Ask HN: How hard is creating an app to replace Uber and Lyft? - <AUTHOR> With Uber and Lyft threatening to shut down over California's ruling to classify drivers as employees, how hard would it be to replace the services? Could drivers and supporters create an alternative app to allow them to serve riders without going through the services? Does California have enough entrepreneurs and programmers whom the shutdown would inconvenience enough to make solving it worth their while? <comment><USER2> Having worked for a thriving competitor of those brands, I can tell you that the app was not the major factor of success for the company. Our infra, at the time, was retarded, the code quality was mediocre, and we witnessed major downtimes, fun times. You have to come at the right time (for vc money), organize operations efficiently (recruit drivers + passengers) and make some lobbying to not be banned outright, while managing angriness from drivers, and unhappy clients. This is the hard part. The tech is basic !

<comment><AUTHOR> What you wrote is why I asked not only about programmers but also entrepreneurs -- people to handle relationships and beyond the tech.

Speaking about the right time, Uber and Lyft proposing to leave the market seems like a great time to practice, especially while drivers are hurting from a lockdown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You would need to get drivers, and you would have to follow the law. That would be the hard part.

<comment><USER4> What if it were done in a different way though so that the app is really just an app that doesn't attempt to exert any control over the drivers ? In that case wouldn't the drivers really be independent contractors and not employees ?

I always thought that instead of trying to replace taxis someone should have created an app/platform to make them as easy to use as Uber/Lyft.

<comment><USER5> I have seen somewhat successful attempts (in international markets) that used a similar approach. There are still some hard questions: how do you make sure that your clients receive consistent levels of service, what is the plan if a driver breaks the law (if/when something _really_ bad happens, clients typically don't like position "it's not us, we are just the app - blame the driver")

<comment><USER4> The plan is that you don't get involved in any of that. All you do is provide a platform that allows customers and drivers to connect in an efficient way. If clients don't aren't willing to accept that then I guess they don't need rides.

<comment><USER6> I suspect that a large part of the current ridership of these services would be less than thrilled about grabbing a ride from a random stranger without the level of oversight provided by Uber/Lift in terms of payments, safety, and service levels.

<comment><USER4> My objection to your argument is that taxis and other car services existed long before Uber and Lyft, usually with some level of safety supposedly being provided by government licensing requirements for drivers.

The big problem with taxis is that they're inconvenient to use. You either have to take a chance at hailing one or call a switchboard, having no idea in advance of how long it will take to get picked up.

Uber/Lyft's platform largely solved the inconvenience problem, they could have offered it as a service to existing taxi companies/drivers without getting involved in all the regulatory issues.

<comment><USER7> >My objection to your argument is that taxis and other car services existed long before Uber and Lyft, usually with some level of safety supposedly being provided by government licensing requirements for drivers.

And people preferred Uber/Lyft's oversight versus the taxi services that existed before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I mean, the real question would be - what would be the differences you'd want to see between unnamed new app and the existing ones?

That would dictate how hard it is. Anyone can make an app, Market penetration/usage is where the real questions await.

Put another way, what compelling reason could be offered that a.) entices drivers b.) entices endusers c.) technically feasible d.) sustainable

<comment><AUTHOR> > _what compelling reason could be offered that a.) entices drivers b.) > entices endusers c.) technically feasible d.) sustainable_

The big compelling reason seems Uber and Lyft suspending operations while drivers are hurting from a lockdown.

The enticements to drivers and users are the enticements to use Uber and Lyft, now not met.

A further enticement to drivers is to signal to Uber and Lyft that if they try to play hardball too much, they can be replaced. Even starting developing the app and service would create incentives for Uber and Lyft to accept that they have less negotiating power than they think.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, it just seems like an opportunity for drivers and riders to decrease the share going to Uber and Lyft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are a bunch of them, six or more, where I live. YCombinator even backed one of them recently[0], but they were already +200 employees and dominated the market.

I always thought they would sell to Uber. Recently, Careem entered the Algerian market after Uber bought Careem. I always thought the company would sell to Uber/Careem, but they haven't yet. They issued a statement April 1st that they sold to Uber/Careem if I recall correctly.

[0]: [https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/13642](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/13642)

</comment><comment><USER10> I worked for a British taxi company that was developing that kind of app, I developed it. One problem for the company was that their drivers worked for Uber at the same time as them. They were freelancers, not employed by either firm. They had two phones one for receiving jobs from the taxi firm and the Uber one. We had to trust that they weren't doing both at the same time. I think they used Uber to give them work during periods when it was quiet for my firm.

Does this double working happen in the USA?

<comment><USER11> Everytime I have been in the US, the drivers have been working for both Uber and Lyft at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > " _Does California have enough entrepreneurs and programmers whom the > shutdown would inconvenience enough to make solving it worth their while?_ "

Reminds me of a [1] quote from a professor:

"if it takes 6 men 7 days to build a wall. How long will it take 10,000 men to build the same wall? .... the answer is less than 1 second"

[1] [https://youtu.be/2qLuerYx2IA](https://youtu.be/2qLuerYx2IA)

</comment><comment><USER13> Probably not too difficult to make the app itself. To build the network of drivers to make a consistent enough service to attract users(and then more drivers to expand further) is the tricky part. + insurance and regulation, when they started they didn't have to deal with it as much until they did, and by then they had resources to do so.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, good question.

We need anonymous, decentralized cryptocoin-like peer-to-peer service system with crowdsourced rating for every vertical that would allow such system to evolve and prosper outside of this political nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER15> The biggest challenge is obeying the law and might not be the app.

Might be another way to circumvent this would be to masquerade as a delivery service with a free lift.

Not sure if the law covers that part as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the going to a cooperative model is the way to go. It might resemble the taxi companies in some ways

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking like a food co-op instead of a regular store or credit union instead of a bank.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Spreads Like a Virus - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3356098 <comment><USER2> Bitcoin reminds me a lot of monetarism, where the thinking goes to increase the money supply at the same rate as that of productivity: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism)

I'm not a huge believer in monetarism. It pretty much precludes all aspects of monetary policy save growing the money supply to influence the economy. I think Bernanke and the policy of quantitative easing played a crucial role during the 2008 financial crisis, along with TARP and ARRA, and that would not have been possible if the U.S. dollar physically obeyed the properties of Bitcoin.

A thought experiment: how would an economy run solely on a Bitcoin-like currency behave? And how would it respond to business cycles?

<comment><USER3> > A thought experiment: how would an economy run solely on a Bitcoin-like > currency behave? And how would it respond to business cycles?

Terribly.

Bitcoin is by design deflationary, which creates an incentive to maintain currency under the mattress. This is accentuated by the fact that bitcoin can't be used in fractional-reserve-banking.

This means that there is little accumulated capital available to borrow and invest.

It also means that any investment would need higher returns than the expected appreciation of a bitcoin, which might set a very high bar for investments, making raising capital nearly impossible.

Today, in most open economies, nobody controls the supply of money, it is increased and decreased dynamically by the market according to supply and demand and to maintain a certain level of risk on the banking system (with some adjustments from the central bank).

<comment><USER4> > which creates an incentive to maintain currency under the mattress.

Continuing the thought experiment, consider what goods and services people _would_ continue to spend money on, in spite of the expected increase in the value of money.

> Today, in most open economies, nobody controls the supply of money, ...

With all due respect, this is demonstrably false. The Federal Reserve and its member banks control the supply of money.

<comment><USER5> "Continuing the thought experiment, consider what goods and services people would continue to spend money on, in spite of the expected increase in the value of money."

