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Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses (2013)
- wodenokoto 6y agoFor every falsehood, this article provides an example, which is very nice. Most falsehood articles just list a bunch of assumptions and as a reader it can be kind of hard to understand in what way those assumptions are wrong.
- nicbou 6y agoA few more, if I didn't just miss them: - That every place has an address. Some countries like Mongolia don't. Many countries don't have reliable addresses. - That addresses follow the "number street city" format. In Germany the street comes before the number - That street names are unique within a city. - That door numbers are contiguous and zig zag from one end of a street to another. In Germany they sometimes go in a loop, starting on one side, and returning on the other. Unless they don't. - That streets are continuous. Mine wasn't and it confused delivery drivers. (Rue de la Volière, Granby, Canada
- Symbiote 6y agoI think only the fifth is missing.
- jobigoud 6y agoBut do programmers believe that? Even in big US cities streets are cut and restart a few blocks later... And the numbers don't go from one end to another they often start at the city center and increase in both directions. In Los Angeles Wilshire Boulevard start counting from downtown LA and also start counting from downtown Santa Monica at the other end and they meet with highest numbers somwhere in the middle. If you have an appointment at 900 Wilshire make sure your GPS don't send you on the other side of the city an hour of traffic away.
- nicbou 6y agoThey might not believe it. They might just not think about it. I worked at HERE Maps, and little things like these cropped up in meetings. One of the benefits of a diverse team is that someone will often point it out.
- dnpp123 6y agoI think the scope of the link is pretty much UK/US centric. e.g. in S.Korea you write an address from the biggest geographical indicator to the smallest (country, region, city, district, road, building NOT building, road, district, city, region, country)
- Bost 6y agoError translating "Context" to Korean... timeout.
- paganel 6y agoTo add to that list, in many places zip-codes just don't matter, I think they're mostly a US/UK thing. I'm from Eastern Europe and I found myself many, many times googling for my address's zip-code when filling-in online forms because I have never known it by heart (and before the advent of the Internet I very rarely used it).
- ygra 6y agoIn Germany they're needed as well. And in my home town there's actually two streets with the same name in very different parts of the city, distinguishable by postcode. Furthermore, they ease automatic sorting and sure, once your mail reaches your local postperson, they know the neighborhood and names and addresses, but that doesn't mean postcodes don't serve a purpose.
- Bost 6y agoFun fact: several Central European countries are being quite often (wrongly) described as East European. So while at it, in that part of Eastern-ish Europe where I'm from the ZIP codes do matter :)
- nicbou 6y agoAsia also starts in a different place, depending on who you ask. It can start anywhere between Istanbul and the Urals
- speeder 6y agoI am from Brazil, here usually door numbers zig-zag (one side is odd, the other is even). But for some reason, on the street of my business, the numbers are seemly completely random, really. Cue the drivers that are supposed to come pick-up products we have to ship ALWAYS getting lost if it is their first time...
- swaranga 6y agoI moved to USA from India and after the interstates, this is one of the top things I am jealous of since we don’t have a sane addressing system in India. Only if you are from such a place you will have an idea how frustrating it is to explain to a delivery person how to reach your apartment. “Bro, come around behind the mall, proceed to the dead-end and then left and then to the right after the temple”. This is not even some small town in a remote place. This is Bangalore, where I lived for years near corporate offices. Sigh.
- gonzus 6y agoDoes something like Google Plus Code (https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/) help in this case? This sounds exactly like the use case they wanted to support (and that was supported by other systems prior to GPC), so I am curious if it, in fact, makes any difference on the ground.
- ssivark 6y agoInteresting, apart from the problem that like any Google feature/product it will likely be abandoned, and then shut down in a few years screwing over anyone that actually depended on it :smh:
- Arcorann 6y agoPlus Codes (or Open Location Codes) are simply mappings from latitude/longitude to an alphanumeric string [1], and there are open-source implementations in many languages [2], which means the effect of the project being abandoned would be limited. [1] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/docs/specification.md https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc... [2] https://github.com/google/open-location-code https://github.com/google/open-location-code
- signal11 6y agoIndian food delivery and ride-hailing companies like Zomato and Ola don’t appear to support it yet (and training their delivery folk), sadly. I wish they would though — it would make life much easier. Most delivery people I’ve spoken to are unaware of the feature. Also Google Maps in India has quite a bit of variance from “ground truth” so the phenomenon OP describes (of delivery folk calling you up every. single. time) is very real.
