Why Bother with What Three Words? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#61

Post by afiori » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 2:58 PM 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…

> My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes.

> With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.

Topologically speaking, I am intrigued :)

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#62

Post by mchannon » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

estomagordo wrote: post #58

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…

So your solution won't result in "coordinates" easily memorized by humans or easily translated to the very vast majority of map implementations?

Not sure how you got that from what I typed.

The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize.

What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#63

Post by Angostura » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

adambyrtek wrote: post #45

I inherited a property management system where previous developers used what3words for storing location of homes (since reverse geocoding based on address is not reliable in some countries we support). However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world.…

I imagine that a single digit typo in latitude could also result in a valid location on the other side of the world

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#64

Post by eruci » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #56

eruci wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I've built one of them. https://3geonames.org . Open source. Works offline. No database is needed. Based on geonames.org. I also know of at least 2 other open source alternatives (what3ducks and what3fucks).

It's weird that I'd never heard of this before, but there seems to be a vibrant community of parodies.

I think it is an important problem since it has gotten the attention that it has.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#65

Post by jccalhoun » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

Mostly off topic: I would like a URL shortener that uses a similar system so that instead of giving me small.url/b3DmQ it would be small.url/MouseHatDoor because I will sometimes share a link with my students and there is always one student who can't get it to work because they type it wrong or something. I can send them the link through a course announcement but it is more convenient to put a short url on screen and have them go there.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#66

Post by mirimir » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

NikkiA wrote: post #20

mirimir wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time believing that W3W isn't an early April Fools joke. I mean, seriously? And why three words? You only need two, unless you're coding altitude. And damn, you already have two numbers (angles) with arbitrary precision. And how does one calculate great-circle distances using their silly words?

The 3 words are because 2 words doesn't give you enough bits of enumerated data. The words aren't to be thought of as X,Y,Z, they're just 3 blobs of bits, where each word represents something like a 0-200,000 range or something.

Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#67

Post by EGreg » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:10 PM 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…

Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com

We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#68

Post by mathnmusic » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

velcrovan wrote: post #7

There is another big problem with W3W that Terence doesn’t mention: it isn’t scalar. From another W3W-criticism blog post ( https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html ): “An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination with its location on the earth is only one of these chores. “If you have a powerful computer in y…

How does Google's Plus codes fair in comparison with W3W? It's apparently open-source: https://plus.codes/developers

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#69

Post by screentearer » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

This strategy of for-profit companies masquerading as open-source advocates is really common in science as well.

For instance, based on advertising from the ACS (American Chemical Society, the largest scientific organization in the world by membership), you would expect they are advocates of collaboration among chemists. In reality they will sue anyone that tries to store or distribute their standard for chemical identifier numbers (CAS#).

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#70

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #47

jillesvangurp wrote: post #25

W3w was a pretty nice idea and I know some people that have been involved with the company. However, it is indeed not open. It's also VC funded which means that openness is incompatible with making money for them. Which means that most of its potential is lost or off limits unless you are a paying customer. They have a few of those and have had some success doing deals with postal services in countries that lack form…

>(though more efficient ways of doing that are available) Would you mind expanding on that? This topic piqued my interest because I've recently found myself using Geohashes to lookup nearby objects and I'm wondering if there's something better that I should be doing.

lucene used to have a geohash backed way of doing location search. They since switched to quadtrees that are binary encoded and added adding custom encoders to lucene for supporting this in recent versions.

I actually implemented search using simple geohashes indexed as terms back in the day. It works but this is way better.