I love this comment. Everyone just blindly says "People will put money in their mattress. Economy will go down" and then it's case closed.. but then what happens next? They just won't buy food? water? won't go to the mall? They just stay at home and hunker down? They won't even be watching entertainment since they won't be paying for a Netflix subscription too, apparently.

<comment><USER6> The proposition is not that people won't _spend_ money. The proposition is that they won't _invest_ the money that they're not spending. Keeping money under the mattress is not competing against groceries and Netflix, it's competing against government bonds and/or interest-bearing bank accounts.

<comment><USER7> If people sudddenly hoard money, they're essentially reducing the supply of money, which means the value of money will go up (as there's less of it), effectively acting as a transfer of purchasing power to the people who are actually spending it at that time. Imagine for instance I do something that generates a lot of value (money), then burn that money (or hide it under my mattress 'til I die of old age). This essentially means I gave "value" to society for free, as I created "value" but did not consume any "value" in return, leaving that "value" I could have consumed with my money to be consumed by others.

<comment><USER3> Nope, the problem isn't people hoarding money, the problem is doing so outside of a banking system, where such money is put to work in investments.

If the economy is growing in the long term and the supply of money is constant, the value of money (vs. goods) will always increase, and everyone has an incentive to hold currency instead of investing in the economy.

The result is that you can't raise capital for a startup or for an infrastructure project.

<comment><USER8> This is not responding to GP's argument: the point is that "hoarders" implicitly provide capital for others by reducing the circulating supply.

<comment><USER3> Driving deflation isn't providing value.

The claim isn't even wrong, it doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER7> To earn money, somebody has to have created value (people are paid for creating value). Spending money is consuming value. Imagine there is $100 worth of total value in existence. Somebody creates $5 of value, they're paid $5, and total value existing is now $105. They could immediately consume or invest this $5 of value, leaving society with $100 of value, and if they invested some productively then they'd have increased the rate at which society's able to generate value in future. Or, they could do nothing with that $5, leaving society with $105 of value. How does society access this extra $5 of value? The person who choose to hoard the $5 effectively removes that money from circulation, which decreases the supply of money and hence increases its value. This means the purchasing power of other currency holders is increased. Those who then decide to spend money can consume or invest the $5 of value that was left unused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The price consolidates over long periods of time to establish an equilibrium with demand. The network then shocks the supply side by halving newly created coins every 4 years. The price starts to move and then human nature takes over and runs the price well past previous highs. During this run, new adopters form the base to support the inevitable decline. Repeat until the market learns to price this in. Third time's a charm? We'll find out soon.

</comment><comment><USER10> It looks like the Gompertz function is asymptotic... i wonder about how they fit that model to the price spikes.

Also, stupid question: what's the expected price then, given that the infection nears that asymptote by say, 90%?

<comment><USER11> The study says that the price almost perfectly fits the curve, but they exclude the price spikes in that fit and label those periods as "manipulated price".

This strikes me as a rather strange approach to fitting data. But I'm not a data scientist, and they do give some references to other studies about bitcoin price manipulation to support this.

<comment><USER12> Isn't price manipulation the purpose of Bitcoin? The market is so small that you can actually corner it with very little effort, and since it's Bitcoin there's no one to enforce the rules.

<comment><USER11> No. According to the original author, the purpose of bitcoin is to provide an electronic payment system that does not require trusted third parties. See the introduction section of [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > number of users (proxied as active addresses)

New wallets cost nothing to create and manipulation in this sector is rife.

The assumptions are flawed from the start.

<comment><USER14> Transaction costs are very significant. As soon as a wallet contains money it is save to consider it as real. Distributing your money to multiple wallets as a single owner is very costly and makes no sense.

<comment><USER13> 1\. Tx costs are basically free if you are willing to wait long enough.

2\. Using a new address per Tx is one of the only ways you can preserve anonymity.

3\. Lots of people have more than one wallet.

4\. Manipulators could automate the creation of wallets at essentially no cost.

5\. The minimum value of bitcoin is 1 satoshi which is 0.00000001 BTC or 0.0000398886 USD at current prices.

To put that in perspective you could fund approximately 250 wallets with 1 satoshi each for one penny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see a few problems:

1\. The author claims the lower bound is above 0 because "Bitcoin offers people a money storage and transfer system with two key properties: (i) permissionless access and (ii) decentralized database management." That might be true if Bitcoin were the _only_ technology that offered those features, but it isn't. Cash is the most notable competitor, but there are also dozens of other cryptocurrencies which are drop-in replacements for Bitcoin.

2\. The number of Bitcoin users has a hard cap because the technology is not scalable. It is just plain impossible for a large number of people to use it. This is not like Facebook, where the system is scalable and user growth is determined almost entirely by user interest.

Also, those graphs make me nervous. Fitting a line to a log-(log-square-root) graph using linear regression sounds awfully fishy to me. Would anyone with a better grasp of the statistics care to chime in?

<comment><USER16> > Fitting a line to a log-(log-square-root) graph using linear regression > sounds awfully fishy to me. Would anyone with a better grasp of the > statistics care to chime in?

It's fishy, but depressingly common in Economics. There's an old joke that 'everything on a log-log plot is linear when drawn with a fat magic marker'.

The errors at the top-right of the chart are much larger than the errors on the bottom left: they just don't look that way because of the log scale. They're also systematically biased at the top-left.

If you want to run OLS on a timeseries, you need ergodicity (i.e. the time series forgets its own history) for the regression to be valid. The number of observations also needs to be across a time much larger than the relaxation time of the timeseries. I don't see that here.

The entire thing triggers my spider sense for cranks. It's written in word and uses excel for its plots, the author runs some sort of crypto fund, and the fact that it uses 'square root of time' as a regressor is just bizzarre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of Metcalfe's law for telecommunications networks.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am the author of "Bitcoin Spreads Like a Virus" and "Metcalfe's Law as a Model for Bitcoin's Value." I will be releasing an explanatory video next week (tentatively Wednesday, March 27th.) The video will incorporate an AMA at the end. Send your questions to email@example.com. You can also visit caneislandcrypto.com/learn for more information.

</comment><comment><USER19> Bitcoin was a great experiment... but it arguably failed.

Nobody really ever used it for normal things.

The one attempt at actually attempting to take a first step to fix scaling issues collapsed due to governance issues.

It never worked as a reliable store of value or means of reasonably transferring funds.

Really cool project but it was an experiment. We can still learn from failed experiments to make even better new ones...

<comment><USER20> > it arguably failed.

I wonder how many people called the internet a failure, 10 years in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You can say that everything spreads like a virus(i.e the internet, facebook, Google etc). Bitcoin (like any viral technology) is no exception

<comment><USER22> No, they don't follow the Gompertz sigmoid growth function so it's not the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the analogy with FB might be interesting, but intrinsically inaccurate.

The value people get from FB is related to the value of other people being on the network, but there is an intrinsic value drived from the different use cases on the platform - photos, messaging, likes, fomo and what not. Which has directly been monetized using advertising.

The value you get from other people using Bitcoin is that the price goes up, without any other intrinsic value aside from "Maybe my investment grows" \- in effect following the 'greater fool' theory (Buffett), or the 'castle in the air' theory (Malkiel et al).

<comment><USER24> No! Bitcoin is a _currency_ not a commodity. There is plenty of value in using it on those merits and that value increases the currency proliferates.