- andrewshadura 6y agoIn Slovakia, we have an addressing system invented in the Maria Theresia times: each building has a separate number, unique within the city or a suburb, in addition to the usual house number. In small villages, especially where streets have no names, these unique numbers are used to identify houses, as no other house numbers exists. These numbers appeared in an attempt to uniquely identify households, mainly for tax and military purposes, hence the name: conscription numbers. In a lot of places, these numbers were literally issued in the order troops marched through the town, usually starting with the church. (More on the topic: https://forgottengalicia.com/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/forgottengalicia.com/conscription-numbers-vienna/_index.html https://forgottengalicia.com/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/...) The fun thing about conscription numbers is that they alone can be used in addresses. For example, Nižná 496 is a valid address (where Nižná is the village name), while Nová Doba 496, Nižná is what many people would use — this village has no street-level house numbers, but streets themselves have names. Similarly, Bratislava I 501 is the same address as Hlavné námestie 1, Bratislava is the same address as Hlavné námestie 501/1, Bratislava is the same address as Hlavné námestie 501, Bratislava. Sometimes, houses have street-level numbers, but there’s no street name. For example: <https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4738832411#map=18/49.05125/19.61773 https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4738832411#map=18/49.0512...>. There’s a bunch of houses in this area which have addresses like Trstica 1, Trstica 3, but also have conscription numbers, so technically Iľanovo 122, Liptovský Mikuláš, Trstica 1, Liptovský Mikuláš and Trstica 1, Iľanovo are all probably valid addresses (not verified by any delivery there, though). With postal codes, IIRC all post codes in Slovakia outside of Bratislava start with 0, those in Bratislava start with 8, a remnant from the times when Czechoslovakia had a common postal code system. In Bratislava, the second digit in the postal code is the city district/suburb, three more digits define a bigger zone within it, but are largely optional; the third digit of zero means the postal code of a post office serving the area: 811 07 is an area in the Blumentál locality, 810 07 is the post office which delivers there, but a post code 810 00 would work just fine.
- merricksb 6y agoIf curious, see these earlier discussions about this list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301 (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489 (2013)
- howlgarnish 6y agoHere's a completely legal and fully specified address in Singapore: 238801 Or if you're sending international mail: SINGAPORE 238801 Explanation: Singapore is a city-state with no divisions for states, counties etc, and every single house and building has its own unique 6-digit postcode, so that number is all you need to receive mail or locate an address. Of course, in practice people usually put in the regular road address as well for redundancy, but it's not really necessary. Ion Orchard 2 Orchard Turn SINGAPORE 238801
- AmericanChopper 6y agoI used to work with a guy who would send mail to his mom at: > Ma > <postcode> > Scotland Supposedly it worked because his local postman knew there was only one woman on the route with a son who would be sending mail from the US. Which didn’t sound like a very reliable method, but he claimed it never failed.
- viraptor 6y agoIn the UK the postcode would be often applied to only one street (or a part of a street). This means in practice you get small villages with a postcode that covers 2 houses for example. The local postman could likely know the residents well enough in that case.
- jjp 6y agoAverage number of properties per post code is 15 (max about 100), so a lot smaller than a route. And in rural area the routes are often kept to the same small group of staff for years.
- Symbiote 6y agoSW1A 1AA is sufficient for a letter to Buckingham Palace. You should probably include the name of the person. It's not unusual. The university residence halls I lived in had postcodes unique to the building, and my first employer in London has several postcodes for several nearby buildings.
- 7952 6y ago
- jobigoud 6y agoIs there any place where streets start counting at 0 or go negative?
- ignoranceprior 6y agoYes, and the article provides an example of both.
- moksly 6y agoA lot of these comes down to structuring law and bureaucracy to be digitizable. In Denmark every cadastre is throughly mapped and logged, and have been for a long long time. As a result we have a national addressregistry with a public API. This way your digital solutions will never really get an address wrong. I think you could build something similar with OpenStreetMaps if your bureaucracy sucks, but it’s a massive undertaking of course. What surprises me the most is how countries that don’t do this, keeps track of all the other GIS related things. Like how much electricity or plumbing a cadastre will need. Or perhaps more important, taxes and property taxes.
