
Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses - michaelt
http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
======
masklinn
The article remains western- (and especially UK-) centric in outlook, a more
international business will probably find plenty others. For instance japans
disprove:

* The address format is uniform across the country (Sapporo has its own, and Kyoto uses an alternative system on top of the standard one)

* Addresses go from the most specific to least (e.g. flat number to postal code), japan is the exact opposite

* Addressing systems don't change (Japan's was reformed in 1998)

* Building numbers are street-based (Japan's are block-based)

It also expands on things like "addresses will have a street": standard
japanese addressing is subdivision-based so addresses provide the prefecture,
the ward (~county), the district and the city block.

Except for Sapporo and Kyoto (see 1): Kyoto allows an denoting blocks as the
intersection of two streets and the position relative to the intersection
(north, south, east or west). One reason is that some wards have multiple
districts with the same name... Sapporo uses a system where blocks are
addressed by their distance (in blocks) + direction from city center, so you
might be told the address is "the 4th building, 3 blocks north and 5 blocks
east".

~~~
jzwinck
US addresses exhibit neither increasing nor decreasing specificity. Apartment
numbers are usually written in the middle, like "30 Tristan Way, Apt. 107,
Gwyneth VA 27384". This never seemed strange to me until I saw it being done
more sensibly elsewhere.

Singapore is another good one: its postcode scheme changed twice in less than
a century, and being a city-state, there is nothing useful to put in a "city"
field (mail is often sent to "Singapore Singapore", or even "Singapore
Singapore Singapore").

~~~
masklinn
> Singapore [...] being a city-state, there is nothing useful to put in a
> "city" field

Good point, which should apply to most city-states (e.g. Monaco, or the
Vatican)

~~~
jeremysmyth
...not to mention the substantial number of rural addresses that don't include
city names in most countries.

------
Udo
The biggest takeaway for me here should sound familiar: don't overengineer
your data model. The more decisions you make about specific properties, the
more special cases you will need to handle (and those are a continuing source
of frustration for both programmers and users down the line).

In this case, most of these issues can be avoided by allowing a free text
field instead of dedicated fields for street name, number, apartment, floor,
state, county, district, and whatever.

~~~
DrJokepu
The typical problem with what you're advocating is that in an enterprise
environment typically your application is communicating with a number of
external data sources that already make a bunch of assumptions about data,
whether they're reasonable assumptions or not, and they typically expect that
you'll be able to return them their data at the same level of granularity as
they've provided it to you. E.g. if your client's 70s COBOL application gives
you a list of their customers with addresses including a postcode field and
then your application filters that or something and sends back a second list,
it won't be acceptable to give them back addresses with the postcode simply
concatenated into a text field with the other parts of the address.

The correct way to handle this is to be able to dynamically accept and store
arbitrary granularity of data (and be able to translate that into a single
text field at runtime if needed).

------
swatkat
Another point I'd like to add. Quite a few addresses in India tend to have
popular "landmarks" listed with them. Something like: _Opposite <a popular
establishment>_ or _Near <a well known park>_ etc. This makes it very easy to
physically locate them!

Here's an example from Citibank India website:

    
    