<comment><USER23> The "currency" use-case has not proliferated or reached adoption at a scale (by any measure) that would make it a worthy medium of exchange, which fundamentally is the definition of a currency.

<comment><USER24> The paper precisely argues that the proliferation of BTC as a currency is a factor in their assertion about the value.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 impossibilities conquered by science - <AUTHOR> http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn13556&print=true <comment><USER2> This all depends on the definition of "scientifically impossible" - most of these arguments were just the formal equivalent of "zomg thats impossible".

I feel there's a difference between saying "it is impossible to create a thinking machine" and "it is impossible to turn back time" or "it is impossible to create a free energy device". Perhaps even these statements will be proved wrong someday, but at least there is a noticeable difference in that we have a working example of the first statement, but the last would have implications that shift things all the way down to the smallest parts of our theories.

All in all, no discussion of whether the laws of physics permit some technological venture has much utility. The laws of physics are never wrong, whereas naysayers are wrong very often. If some conceivable path to whatever it is we want to do exists, there is no historical reason not to go ahead with it. It doesn't take more than a single counterexample to prove something possible. Perhaps the morale from history lessons such as these is to keep your mouth shut unless acknowledging the possibility of some crazy idea will create big problems for your own work. (A patent worker would have a hard time if all free energy devices were to be given scientific treatment, for instance)</comment>


Coding "Snake" in 4 min 30 sec (no engine or library) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGmXxpIj6vs <comment><USER2> _builds a game quickly using a canvas element in a browser_

        no engine or library

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.</comment>


Interview With a Person Who Changed Careers Without Quitting Her Job - <AUTHOR> http://thebillfold.com/2014/03/interview-with-a-person-who-changed-careers-without-quitting-her-job/

<comment><USER2> Truly inspiring!</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most useful online course you have watched? - <AUTHOR> Fellow Hackers, I am bored and want to learn something new.
Have you watched any interesting/useful online courses recently on Coursera/Udemy/edX/OpenUniversity/others?
It can be free/paid and I am open to any discipline. <comment><USER2> Joel Spolsky did a really good one-hour primer on Excel. If you squirm at the thought of spreadsheet anything, this video is for you [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

<comment><USER3> Just wanted to come back and say thanks for posting this.

I don't think I've ever learnt so many great tips about a program I use quite frequently in this short of a video.

<comment><USER2> I took a course on Excel in high school and was just as shocked as you. It's an excellent, highly informative video. Pass it on!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a really excellent course on starting a startup, from Sam Altman (President of YCombinator).

[http://startupclass.samaltman.com/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/)

It was delivered as a live lecture at Stanford, with presentations by Sam Altman himself, as well as Dustin Moskovitz, Paul Graham, Adora Cheung, Peter Thiel, Alex Schultz, Kevin Hale, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Parker Conrad, Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin, Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann, Aaron Levie, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Ben Horowitz, Emmett Shear, Hosain Rahman, Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy, and Tyler Bosmeny.

My favorite presenter is Reid Hoffman, but all the lectures are awesome. If you're a startup founder, you owe it to yourself to watch them all...

<comment><USER5> Second this. You can also get this as a podcast, which is just as easy to learn from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoyed the free "CS193P" course from Stanford with Paul Hegarty. It is not 100% up-to-date but still a good start, covering Xcode/iOS8/Swift:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-8-apps- swi...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-8-apps- swift/id961180099)

<comment><USER7> I recommend this course whenever I have the opportunity.

I started iOS programming about a year ago and it really helped me with grasping how to use Auto Layout in XCode, once you learn that the API is easy to pickup if you have some experience in mobile development.

Swift is a pleasure to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gilbert Strang's linear algebra

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c)

Walter Lewin's Classical Mechanics

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo28HOrhipc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo28HOrhipc)

for the content _and_ the delivery

</comment><comment><USER9> CS50 [https://cs50.harvard.edu/](https://cs50.harvard.edu/)

David Malan in the best lecturer I've ever seen.

Introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming. This course teaches students how to think algorithmically and solve problems efficiently. Topics include abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. Languages include C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML. Problem sets inspired by real-world domains of biology, cryptography, finance, forensics, and gaming. Designed for concentrators and non-concentrators alike, with or without prior programming experience

<comment><USER10> +1.

This was my introduction to CS/programming and is the counterexample to any claim that C makes for a terrible first language. It just needs a phenomenal lecturer.

The computing environment gets you going with Linux which avoids IDE handholding and the recitations and other helpful videos and the forums all make for a great learning experience, even for people are complete programming neophytes.

Following it up with something like Coursera's Hardware/Software Interface would be a great way of cementing the concepts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I enjoyed Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. Why don't you give it a shot.

<comment><USER12> Yes, came here to say this. While I never completed the course (started OMSCS @ Ga Tech shortly after), it did cement my desire to focus on machine learning in my graduate studies. Highly recommended!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the best javascript video i've ever seen. if you wait they do deals all the time, no need to pay $200 it will go on sale usually around $15-$20

[https://www.udemy.com/understand- javascript/](https://www.udemy.com/understand-javascript/)

<comment><USER14> Just came across this link from the course authors twitter

Javascript: Understanding the Weird Parts - the first 3.5 hours free on Youtube: [https://youtu.be/Bv_5Zv5c-Ts](https://youtu.be/Bv_5Zv5c-Ts)

Also has the entire course at 87% off

[https://www.udemy.com/understand- javascript/?couponCode=YOUT...](https://www.udemy.com/understand- javascript/?couponCode=YOUTUBE19)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> CSE341: Programming Languages by Dan Grossman

[http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse341/13wi/#lectur...](http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse341/13wi/#lectures)

</comment><comment><USER16> Coursera, learning how to learn.

<comment><USER17> +1 for "Learning How to Learn". Helpful for improving study habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These are paid, and not exactly a course but the Destroy All Software screencasts are great, and cover a lot of topics like shell scripting, VIM / EMACS, testing, refactoring etc.

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts)

They're by Gary Bernhardt of Wat fame, which is also worth a watch for its presentation style and amusing content:

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

<comment><USER18> Those are soo good. He has a talent for talking while typing and his style of presentation keeps you intrigued and content so densely packed it'll keep you rewinding saying, 'wait, wat was that?'

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://www.udemy.com/an-entire-mba-in-1-courseaward- winning...](https://www.udemy.com/an-entire-mba-in-1-courseaward-winning- business-school-prof/learn/)

<comment><USER20> udemy has some really questionable business practices

<comment><USER21> go on

<comment><USER22> This may give some insight: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638795)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Coursera/UPenn's Aerial Robotics course ([https://www.coursera.org/learn/robotics- flight](https://www.coursera.org/learn/robotics-flight)) and more broadly the robotics sequence.

I'm taking now for a diversion (just started) and expect to learn a bit about quadrotor mechanics, sensors & control systems.

</comment><comment><USER24> This guy is an amazing C#/.Net trainer as well as object oriented programming concepts. Great for people coming from a Javascript background. [http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/](http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I did Creative Problem Solving through Coursera and had a great time participating in the class projects.

There are some great tools which you can use in your everyday life to think innovative solutions to problems. The exercises were incredible fun as well.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/creative-problem- solving](https://www.coursera.org/learn/creative-problem-solving)

Another course which I highly recommend is Learning How To Learn [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

</comment><comment><USER26> Algorithms by Robert Segdewick and Cloud Computing Concepts on Coursera. First is an essential, second is a really good intro into distributed systems.

