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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#321

Post by boomlinde »

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.

In this case it's not looking to your neighbor to derive credibility, it's to derive utility.

I mean, if I buy a hammer, I couldn't care less whether anyone else uses it. Its utility is entirely decoupled from the amount of users. In this case, you're not buying into a hammer, because utility is dependent on the number of users. If "//cat.dog.goose" means nothing to anyone around me, I can't use it to communicate a location to anyone around me.

Maybe it shouldn't just be taken as "the darkest most evil sentiment" but as the general reaction consumers will have to products or services where utility is a function of adoption. With any luck, some few people will insist on using it and kickstart more widespread adoption, but that's just it: luck.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#322

Post by boomlinde »

7952 wrote: post #251
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…

The problem with those kind of numbers is that they are easy to get wrong by a couple of digits. Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone. And guessing distances seems like a pretty unusual thing to do. Especially as latitude/longitude is a terrible system for that anyway. Small distances are very small numbers and hard to think about. It is possible to make a spelling mistake in what three…

> The problem with those kind of numbers is that they are easy to get wrong by a couple of digits. Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone.

This already presupposes that the parties involved in the communication are using smartphones, so why not send the coordinates over SMS, email or any other available messaging system?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#323

Post by fundingshovel »

interestica wrote: post #255
nfg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact use-case is debunked in article linked.

No, the writer's misunderstanding of that use case is explained in the comments. Emergency services don't have sms/mms service. The W3W service would presumably use SMS to get location. (phone sends lat/long coords via sms, gets 3 word response). SMS tends to be more reliable than a data connection in areas with a poor connection (remote, or interference). This is doable right now - having some sort of data-to-emerge…

Why not just build an SMS gateway for emergency services with GPS coordinates and call it a day? It seems like the important bit is the gateway, not the 3 word response

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#324

Post by boomlinde »

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?

While they're not conceptually hierarchical, it's not fair to say that they are opaque strings either. "////" is not a valid HTTP 1.1 path, for example, and "" means "/"

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#325

Post by coryfklein »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #197
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…

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…

Wait, you can favorite comments on HN? How?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#326

Post by ltbarcly3 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #316
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

I took a 256 square hilbert curve and took random points in it (discarding points where the euclidian distance was > 8).

Here is the plot: https://gist.github.com/justinvanwinkle/22a15bb33536095b05dc...

Notice the Log y axis. I don't you think you could consider this even roughly continuous. This is only even bounded because I only took points within the 256x256 grid, if I let it run over say a 1000x1000 grid the hilbert distances wouldn't plot well even on a log plot.

The second plot I took any random point within euclidian distance 8 from a random first point, and didn't restrict it to stay in the same 256x256 grid. 10k points total. Even at distance 1, you get hilbert distances like:

4469269309980865699858008332735282042493121940197464459241187147907254676691182325600624766055634475896677286062162016951251294270648856648811216335320387

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#327

Post by DoreenMichele »

coryfklein wrote: post #325
DoreenMichele wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…

Wait, you can favorite comments on HN? How?

Click on the timestamp of the comment. It will give you additional options, including "favorite."

Upvotes will privately bookmark things you like. Favorites are public.

I use them occasionally to actually have some hope of finding something again. But if you don't want people to know, then don't use "favorite."

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#328

Post by thanatropism »

Pamar wrote: post #296
thanatropism wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you have space filling curves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve With that you can have a linear ordering of space at each scale. Rounding errors become rounding errors. I remember seeing an implementation of that on npm or some such thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

See also this http://www.drdobbs.com/database/space-filling-curves-in-geos... (Dr.Dobbs Journal, 1999). It explains how to easily search for "points no more than X km from Y" in a DB query without having to actually calculate distances.

I wonder if space filling curves are used in the Python GIS stack for radius queries.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#329

Post by mchannon »

pojzon wrote: post #60
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…

Would you mind to share a github or its still private wip ?

github.com/mchannon/hashsite

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#330

Post by aagha »

I've always thought that one of the ways to stop such stupid ideas/companies is to follow the money and potentially black-list the VC's that are helping to propagate a bad idea.

Digging into this on Crunchbase, it turns out that some of the funders behind W3W are HUGE names[0,1]:

* Intel

* Daimler

* Sony

To me, this lends credence to the idea that many investors are either just in it for the money--despite what their mission statements say, or just plane stupid.

0 - https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/... 1 - https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...

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