         Citibank,
         No. 91, Prestige South End,
         South End Road, Opposite Surana College,
         Jayanagar, Bengaluru - 560 004

~~~
julian_t
I regularly see these... petrol pumps and bus stops seem popular reference
points:

State Bank of India, No.997, Opposite To Bus Stop, Service Road, 4th Cross,
9th Main, Rpc Layout, Vijayanagar, Bangalore - 560040

------
speeder
I am from Brazil...

Most programmers here assume stuff US-like in addresses.

Well, and government forms even frequently require a specific style of address
(Street - building number, city, state, zipcode)

But in Brasilia (Brazil capital) it already breaks.

A typical address there for example is: Building 3, Apartment 12, Block H2,
Residental Section, North Wing, Brasilia

As you can see, Brasilia does not have street-based addresses, in fact most
streets there are not named at all, the city was made on purpose to allow this
new type of adressing that the city planners thought it was better.

Also, zipcode precision is almost random, I lived once in a building with 20
apartments that had its own zipcode, and I also lived in a city with 150.000
people that had only one zipcode, and I know a building that has has three
zipcodes.

And there is zipcodes for streets, neighborhoods, and several other random
things.

And the coolest feature of all: brazillian zipcodes can start with a zero,
breaking every stupid database that store them as number instead of string.

Also, streets not only can have more than one name, it is possible to the post
office have the WRONG name.

I lived once in a street named "Gracia Mauro Chieni", and for many years it
was listed on post office as "Graça Maria Cheni"

After nagging them a lot, they fixed...

It was now: "Gracia Mauro Cherene"

And of course, sites that used the post office company API to find the zipcode
worked great with the name of that street ;) (NOT)

Oh yeah, remember the street I mentioned, the one with two wrong names in the
post office? Well, in the power service registry (That in Brazil is valid as
address proof and some other address related things), the name of the street
is "H", yes, just one letter... It was the original name of the street when it
was first opened, and they never bothered to fix it in their database.

~~~
Bognar
There are US zip codes that start with 0 as well.

~~~
ceejayoz
Which Excel loves to silently turn into integers and subsequently destroy your
zip code column. Not. Fun.

~~~
Falling3
Those excel "features" always seem to be breaking something. The other recent
one that comes to mind is SKUs being converted to scientific notation.

------
dfox
Some additional things I've seen:

* Address encodes where the building is physically located

* It does not matter whether address is written as name, company or company, name.

* That there is some unique mapping between postal codes and geographical areas (or post offices). I've seen buildings that have different postal code depending on what shipping service you use and multiple discontinuous areas that have same postal code.

* Address has exactly one city/town (although in Czech case most such addresses does not have street)

* Address contain non-latin characters used only in one language.

* Non-latin characters in address can be mapped to ascii in non-ambiguous way.

* Address is always written in order from most specific to least specific.

* Buildings whose number differ only in letter postfix (33a vs. 33e) are near each other. Alternatively: such postfix does not matter.

* There is single building number for address. (Czech addresses have two building numbers, usually only one is written in address, but for some places you either have to write both or indicate which one you mean)

------
Moofius
I would like to add one point:

* Addresses can have accented or other foreign characters.

I ordered a package to "Fäkéstreet", but it arrived addressed to
"FÃ¤kÃ©street", luckily the postman was smart enough to decipher it.

I have also run into the address length issue, even thou my address is only 54
characters long.

~~~
dagw
What's really depressing is I've had that happen when ordering from a Swedish
company. I can kind of understand that US companies get it wrong, but when a
company can't deal with all the letters in the alphabet of the country it's
based in you know something is fucked.

~~~
masklinn
One of the issues is actually that web browsers can have inconsistent encoding
of the data they send, and depending on the amount of testing (across
browsers) done that can yield surprises.

For instance, the "unicode snowman" is because MSIE 5-8 will _refuse_ to send
a form as UTF-8 (completely ignoring `accept-charset`) if it can encode
everything to Latin-1. Conversedly, most browsers will default to UTF-8 (but I
believe normalization may vary). If the system was built in the early 00s and
only tested in MSIE, it might well expect all input data as latin-1 (because
that seemed to work at the time) and crap out when UTF-8 comes in.

~~~
mlnhd
What does "unicode snowman" have to do with this?

~~~
alan
Some websites now will include a hidden input field in all forms <input
type="hidden" name="snowman" value-"&#9731" />

to convince IE that it's supposed to be sending UTF-8, not latin1 (And so the
site can recognize if the input was likely mangled.

~~~
mseebach
It's built into Rails, except they use utf8=✓ now.

------
kijin
Another falsehood:

* Street numbers are integers.

A house near my university was numbered something like 3 1/2. It was between 3
and 5, and 4 was taken by a house on the other side of the street. I'm also
sure I've seen houses with 1/4 and 3/4 in their numbers. Platform nine and
three quarters doesn't need to be magical!

I once lived in a house that was numbered 50-2. A lot of U.S. websites
wouldn't accept the hyphen. Fortunately, I could just truncate it to 50
because there were only a handful of houses with the same prefix and the
postman knew where my family lived.

I also once lived at an address where the street number had the suffix "B".