</comment><comment><USER27> Introduction to Operations Management Professor Christian Terwiesch brilliantly and understandably explains the math behind "operations".... which explains Lean, Agile, DevOps and everything from running a restaurant to a doctor's office.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton- operations](https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-operations)

</comment><comment><USER28> Robert Sapolsky`s lectures on human behavioral biology.

Fascinating, funny and gives insights into many different topics like cultural differences and nationalism.

[http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA?list=PL150326949691B199](http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA?list=PL150326949691B199)

</comment><comment><USER29> Anything else from Brady Haran is pretty fun and educational. Not exactly in the spirit of pedantry and sit-down-and-take-notes, but really fun and engaging (like all good teachers should be, I say)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile](https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile](https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/sixtysymbols](https://www.youtube.com/user/sixtysymbols)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos](https://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos)

etc...

</comment><comment><USER30> Getting started with GO with Andrew Gerrand. Not only did it teach me the basics of GO but showing his keystrokes demystified vim as well :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KmHtgtEZ1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KmHtgtEZ1s)

</comment><comment><USER12> Artificial Intelligence for Robotics Programming a Robotic Car

Sebastian Thrun (former leader of Google and Stanford's autonomous driving teams that won the DARPA challenge) teaches a class focusing on the basic methods in Artificial Intelligence to support autonomous vehicles, including: probabilistic inference, planning and search, localization, tracking and control, all with a focus on robotics. Programming examples and assignments apply these methods to building self-driving car like experiments.

Free course!

[https://www.udacity.com/course/artificial-intelligence- for-r...](https://www.udacity.com/course/artificial-intelligence-for-robotics --cs373)

</comment><comment><USER31> CS 61c lectures from UC Berkeley. Computer architecture. Ideal if you are good with data structures / algorithms but the machine still feels like magic. It is empowering to understand what the machine is really doing.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl is a good starter course on Rails.

[https://www.railstutorial.org/](https://www.railstutorial.org/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Course on programming in R: [https://www.datacamp.com/courses/intro-to-python- for-data-sc...](https://www.datacamp.com/courses/intro-to-python-for-data- science)</comment>


NYC doctor tests positive for Ebola - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/23/health/new-york-possible-ebola-case/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh boy!</comment>


Ask HN: My education startup idea, tell me why it sucks - <AUTHOR> So I have many ideas and have had many ideas throughout the past week. I thought one way to finally stick to one would be to ask HN and get input on why it sucks in order to understand how to better it.
I have wasted a lot of time reading books that were on top reader lists for business, programming, design, etc. Only to find the same information in another highly rated book rewritten or condensed.
I want people to be able to minimize the amount of books they need to read and to maximize the amount of knowledge they obtain by suggesting books to a user based on what it is they are trying to learn and then giving them a sequence of other books to read in an order to further their knowledge in said subject.
What does HN think of this and are there any similar sites/competitors? <comment><USER2> Book lists on Amazon by those with good domain knowledge might be somewhat similar to this? (or for programming maybe the recommended short reading lists often posted on HN). And I think that was the objective of many of the _any subject_ _Bible_ type books that attempted to be comprehensive / condensed references in a single book.

Just a thought, maybe you tackle the problem instead at the recommendation level - rank books based on an aggregate of recommendation lists, sales rank, etc, to identify 'good' core books for any subject, as well identify those not often recommended that might be too 'fluffy' or what folks consider 'core' recommendations for a subject.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see 2 problems with this. One: for many people, books will not be the best (or cheapest) resource. How will your metric rank items like websites, college lectures series, things like Khan, and other non-linear content?

Two: How specific will you make the "goals"? If an example goal is "To be a doctor"...the route there is immense and incalculable. If you do something like "brain surgeon"...there are many subgoals even to that specific profession.

OK, three: i don't think you have the expertise to say that there's one best set of books or learning material. everyone learns differently. That's part of the reason why you found so many books in the first place

</comment><comment><USER4> My question to is... how will this be monetized?

You aren't creating any content here (at least in the way you have positioned it). So, you'll be making a very small slice per sale you provide via your website. But what is to stop people from simply going to your website, seeing the order in which you've outlined the books and then not going through your site to buy (or clicking through links to buy, however you approach it)?

I don't think the problem you are trying to solve is bad. However, I'm not sure if what you have posed is the best solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> My initial thought was to monetize through affiliate sales but you're right. I have to find another way to monetize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this feasible? Is it something you can control, or is this largely controlled by the content authors choose to put into their books?

Also, just a bit of advice - not having competitors _can_ be bad. It could indicate that you're trying to build a company in a market which can't exist because it's just not viable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Competitors seem to be sites that simply suggest similar books

whatshouldireadnet.com reader2.com shelfari.com and of course Amazon

What they do not do is give you an orderly list of books and an order to read them in to maximize knowledge and avoid excessive repetition.

I was thinking of having it controlled through votes, up and down. So a user who just obtained say an IT certification such as the CISSP can list the books he read and the order for the search term "cissp". Then if one of the books is heavily downvoted it would be removed from the list. This way dated material will be removed and replaced with up to date books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If it actually worked, it would be very useful. But the problem is it will take a while to test if it works or not. Can you make it work on a shorter time scale, say for something which could be done faster than reading a set of books?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good question, I could do a shorter time scale by pulling specific chapters of every book and then combining them into a slimmed down reading list. Say, from book one read chapter 1-3, book 2 chapter 5 and 6, book 3, chapter 9-10 and that will give you x knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would I choose your site for suggestions over Amazon.com which has a vast catalog, decent search, user reviews, and a review rating system?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our suggestions will come from users who have already read the books and have determined the bare minimum you will need to read to maximize knowledge.

Amazon suggestions simply basis off of ratings and copies sold so you might buy two highly suggested books off of amazon only to find out that it's the same materials covered, written by two different authors.

<comment><USER7> > _"Our suggestions will come from users who have already read the books and > have determined the bare minimum you will need to read to maximize > knowledge."_

1\. How will you overcome the chicken and egg problem and attract users who have read the books?

2\. How will you screen users to determine that they have the necessary domain expertise to determine "knowledge maximization?"

3\. How can a generic list of materials be assumed to apply to individuals with diverse backgrounds?

Finally, as soon as you see reading two books on the same topic as a problem, you have somewhat divorced yourself from the kind of people who typically read books - particularly readers in pursuit of technical expertise.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. How will you overcome the chicken and egg problem and attract users who have read the books?

A. I was going to start out in a niche that I have familiarity with, IT certifications. I would like to reach out to three primary IT certification forums where users ask for advice about which books they should read to obtain a specific certification. I could use them as a test and pivot as needed depending on the outcome.

2\. How will you screen users to determine that they have the necessary domain expertise to determine "knowledge maximization?"

A. Screening is going to be done through voting on the list. So there would be one list per subject, then users can vote up or down on any book in the list to change it's ranking.

3\. How can a generic list of materials be assumed to apply to individuals with diverse backgrounds?

A. They can't. The hope is that the list will give the user a better idea of what to buy/read.

The reason I want to do this is because it is a problem I face all the time. When I want to learn a new subject such as Malware analysis. I search Amazon and get a fairly large list of books to choose from. Now I try to choose them by basing my decision on the amount of customer reviews, ratings and comments. What if we could simplify that and allow those same users to rank the books so you wont have to make a determination based on looking at three meterics for every book you want to take into consideration?

4\. Finally, as soon as you see reading two books on the same topic as a problem, you have somewhat divorced yourself from the kind of people who typically read books - particularly readers in pursuit of technical expertise.

