7 ms·

Can concur, I live in Sydney, NSW and have made the mistake in concur myself. Fortunately just for listing the city I had a meal in, not for booking a flight.

RegnisGnaw 6y ago
I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.
- zwayhowder 6y ago
  A lot of smaller platforms I've worked with, before address validation became a standard library to pull in, would have a two character field for state if they were developed in the USA. Most things developed outside the USA tend to put no limit on it. For Concur I think it was built on top of the limitations of the global platforms most airlines use that were designed a long time ago for mainframes that didn't have a lot of memory. (There was something about dates once...). Working on platforms built for industries that relied so heavily on mainframes reminds me of the apocryphal story that the space shuttle was the size it was because it parts had to travel on railways that were built to a standard size that matched horse drawn wagons which were built to a standard size for two horses abreast. Or to summarise, the size of the space shuttle was determined by two horses arses...
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    At one point there was an ISO standard for Australian state and territory abbreviations that used two digits. According to that standard, NSW was NS. Unfortunately, since ISO charges six arms and three legs for a standard, businesses can sometimes run on stupid standards that are decades out of date. My mother saw her return ticket was heading to Melbourne VI and assumed it meant gate 6 at Melbourne airport. It didn't. Fortunately there's no real significance to the return gate at Melbourne airport for an international flight, so it didn't affect me picking her up.
- verelo 6y ago
  Because in the US, where the company was founded, the states have 2 letter abbreviations in common language. I wish people could use the ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US
  - endgame 6y ago
    We had a chat about that on HN just the other day. It's cheaper to hack something together based on the world around you than it is to pay ISO a bucket of money to read one standard.
    - bregma 6y ago
      But it turns out most people have been doing it all wrong since forever. [0] [0] https://www.iso.org/standard/73224.html https://www.iso.org/standard/73224.html
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Canadian provinces and territories also use standard 2 letter abbreviations, which makes things work better with the US postal and addressing system. BC, AB, SK, MB, ON, QC, etc.
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    If you check the link you linked, you'll see that until 2004 the codes were indeed NS for NSW, VI for Vic, TS for Tas and QL for Qld. If you bought the standard for an arm and a leg in 2003, why would you buy the update for two arms and three legs in 2004? It's not like there's been any new states in Australia ever.
    - verelo 6y ago
      Interesting. I only first used these ISO labels around 2011, so the two letter versions for Australia never hit me. However, having grown up in NSW, i can attest that it’s never been a two letter abbreviation in common language. Likely the standard was mass produced and “corrected” for ambiguity later, that’s my guess anyway.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time. I mean if we ever get more than 17576 airports in the world, there will be a problem with the three-letter airport codes because every system built in the past 50 years will be using that. Fixing, replacing or modernizing something like that becomes a feat of archeology. I mean the codebase I work in is from 2012 and it's already got a high rate of wtf/sec (the incompetence of my predecessor didn't help there)
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    > Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time. There was a story by a man named Amr whose name could never survive a trip through airline booking systems that encode the gender in the given name field: "SMITH/JOHNMR". His name would always come back as A. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-causes-an-issue-with-any-booking-names-end-with-mr-and-mrs https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      My initials are J.R. In the US, when these are printed after my surname, a lot of people think I'm <surname> Junior.
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        There's a similar effect with the initials D R, M R or M S. In Britain, including a dot after abbreviations is a bit dated — it's UK, USA, NASA, JG Smith Motors Ltd, Mr Jones etc. (American usage seems mixed; I sometimes see "USA" and "U.K." in the same sentence.) That means "Dr Jones", "DR JONES" and "D R JONES" are particularly easy to confuse.

RegnisGnaw 6y ago

I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.

zwayhowder 6y ago
A lot of smaller platforms I've worked with, before address validation became a standard library to pull in, would have a two character field for state if they were developed in the USA. Most things developed outside the USA tend to put no limit on it. For Concur I think it was built on top of the limitations of the global platforms most airlines use that were designed a long time ago for mainframes that didn't have a lot of memory. (There was something about dates once...). Working on platforms built for industries that relied so heavily on mainframes reminds me of the apocryphal story that the space shuttle was the size it was because it parts had to travel on railways that were built to a standard size that matched horse drawn wagons which were built to a standard size for two horses abreast. Or to summarise, the size of the space shuttle was determined by two horses arses...
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  At one point there was an ISO standard for Australian state and territory abbreviations that used two digits. According to that standard, NSW was NS. Unfortunately, since ISO charges six arms and three legs for a standard, businesses can sometimes run on stupid standards that are decades out of date. My mother saw her return ticket was heading to Melbourne VI and assumed it meant gate 6 at Melbourne airport. It didn't. Fortunately there's no real significance to the return gate at Melbourne airport for an international flight, so it didn't affect me picking her up.
verelo 6y ago
Because in the US, where the company was founded, the states have 2 letter abbreviations in common language. I wish people could use the ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US
- endgame 6y ago
  We had a chat about that on HN just the other day. It's cheaper to hack something together based on the world around you than it is to pay ISO a bucket of money to read one standard.
  - bregma 6y ago
    But it turns out most people have been doing it all wrong since forever. [0] [0] https://www.iso.org/standard/73224.html https://www.iso.org/standard/73224.html
- walrus01 6y ago
  Canadian provinces and territories also use standard 2 letter abbreviations, which makes things work better with the US postal and addressing system. BC, AB, SK, MB, ON, QC, etc.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  If you check the link you linked, you'll see that until 2004 the codes were indeed NS for NSW, VI for Vic, TS for Tas and QL for Qld. If you bought the standard for an arm and a leg in 2003, why would you buy the update for two arms and three legs in 2004? It's not like there's been any new states in Australia ever.
  - verelo 6y ago
    Interesting. I only first used these ISO labels around 2011, so the two letter versions for Australia never hit me. However, having grown up in NSW, i can attest that it’s never been a two letter abbreviation in common language. Likely the standard was mass produced and “corrected” for ambiguity later, that’s my guess anyway.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time. I mean if we ever get more than 17576 airports in the world, there will be a problem with the three-letter airport codes because every system built in the past 50 years will be using that. Fixing, replacing or modernizing something like that becomes a feat of archeology. I mean the codebase I work in is from 2012 and it's already got a high rate of wtf/sec (the incompetence of my predecessor didn't help there)
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  > Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time. There was a story by a man named Amr whose name could never survive a trip through airline booking systems that encode the gender in the given name field: "SMITH/JOHNMR". His name would always come back as A. https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-causes-an-issue-with-any-booking-names-end-with-mr-and-mrs https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    My initials are J.R. In the US, when these are printed after my surname, a lot of people think I'm <surname> Junior.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      There's a similar effect with the initials D R, M R or M S. In Britain, including a dot after abbreviations is a bit dated — it's UK, USA, NASA, JG Smith Motors Ltd, Mr Jones etc. (American usage seems mixed; I sometimes see "USA" and "U.K." in the same sentence.) That means "Dr Jones", "DR JONES" and "D R JONES" are particularly easy to confuse.