the operator send them a text with a link in that they follow and can communicate very effectively the precise location. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912

Every internet capable device has GPS, iploc, or both. This is just adding an extra step to the process that requires a bunch of button pushes and lip flapping.

Or in other words, if someone on a 911 call has time to open their text message app, click a link, wait for a page to load, find the important text, and read it aloud, then they have time to open their text message app and hit the "send my coordinates" button.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#316

Post by kevinventullo » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 12:51 PM UTC

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #278

kevinventullo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematically, I would phrase this by saying that the mapping of physical location to (lat,lon) pair is continuous . Space-filling curves and related things like Google's plus codes are nearly as good, in that (if you squint) they are continuous almost everywhere (everywhere but the boundary of some grid). W3W on the other hand is discontinuous everywhere. I think the advantage of lat/lon boils down to the fact that…

So you have to be careful with the terminology. Space filling curves can be a continuous mapping of the line to the curve itself. However, this does not set up a continuous mapping from the space to the coordinate system, which is also quite important. A tiny change in your coordinate will mean a tiny change in your physical position, but a tiny change in your physical position will almost always mean a quite large (…

Yeah, let me try to be more precise, though maybe it's worth writing down in a more formal setting because comments are awkward. Say we're looking at the Hilbert curve. I claim that for almost all physical positions, a sufficiently small change in position yields a correspondingly small change in coordinate.

In the purely mathematical sense, this means something like "continuous except at points with at least one rational coordinate".

In the programming sense, where everything must be approximated and you're mapping a 2-d lattice to a 1-d lattice, then it's a bit tricky to formulate, but something like: if you take the maximum distance in 1-d space between a 2-d point and its eight "neighbors", then the probability of this distance being > N should be O(1/sqrt(N)). Concretely,

P(point has an adjacent point whose Hilbert coordinate disagrees past the highest n bits) == P(d > 4^n) < 4*(1/2)^n

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#317

Post by austincheney » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 1:02 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…

> Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?

That is the darkest most evil sentiment to any product manager. It basically says a person cannot form an independent opinion and looks to their neighbor to derive credibility. If enough people think that way new ideas never enter the market. This is the opposite of merit.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#318

Post by mirimir » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

alexbecker wrote: post #275

mirimir wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name. No, it's not. It's actually more like the opposite. The domain name system is hierarchical, and W3W is clearly (and I gather, intentionally) not. IP addresses are also hierarchical, but the mapping of domain names to them is only somewhat systematic. Really, though, W3W identifiers are most like Tor onion names. Just hashes. Indeed, some have sugges…

For most users, the domain name system is only very nominally hierarchical--every domain name they see is of this form: (www.)?[random-words].com

Really? My wife is ~70, and not all that technical, but she knows (for example) that "maps.google.com" is a Google URL. And she even knows that "mail.google.com.assholes.io" is not a Google URL.

It's just anecdotal, I know. But I find it hard to imagine that most people don't understand URL hierarchies. I mean, people who use computers commonly organize files in folders.

But maybe that's becoming a lost art, as most new users just have mobile devices.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#319

Post by JasonFruit » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 1:50 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #317

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…

> Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? That is the darkest most evil sentiment to any product manager. It basically says a person cannot form an independent opinion and looks to their neighbor to derive credibility. If enough people think that way new ideas never enter the market. This is the opposite of merit.

Maybe a good translation would be, "This is crap! And why are we talking about this crap, since most people haven't heard about it and it's crap?!"

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#320

Post by velcrovan » Fri, Mar 29, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

praptak wrote: post #55

enticeing wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that ringleader.kilt.comedians and since.duplicated.backswing have no relation at all to each other, and don't communicate to the user their spatial relationship. On the other hand, you could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd. EDIT: Also, given a set of lat/long coordinates, regardless of the precision, you could infer their spatial relationship as well.

"you could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd." Don't overestimate that. There are nasty exceptions where the street disappears and continues elsewhere without a significant gap in house numbers, especially in cities with a long history.

That's why an address consists of more than a street name and a number. It includes town, province/state, postal code, and country. When given two actual complete addresses, it is indeed possible to infer relative distance with reasonable accuracy, exceptions notwithstanding. (And I live near St Paul Minnesota!)

Even granting that your “nasty exceptions” comprise fully half of all complete addresses, that would simply mean that a normal addressing scheme is better than W3W 50% of the time and no worse in all other cases.