A. I don't see reading of two books on the same topic as a problem but the problem lies in the materials within the book. For example chapter 1-3 in one book and chapters 4-6 in another book might be the same material, so I want to avoid that. So I want to minimize the material you read within the books.

<comment><USER7> How is that better than a test centered Q and A format - i.e. a Stack Exchange clone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any ideas on monetization?

</comment><comment><USER8> Education is a terrible market to be in. You'll be fighting the tide at every step along the way. It'll be difficult to monetize and even if you do, the cost of education is skyrocketing which leaves less and less money each year for discretionary spending. So you're essentially in a shrinking market to begin with.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do? Received a Cease and desist letter - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have a site, where users may create their own accounts identified by the username (as usual :) I been receiving "cease and desist" emails from one source asking to delete one of the accounts as the username matches "lindblad" which seems to be owned by the source. I've been trying to find more info about it in some trademark databases without really finding the proof of their ownership. It would be very easy for me to just "delete" that account, but honestly I don't want to do it, at the end it's just a "username" without any intention to impersonate anybody.
What would you do? <comment><USER2> I'm not a lawyer, but I would have thought that trademarks are balanced by common sense and context. So, if you have a shoe company called London, and I call myself London, you have no claim against me unless I'm also selling shoes (because it seems like I'm representing myself as you), because it's a reasonably common word that has meaning outside of your shoe-selling context.

In your case 'Lindblad' appears to be a reasonably common surname. It just so happens that one person with that name set up an expedition company - I'm guessing they're the ones that wrote to you. In this case I think the company has absolutely no claim over the name whatsoever.

So, here's what you do:

Post the letter on your site's blog. Write an article about how you don't comply with baseless legal threats, and instead you prefer to shame companies that attempt to terrorize individuals into giving up their legitimate use of generic terms (in this case, a surname). Submit the article back here and to other places that are interested in legal overreach (reddit/boingboing.net come to mind). Send a link to your article as a response to the lawyers who wrote to you (or write a separate response but add this to your articles). Keep updating the article/blog with any responses they send you.

Your customers will have increased respect for you for not giving in needlessly, and you may even get a few new users who found out about you just from this. Plus you'll have struck a small blow against the stupid use of legal threats by companies.

<comment><USER3> Just to put some numbers on this:

There are 1.5 million search results for Lindblad on Google, and there are at least three completely different companies using the name on the first two pages alone, not to mention numerous individuals with the name. That anyone could claim to own the name in a global sense is absurd.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know the folks at linbblad Expeditions. drop me a line with your site and i'll see if i can help. james of Adventurelink.com

</comment><comment><USER5> Get a lawyer

</comment><comment><USER6> You've been receiving emails from the source, or from the source's laywers?

</comment><comment><USER7> are you in the states? if so this could be a DMCA issue vs copyright...</comment>


Website Statistics? - <AUTHOR>

What sort of site statistics do you all collect on your websites?  I'm gearing up for my site launch and I have the usual view count per page plus IP address logging, but I'm wondering if there's any other interesting statistic gathering I could be doing.<p>So what do you do? <comment><USER2> In the past, I've set up MRTG (<http://www.mrtg.com/>) graphs of things important to the site/business, e.g. new users, new posts, purchases, etc.</comment>


The future of photography and Unsplash - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/unsplash-unfiltered/the-future-of-photography-and-unsplash-811f114aab7a <comment><USER2> Unsplash powers nearly all of the stock photography I see these days. It's crazy to see photographers are able to get more impressions on their photos than any other platform (ie Instagram and the New York Times)</comment>


Why Bother with What Three Words? - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-words/ <comment><USER3> 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 should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related.

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?

<comment><USER4> _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 insightful. I have a (useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map stuff.

<comment><USER5> I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows the Latin alphabet, but reading and writing is all in Mongolian Cyrillic, so it doesn't even make sense that way.

In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. While Ulaanbaatar does have street numbers and such, they're not well-known and are basically never used when giving out directions/advertising. It's more like: The "yellow building to the right side of the big department store". Official addresses also rarely use street names, it's more like: Flat #5, Apartment #2, Microdistrict #4, Sukhbaatar District.

So in reality everyone just uses Post Office Boxes for mail, who often just call you and say mail's arrived and charge 400 tugrug.

That said, no-one I know has even heard about what3words, aside from those who read the initial press release. And I'm from Mongolia.

<comment><USER7> Hey, weird ask, but I am going to be visiting Mongolia in 3 months with a small group of online pals. Want to be friends? My email is on my profile!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 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 extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off will be imperceptibly close to the original.

•Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character.

•Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear.

•Logic-optimized. 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.

•Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. 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.

Watch this space.

<comment><USER9> Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com

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

<comment><USER8> Geohash is easily the best system currently out there.

Worse might be a little harsh, but my system:

•Packs slightly more bits into the string (naturally there's a tradeoff with data fidelity) for shorter strings

•Follows a completely logical alphanumeric distribution (Geohash will skip letters, some for good reason, like o and l, and some for not-so-much, like a)

•Some of the other benefits in the original post are also missing.

You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean.

<comment><USER10> >You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean.

89c25855b9b

That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY.

Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and everything can be stored as a single 64-bit integer with lots of extremely useful properties, (e.g. the use of the Hillbert Curve with all of it's benefits, like localization in address space and real space - <USER2> [http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...](http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry- on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/))

If your system adds more benefits than this, I'd love to hear more about it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 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](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 your pocket, and you want to use your brain to remember and then use your voice or a text message to share a geographic location with someone else who also has a powerful pocket computer, what3words has got you covered. If you want to infer how far that location is from another location, or which roads might connect to it, you are out of luck. Building an addressing system is difficult, expensive work specifically because legitimate addresses embed so many levels of hierarchical categories and scalar proportions for us. Remembering coordinate locations is cognitively burdensome, but the signifiers retain some meaning relative to one another. You can tell the search and rescue team that you've twisted your ankle at ringleader.kilt.comedians, but as soon as you've moved 3 meters east, you're at since.duplicates.backswing, and the technologically-enhanced mnemonic crutch has exhausted its usefulness. Augmenting one cognitive task in a manner that debilitates the constellation of surrounding faculties is not the right way to apply technology to our problems."

<comment><USER12> I don't see the relevance of that complaint. People don't memorize their current lat long to 16 sig figs either. You'd still need a gps device or a paper map without w3w.

<comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> "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.

<comment><USER15> Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Being able to naively navigate city -> street -> number is _incredibly_ useful, and that it is occasionally broken doesn't make it an undesirable feature.

<comment><USER16> It's more than occasionally broken, there's billions of people living in spots where it doesn't work.

<comment><USER17> Billions? You've found navigation by street number to be unreliable in 20+ % of locations?

Either way, it does work for several billion other people.

<comment><USER16> I haven't personally found it to be the case, but I do know that people in much of the developing world simply don't have/use street addresses like are common in the "West".

<comment><USER18> Just because you use a system like W3W or even just lat/long for a rural address in a developing country, doesn't really mean you will easily be able to navigate to it. Many rural roads don't have names/numbers and may not even be marked on mapping software. Navigating to these kinds of places takes local knowledge (or at least a GPS, a recent topo map, and careful planning) to get to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 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. The most common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g. "cats" not "cat") or the other way around.

Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate distances between them.

<comment><USER20> I imagine that a single digit typo in latitude could also result in a valid location on the other side of the world

<comment><USER21> Sure, but none of the numbers are homophones or even particularly easy to confuse (in English, anyway) when giving a location verbally. W3W marketing claims none of their words are either, but the evidence suggests otherwise...