~~~
ams6110
There are a lot of 1/2 addresses here. Usually happens when a house that was
originally a single address has a room (or several) divided off and rented out
as a separate dwelling. So that can become "320 1/2 S. Lincoln Ave" or
whatever. Sometimes though, in the same situation, separate apartment numbers
will be used on the orignal adddress. I'm not sure what drives this one way or
the other.

------
Macha
It seems to include one in itself, with:

> The user will know their postal code/zip code.

Which assumes that the user has a postal/zip code. For a counter example, all
addresses in the ROI outside of Dublin do not have postcodes. (And most online
sites won't validate Dublin postcodes either, being of the form D4 or Dublin 4
for example)

~~~
Renaud
Same for the 7M+ inhabitants of Hong Kong: no-one uses postcodes, and it
becomes really bothersome when most websites asking for your address insist on
you entering one...

~~~
jalanb
Not sure how the folk in Hong Kong handle that, but as an Irishman: I always
use the province (Munster) in online forms which insist on a postcode.

Which works fine on the envelope, postman hardly notices, but leads to another
one for the believing programmers: a postcode field contains a postcode

------
nathan_long
Wow. That's insane.

As a software developer, I'd like to propose some changes in the world.

1) Addresses should be the very precise lat/long of the mailbox + the name of
the recipient. Nothing else.

2) There should be one time zone for the whole world and no daylight savings.
Time should be 24-hour-based. Perhaps you'll need to set your personal alarm
for 19:00 in the "morning". Tough.

3) Nobody is allowed to change their names.

4) Whoever keeps sawing outside our building should stop.

That is all for now. I look forward to the complete capitulation of all world
leaders to my frank good sense.

Thank you.

~~~
lsiebert
Ah, so you could never move a mailbox?

~~~
saraid216
Or have mailboxes stacked on top of each other. Has GP never visited a mail
room?

------
jzwinck
The example of "GB Technical Services, Unit W7a, Warwick House, 18 Forge Lane,
Minworth Industrial Park, Minworth, Sutton Coldfield, B76 1AH, United Kingdom"
could still reasonably be written within five lines this way:

GB Technical Services

Unit W7a, Warwick House, 18 Forge Lane

Minworth Industrial Park, Minworth

Sutton Coldfield, B76 1AH, United Kingdom

I don't think British people would actually write it as eight lines. Does
anyone have a better example of an address that does not
reasonably/conventionally fit on five freeform lines?

~~~
pm215
You could compress it a bit, but the standard is to write the postcode and the
country name on lines of their own, and usually the post town too (that's
"Sutton Coldfield" here). So trying to compress down to five lines would
require really weird formatting (and possibly confuse the automatic postcode-
reading hardware).

([http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/How-
do-I-...](http://www.royalmail.com/personal/help-and-support/How-do-I-address-
my-mail-correctly) specifically wants postcode on a line of its own.)

------
chromaton
One of my favorite address stories: the Russian Post Office successfully
delivered a package with an address hand-written with the wrong character
encoding.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_to_Russia_with_kro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_to_Russia_with_krokozyabry.jpg)

~~~
angersock
Another fun story, this time just involving repeated escaping and mangling of
an address:

<http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-resemble-this-remark/>

------
xradionut
Very few experienced programmers will have these beliefs. Addresses are the
most fucked up personal information that we have to deal with. Names run a
close second.

Over beers a few of my mates came up with a system like DNS to map a mailing
domain for an individual/organization to a physical location. But after much
discussion we decided it was just easier to let the geo-challenged to lease
postal boxes with saner locations.

~~~
DanBC
> Over beers a few of my mates came up with a system like DNS to map a mailing
> domain for an individual/organization to a physical location.

Isn't that what ZIP codes should have been?

In the UK my postcode is limited to not many addresses. (Mine is 10, but they
can be more.) The Post Office database is widely used. It's not always
particularly accurate. While there's no official database of addresses the
Post Office database is pretty close.