- Symbiote 6y agoWhen I moved in to a new apartment in Copenhagen, it took about a year for the address to be present on most websites that tried to autocomplete it. Almost all of them let me input it myself if the autocomplete failed. I did have to phone Yousee so they could provide broadband.
- moksly 6y agoWell, the open API isn’t free as in beer.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoDid a project for consolidating address representations across systems for large logistics a couple years ago. It was the one project where XML was a genuinely adequate representation. Ie you could have a text line address preserving sequence, newlines, and whitespace, yet markup postcode and other distinguished fields. Like <line>Bla Ltd</line> <line><houseno>11</houseno>, Xyz-Street</line> <line><postcode>12345</postcode> MyCity</line> Taking advantage if the fact that almost all addresses can be written in a line-oriented fashion. Actual addresses were using the much more granular UPU S1 vocabulary. SGML would've been even better since it can treat newlines and whitespace as markup, eliminating <line> boilerplate and just use a regular text block representation.
- steerablesafe 6y ago> Tibor Schütz points out many post offices have novelty handling of mail to Santa Claus, even going as far as to allocate special postcodes. For example, in Germany: Santa Claus Nordpolen, Julemandes Postkontor, DK-3900 Nuuk; in Canada: Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0H0; in the UK: Father Christmas, Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ Well played, Canada.
- chrisseaton 6y agoThe biggest falsehood I regularly see is requiring a 'city'. It seems like almost everyone does this. I don't live in a city. Many people live in villages or towns. What do you want me to put there?
- SuperCuber 6y agoThe village or town..?
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhy don't they ask for city/village/town then? Why always ask specifically for a city? Many people don't live in cities. Some don't live in any kind of town or village or anything.
- Bost 6y agoI've been told, in the U.S. you don't really say or use the word "village". Even if the place has just some 300 souls living there. So "The village or town..?" may not pass the type-checking :)
- tomjakubowski 6y agoMany parts of the United States have municipalities legally incorporated as "villages". Illinois is one example, "the Village of Downers Grove" http://www.downers.us/ http://www.downers.us/
- kevcampb 6y agoA fun one to add. In Hong Kong, old walk-up buildings often have different floor numbers in English than they do in Chinese. For example, 2/F in English may be 三楼 (third floor) in Chinese.
- jeroenhd 6y agoI don't think this is all that strange, because even within the English language there's a difference of interpretation of what the "first floor" really is. British English uses "ground floor" for the floor that is at ground height and "first floor" for the first floor you need to reach by stairs. American English often interprets "first floor" as the first floor entered (the one on the ground). Of course, the British rule has left the American continent these days, but in other countries this could very easily become a problem. In a country with different cultures, languages and systems of writing it's only natural that the Chinese representation reflects what a Chinese person would call that floor, with the English representation next to it converted to whatever level of language compatibility someone might choose for international mail.
- kevcampb 6y agoIt's strange in that my floor number changes depending on what language you are using. For systems that parse addresses into a structured format it's a real problem, as they need to ensure they are rendered into the original language.
- ignoranceprior 6y agoThis is by the guy who did the XSS injection via company name a few days ago.
- Bost 6y agoIn "Bohemia" there's a village called "Bohemia" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cechy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cechy
- Semiapies 6y agoUnfortunately, the biggest falsehood a programmer (very briefly) believes after reading this list is that management will let you just use the only reasonable solution of a single textbox for the address without any attempt to validate it.
- izgzhen 6y agoI like this type of articles, but also felt pretty frustrated. Programmers are not supposed to be an expert in this type of details, neither do most other people in a company. The real problem is that how do we encode this knowledge in an easily reusable way? (In the same way they programmers do not have to know x86 ISA to write useful applications)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hvdijk 6y agoAn extra one: addresses won't look like dates. The typical way of writing my address starts in the format 1/2 X Street to indicate house number and flat number. Some text processor altered this to the format 1 February X Street. Not surprisingly that got misdelivered.