Latitude errors are also much easier to correct if you incorrectly memorise it but know other information (country/city). But if you find out that arbitrary.word.cat gives you an obviously incorrect location, you've got very little chance of realising that actually it must have been arbitrary.world.cats

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are plenty of alternatives to W3W, most notably Open Location Codes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code)

Alternatively, try a W3W parody:

[https://what3emojis.com/](https://what3emojis.com/)

[http://www.what3fucks.com](http://www.what3fucks.com) (NSFW text)

<comment><USER23> The emojis one have the nice property that close addresses share some words.

<comment><USER24> And the emoji one will work across languages.

<comment><USER4> Has anyone else tried to look up a location, find the emoji(s) for it and then put the text for it back into the search bar? It seems to not do reverse lookup, making it completely useless as far as I can tell. You can find the emoji(s) for a place, but not a place that corresponds to the emojis.

<comment><USER25> Maybe that's a feature?

;)

<comment><USER4> I did think about posting my location for all the world to see, knowing that it wouldn't tell anyone anything at all.

But then I thought "Maybe I just can't figure it out and other people can."

Thus the question. :P

<comment><USER26> It definitely isn't a feature! We just never got around to putting it in!

I do take pull requests :D

<comment><USER4> I was going to try to submit a pull request, but it seems someone requested this already:

[https://github.com/BadIdeaFactory/what3emojis/issues/10](https://github.com/BadIdeaFactory/what3emojis/issues/10)

 _Reversable #10

@asteres

asteres opened this issue almost 2 years ago

I don't see a way to lookup an address if I have 3 emoji._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Here's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection - the web > page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services!

No need even for the data connection. Any Android 2.3.7+ or iOS 11.3+ phone will automatically SMS the location when the emergency number is dialled.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location)

<comment><USER28> There's also a ton of E911 infrastructure already for exactly this problem (USA, your number may vary!). It's not done at the user level and certainly not by a third party.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> W3W seems to me like it adds more confusion to finding places than it adds clarity. The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem quite east to get wrong from memory. This is exhibited in two of the carousels on their homepage:

* actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items

Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on items.

I think the advantage of lat/long and plus codes is that they are more obscure. They don't make the odd promise of being memorable.

With W3W codes, are we supposed to remember more than one of these? I know the addresses of my parents and a few friends, but rely on mechanical storage for all others. I understand the advantage of having a more universal way of identifying precise locations, but don't see cute password-like names as a helpful solution to that.

Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up inscrutable bits of information.

<comment><USER25> They should be using something like the EFF's word lists: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists- random-p...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random- passphrases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> 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](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.

<comment><USER31> 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 cities of other countries can cause controversial codes, especially for young and or small countries.

3geonames has to use a language for each name. This makes it hard for people who don't speak that language to pronounce the words.

The 3geonames website describes the basic principles but there's no detailed description on how to build those codes besides (a somewhat hard to read) Perl script. For example, the documentation does not explain what encoding is used exactly.

<comment><USER30> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I had never heard of this until I read the criticism, maybe this is some kind of corollary to the Streisand Effect.

Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.

<comment><USER33> 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?

<comment><USER34> 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.

<comment><USER33> Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.

<comment><USER16> How many bits do you think it takes to precisely indicate a location on the surface of the earth?

If you are using 2 angles, I guess the place to start is with the circumference of the earth, which is 40 million meters. So to get within a meter, you then need to encode your angle with enough precision to indicate a single one of the 40 million possibilities.

<comment><USER33> Ummm. That's what latitude and longitude are. Angles. Or equivalently, radians.

And what's magic about one meter? Latitude and longitude can be arbitrarily precise. But whatever. You want 40 million? Well, 360 degrees / 40 million ~ 10^-5. That's easily handled by "43.63872, -116.24135".

<comment><USER16> Yes, it seemed you were arguing those two numbers could easily be encoded using existing words.

If you want to make gibberish word like objects it's probably possible.

<comment><USER33> But what's the point of that?

If they were _always_ the same two (or three) words, fine.

But if there are multiple such encoding systems, any set of three words (foo.bar.baz) is ambiguous. Because it depends on the system being used.

So sure, someone might remember "foo.bar.baz". But "foo.bar.baz" in W3W might be in SF. But in Hanoi by some other system.

And then we get to the need to pay W3W to generate those codes. That's crazy bullshit.

<comment><USER34> TBF The maidenhead system (which is a worldwide standard) IS, IMO fairly easy to remember.

And because it's pairs are increasing in area, I can state that I live in IO93 and it narrows it to:

[https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square- locator/?gr...](https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square- locator/?grid=IO93)

or I could give the next 2 characters to narrow it to a 1km x 1km (roughly) area that covers my town, or the 2 letters and 2 numbers that give a small area that pinpoints 2-3 houses on my street.

It's not really any more complex or hard to remember than a standard postal code or zip code.

<comment><USER33> Now _that_ sounds like a very useful system. It's hierarchical. With arbitrary precision. With ~short, easy to remember (and easy to key/speak on radio) codes. Nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on outside of Amateur Radio.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely.

For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses Treasure Island as well, and CM87 is most of the bay area.

<comment><USER36> Indeed it seems neat. And you will learn to ignore CM87 the way you (used to) ignore phone area codes.

Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?

<comment><USER35> Yes. Less than a building, in fact. CM87TT20SV is the front entrance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> First of all, WTW seems like a BS solution in search of a problem that wont go anywhere, anyway. So I don't see a reason not only to bother with them, but even to be bothered by what they do. Even if needed, this is much better: [https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.".

Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your house number the same but changes your long/lat.

Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?"

They don't have to? Domain names are not universal either (even when they added unicode after tons of years it has near zero adoption, plus implementation issues in many browsers/client libs. Heck still today Chrome shows the Poopla domain as mere punycode: [https://xn--ls8h.la/](https://xn-- ls8h.la/))

</comment><comment><USER38> One clarification, as a native german speaker:

>Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?

That's "suspect" in the sense of "guess" (as a verb), not in the sense of a criminal suspect. (And "stocked" like a store shelf would be)

I'd call this example entirely benign.

</comment><comment><USER39> 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 formal addresses or for use cases where formal addresses are not that useful, like e.g. logistics or big public venues like airports. But the closed nature of this of course holds back most of the interesting use-cases.

For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path (e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks (mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc.

There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet.

A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm. They are easy to remember but meaningless.

Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With 7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.

<comment><USER40> >(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.

<comment><USER39> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 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#).

</comment><comment><USER42> "superficially simple solution to a complex problems" \--- Exactly this

While it might initially seem a bit easier to remember words vs numbers, W3W is a non-solution in many ways, many nicely described in the article.

Most critically, the W3W indicators have zero relation to actual geography. Adjacent locations have entirely different quasi-random identifiers -- there is no progressive gradation, and no indication whether two locations are adjacent or on different continents.

It does not scale, and leaves us completely dependent on a data connection and their servers to navigate.

There is also no way to figure it out from known principles. The entire system has many points of failure. With a street address, I can know which way to from seeing a couple of existing addresses; W3W - no way, need a data connection.

With Lat-Long I immediately know what part of the world I'm in, and what direction I need to move to move to get closer to my target. A GPS unit, or a simple compass and map will work great. W3W -- zero clues, and need a data connection to them.

Horrible, non-scalable, non-solution looking for a problem.

Massive marketing attempting to overcome bad technology.

</comment><comment><USER43> Google Plus is dead. Long live Plus Codes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code)

</comment><comment><USER34> On top of those reasons.... It's already a long-ago solved problem:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

<comment><USER44> To be fair, W3W and similar projects have a lot more friendly and memorable addresses than this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 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.

<comment><USER46> [http://yellkey.com](http://yellkey.com) is designed for exactly this use case, and is near-exact clone of the now defunct [http://shoutkey.com](http://shoutkey.com) that was prevalent at our school for this. It provides single-word short URLs that expire after 24 hours, which is fine in practice for any in-person use case.

<comment><USER45> nice. I have looked for url shorteners but didn't find this one. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> W3W feels a lot like Swatch .beats [1]. It's not exactly solving a problem the doesn't exist, but I think solution is at least as bad as the problem we started with.

At least .beats had the excuse of being a marketing gimmick, or so I assume. No one really thought millidays-since-midnight-GMT was a reasonable alternative to time-zones or just UTC time, right?

What is the problem that W3W is intended to solve? The idea is that I'll describe a location via W3W coordinates rather than by address (or lat/lon)?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

</comment><comment><USER48> 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.)

</comment><comment><USER49> I once thought about W3W like a DNS. Registered companies and businesses could purchase a "number plate" e.g. "jakes.superior.plumbing" and then keep that number plate on a subscription basis, much like owning a domain name. If the business moved address, the geographic coordinates could be updated in the back-end so that "jakes.superior.plumbing" always resolved to the correct location. This, I thought, would be a great monetization strategy and beneficial to many businesses. Even for folks who live in e.g. Dubai or rural areas where there there has been no proper addressing strategy from the municipal side, to be able to purchase a "name" of 3 words or whatever, in order to be found easily - would be hugely beneficial. Furthermore, instead of the 3 words being hard-coded to a specific cell on a world-grid, you take the name with you. If you move house, or move business, just change the coordinates and keep the name. I did mention this to W3W management when I spoke with them in past dealings; they brushed the idea off as useless because they didn't have the means or capacity to maintain a changing directory of names/coordinates. Or perhaps they just thought my idea was silly compared to their approach of dividing the world into trillions of cells and giving each cell an identifier.

</comment><comment><USER50> I am not familiar with this company but I find what they are doing almost as funny as the Indiana Pi Bill . [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill)

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm trying to understand it, but I can't.

Latitude and longitude can be used without an internet connection if you can get a GPS signal.

If you're a boy scout or doomsday prepper or 1800s explorer who fell through a wormhole, and have a bit of time, you can use the sun, stars and a makeshift compass to get a good ballpark.

It's a system which only requires you and your counterpart to both accept the contract of the coordinate system.

As many others here have pointed out _fuzzy.enlarged.testicles_ doesn't mean anything unless we both have access to W3W, and then the directions which come from me needing to get from _hairy.baked.potato_ to you at _fuzzy.enlarged.testicles_ uses GPS. Because giving someone a print out of all the W3W plots they need to pass through is useless, because those phrases don't mean anything, because the system isn't contiguous or addressable.

It'd be like every house on a street having a different, non-contiguous number, different name and different postal code (134 wallaby 53217 next to 5678 futon 44444). Or for the Londoners, if the postal districts didn't increase as you moved outward.

It's a bad design with too many assumptions.

<comment><USER51> Or for you mathamatican, it's as if every square on a Cartesian plane had some arbitrary value assigned to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> All you need is [https://what3emojis.com](https://what3emojis.com)

<comment><USER53> > If you are unhappy with the emoji you are assigned you can reserve custom > emoji markers for your triangle for only a low, lifetime price of $24.99.* > Custom emoji can be any length (except three), up to the VARCHAR limit set > in our MySQL database.

Awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I love tech startups: Longitude and lattitude have worked fine for centuries (well, ever since clocks became reliable enough, that is!). So let's... disrupt it? ...with something less intuitive? ...and proprietary? Typical VC mentality! Shut these jokers down.

</comment><comment><USER55> Another blast from the past: the SRI dotgeo initiative, ca. 2000:

[http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/](http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/)

They proposed cuteness like this:

 _Default Brand Name (short for "default cell server brand name"): the special brand name, such as "mercury," "venus," "earth," "moon," "mars," that denotes the default GeoRegistry for a planet. Other cell server brand names always refer to the planet Earth._

</comment><comment><USER56> There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread!

I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5 meters if you didn't update it after the quake.

Some people had an idea, built it out, and everyone here is losing their minds, I don't get it?

<comment><USER57> 2.5 meters is a problem in W3W. The squares are 3mx3m so most things are going to change "location." Combine that with the nonlocality of the W3W encoding and suddenly anything used has a completely different 'address' where with traditional latitude and longitude 2.5 meters doesn't drastically change.

<comment><USER56> So you just keep using the old address code or words or whatever, I really don't understand why this is a problem. What is going to happen if people come looking for you and you are 2.5 meters to the left of where they show up? Your original geolocation is almost certainly less accurate than 2.5 meters to begin with, no matter how you specify it. Add to that the fact that if it's a physical location with geographical extent, like say a building that is more than 5 feet across, you are arbitrarily picking your location from within all the possible locations that fall inside that building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> With respect to the word list being non-language-neutral, possibly offensive, etc - there was an old Mnemonic encoding project, the original gone but many other mirrors (e.g. [https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic- wordlist...](https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-wordlist/) ) which is essentially perfect for these kinds of encodings.

It's not a standard, but it should be.

</comment><comment><USER59> Does anyone have a list of patents What3Words has?

Regardless, this service solves a problem that does not exist whatsoever. My guess is they will go out of business in a few years.

<comment><USER60> It does exist in developing nations, where street names change very quickly and are not very reliable (and the rusty government can't keep up with the quick development). First hand experience, Vietnam - I currently live in a street that wasn't there a year ago and isn't in Google Maps. If you put it into Google, it will send you to another place, 200 meters away. (They are getting better fast, compared to Apple Maps for example which suck hilariously, but still isn't perfect.)

You _can_ share a long/lat, or a link to Google Maps, but that's hard to write down.

So it's a problem.

<comment><USER61> That's what Plus Codes appear to be aimed at. And it's open source. [https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd never heard of this place, but based on the staffing ratios in evidence on their "team" page ([https://what3words.com/team/](https://what3words.com/team/)), the vast majority of the company is in "partnerships", "growth", "business development", and "marketing".

</comment><comment><USER63> The US (as well as other countries) has had a grid mapping system for hundreds of years[0]. It's just way less useful than GPS. The only time I've seen PLSS used over GPS is for legacy reasons.

[0] Public Land Survey System [https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html](https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html)

</comment><comment><USER64> The startup I'm working with offers a much better solution. We call it a geohash phrase. Instead of three random words, where plurals and order matter, instead we map geohashs to 5-word tuples that easily form a phrase. Moreover, the words will only ever appear in one slot of the tuple, and pluralization and word order don't matter.

You can find more at our website: qalocate.com

</comment><comment><USER65> 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/...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_investors/what3words) 1 - [https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_lead_investors/what3words)

</comment><comment><USER66> There are so many competing systems because the problem of turning two numbers (a coordinate pair) into a string is trivial, so everyone comes up with their own bikeshed.

The individual details of the systems don't really matter. Sure, they each have some small advantage or disadvantage, and you can argue about them for a long time, but in the end, what matters is usage/adoption.

A widespread but suboptimal system is better than a system with better properties that few people know/use, because the differences barely matter.

Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient need for such a system that ordinary people would regularly come into contact with it, and any group of people that does have such a need already found a (proprietary) solution, so it's unlikely we'll get a standard soon unless big players agree on one and aggressively push for it.

</comment><comment><USER67> When I first learned about W3W, I immediately wondered if this same process of mapping n-word tuples across a discrete space could be applied to time. Similar to GPS coordinates, Unix timestamps like 1293432531 don't communicate much to a human developer about when in history they occur. Just use 2010-12-26 22:48:51 then, right? Sure, but then my brain has to worry about timezones, DST, etc. I feel like a unique English name for each second could be useful in some cases, like 1293432531 but (easier, to, pronounce).

Of course a lot of the shortcomings about W3W would apply to to this system too (offensive phrases, lack of relation between nearby points, etc.) Anyone know of something, open source or otherwise, that exists?

</comment><comment><USER68> I agree with the author that using W3W for locating people in trouble is ludicrous, yet it appears to be real:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912)

<comment><USER69> Can anyone suggest why the Advanced Mobile Location system discussed above wasn't used in this situation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> How w3w solves the emergency problem ?

In case of an emergency you go to a link and read out your location.

If the gps is enabled shouldn't the location of the person in need be automatically logged when he opens the link ?

Why should he even say the name of the location ?

</comment><comment><USER71> That -apart from being a brilliant idea- seems to be easy to replicate in open source software. Replicate not in being compatible but as a different system altogether. Or has that already happened?

<comment><USER30> Yes. I've built one of them. [https://3geonames.org](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).

<comment><USER72> It's weird that I'd never heard of this before, but there seems to be a vibrant community of parodies.

<comment><USER30> I think it is an important problem since it has gotten the attention that it has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Isn't the algorithm for this trivial? Convert the lat-long to a single number by Z-order (Hilbert curve if you like pain), optionally use xor and bit- rotations (which are both bijective) to scramble it, then divide it into chunks and lookup in a dictionary. How do you sell that to an investor who knows how to code?

(It can be made hierarchical, just chunk the lat-long first!) (Just clean the dictionary of any homonyms!) (You can get error correction by XORing the three word indexes together to generate a check word!)

</comment><comment><USER9> I was friends with this kid and I will associate Three Words with him instead!

[https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is- mark-b...](https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao- meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/amp/)

</comment><comment><USER74> Wow, the entrance to the coffee shop I'm currently sitting in is "anyone mock grid". So I guess anyone can make fun of their grid? :D [https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid](https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid)

</comment><comment><USER75> 42 Acacia Avenue? I take it that Terence wanted to write 22, but was afraid of Iron Maiden's lawyers? :)

</comment><comment><USER76> Oh interesting I just got to know about w3w from this post. I agree with the criticisms about it not being an open standard.

But the idea sounds interesting. I won't be using it anytime soon, but I can see it can be useful to Ron Swanson who hides his gold arbitrarily under trees in forest. :)

</comment><comment><USER77> 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.

</comment><comment><USER78> I was reading on w3w in 2017 and thought its better expressed as syllables instead of arbitrary wordlists: [http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable- locations](http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-locations)

</comment><comment><USER79> "If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology ..., then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences ..."

What are "suitable licences" for the public domain?

</comment><comment><USER55> This reminds me of RealNames(.)com. To their excuse, this was back in the crazy Internet days.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames)

</comment><comment><USER80> Our office location had a square named: [boom,bedroom,gagging]

<comment><USER81> I guess that's exactly what they are after: funny (or otherwise "engaging") three word combinations that are: (a) easy to remember, and (b) promote their service. - the default square when looking up the town i live in is leber.abhilfe.schnell (german), translated "liver, relief, quick", so maybe that's what their algorithm is optimized for?

Either way, the whole system seems pretty stupid: why 3x3m (way to high res for normal street addresses, much to coarse for anything else)? what is the problem supposed to be that W3W wants to solve? I sure dont see it...

location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.

<comment><USER82> >location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.

So in one setting I have to email myself a link to get the map on another device. In the other I just type three words from one screen into my phone.

I wonder which one's more convenient.

<comment><USER24> you could scan a QR code from your phone

<comment><USER82> That also seems more effort than typing three words to me TBH, but I guess there YMMV

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> So this is a worse implementation of the German Navel Grid System, taken a few layers deeper, and without the contextual value of an actual grid?

Looks like Lat/Long win again.

</comment><comment><USER84> Maybe it's because english is not my native language but, how does it do with spelling?

Are now-sphere-dew and now-sphere-due two distinct locations? Are they at least close enough?

<comment><USER36> I think they are likely to be both valid, but are deliberately far apart.

So you don't get a checksum; perhaps if you are typing your own address in and are shown a map you will wonder why it's showing Timbuktu... but if someone else's address is in the middle of Siberia you won't know how to correct it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Idea: phones could have a feature to send your location as a series of DTMF tones. If standardized, that would be great for any service that needs your location.

</comment><comment><USER86> Yeah what 3 words is a pretty dumb engineering as author pointed out.

If you just want to make it easier to remember numbers, just convert them to a pronounceable base.

Like bacadamafuge

</comment><comment><USER87> What Three Words always seemed like a stupid idea to me. Not much thinking beyond: Locations need bits, English words have bits, Let's use one for the other. Addresses already work. Cellphones have GPS. It seems like an idea for a problem that doesnt exist. What next, mapping words to phone numbers?

</comment><comment><USER88> All these ideas are doomed to fail. No-one will ever use them.

</comment><comment><USER89> To be fair, I haven't heard about W3W until this post.

<comment><USER90> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> This is the first time I've heard of this and I don't know why people would use it... there's no pattern to the word-locations; at least a grid has a pattern.

</comment><comment><USER92> This idea of mapping words over an information space seems to be floating about quite a bit in recent years. I was inspired by the XKCD about the superiority of passphrases (Correct Horse Battery Staple) and have thought of a handful of other applications that are more relevant than GPS location for word mapping. It's the wrong application of a generally great (but not novel) idea.

</comment><comment><USER93> this is an april fools joke, right?

</comment><comment><USER94> Lost me at "The world is a sphere"

<comment><USER95> 1) It has link to "Oblate spheroid".

2) On Google Maps and almost all other popular maps on the web, Earth is a sphere, see EPSG:3857

<comment><USER96> Of course, the Earth is not really an oblate spheroid, either. That's just a slightly more accurate approximation than a sphere. A quick look out the window reveals that the Earth is bumpy, covered in valleys, hills and mountains that are not included in the ellipsoid description.

As they say, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." The trick is to choose the simplest model that works. The right one to use depends on what you're using it for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> the weepy.lulls.emerge thing is really terrible

</comment><comment><USER98> I've assisted to a speech/demonstration by an employee in my lab and while the system was nice in principe the non-openess and internationalization let me a meh impression. It is used in Mongolia by the country post so it addresses a real problem but concerns rising in the blog post are real.

</comment><comment><USER99> Aaah, no. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER100> What are some better (more open, reliable) alternatives to sharing latitude/longitude-based locations? (Note: I'd never heard of What 3 Words before coming across this post.)

</comment><comment><USER101> Why don't you just make an open alternative is this is so disconcerting to you?

<comment><USER102> 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.

<comment><USER82> 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.

<comment><USER90> Words do have value, but what W3W takes away from you (money!) has _more_ value.

<comment><USER82> It's free for everything I need as an end user AFAICT. How does it take away money?

<comment><USER102> Apparently they charge for API usage. If it became popular you would be paying for it (indirectly).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>