~~~
seszett
In France postcodes usually span several towns, or one medium city, and only
larger cities have several postcodes (three for my 300 000 inhabitants city,
for example).

They are not very precise, which is to be expected since there are only about
100000 possible postcodes in our scheme.

~~~
jzwinck
The US used to have five-digit postcodes, now has nine-digit ones, but
laypeople mostly ignore the extra four digits. Singapore used to have two-
digit codes, then upgrade to four, then to six. Maybe French postcodes will
grow another digit or two someday.

~~~
mpyne
The U.S. system is nice in that most people only even need 5 digits. The USPS
reduces fees for their large customers that use all 9 digits, so they still
end up with the majority of their mail being very specific, while those just
sending a letter to a relative can just use the 5-digit code and let the
destination post office take care of re-sorting it before delivery.

------
faithful_droog
Japanese addresses are also unusual in that they generally don't involve
streets (or street numbering) at all but are instead based around city
districts and blocks.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system>

~~~
kijin
Korean addresses are similar, but they're slowly transitioning to an American-
style addressing system that uses street numbers and street names.

I guess the district-based addressing system made a lot of sense back when
people just built houses in random locations around the town center.

------
riccardoforina
Should be "Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses".

Anyhow true. I recall the "Apply for this position" form of a big player, open
to remote working. A full US address was actually required to submit /facepalm

~~~
saalweachter
Which is two problems, since it implicitly discriminates against the homeless,
who need a job to get an address.

------
gambiting
My Adress is:

street_name 42/38/13

Yes, with slashes. It's the number of the block, then the number of the
stairwell, and then the number of the flat. I cannot enter that bloody number
anywhere online, every website shouts at me that it's incorrect. It's not, I
think I know where I live!

~~~
acqq
My address is of exactly the same form and I can't use it to subscribe to the
delivery of the magazine I read. The site doesn't alow slashes.

BTW the zip code contains the letters and the dash too.

------
swatkat
I thought this was about computer memory addresses. Falsehood about falsehood
about addresses ;)

------
kamakazizuru
its interesting how a lot of these are from the UK. In Germany on the other
hand - every address follows the same format. The only weirdness you run into
is that sometimes (Especially in former east german areas) - the numbering of
buildings isnt really sequential.

~~~
xioxox
One aspect of German addresses is rather strange, I find as a foreign
resident. If a building is split into individual flats, each flat does not
have its own number in the address. Letters are addressed to names in a
building. We have to deal with the electricity company with designations like
Erdgeschoss Links (ground floor, left). They also get rather confused if
married people do not have the same surname.

~~~
chalst
Married people with different names is not a problem: you list all of the
names on the name shield. This is also common with WGs (shared accomodation).

The common case that fails badly is where two people in the same apartment
block share the same surname. There is no good workaround for this case,
especially given the German resistance to putting first names in formal
correspondence.

------
kephra
Lets cross check what the United Nation has to say about NAD:

<http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/d04b/trsd/trsdnad.htm>

As you can see, only the 3035 "PARTY FUNCTION CODE QUALIFIER", telling if this
address is a buyer, a supplier, a shipper, or something else, is mandatory and
everything else is conditional.

You have 5 optional lines of "Name and address description", 5 optional lines
of "Party name", 4 optional lines of "Street and number or post office box
identifier", an optional "City Name", several optional "Country Sub-Entity
Details", and optional "Postal Identification Code" and an optional "Country
name code"

I think that pretty flexible, allowing short addresses like "27321 Finkenburg,
Germany" and long ones also. The main restriction is line length, so the
address has to fit onto an envelope.

------
3JPLW
My personal favorite is Nicaragua. Here's an example:

 _Reparto Serrano, de la Policía de Plaza del Sol 4 cuadras al Lago, Casa
esquinera Managua, Nicaragua_

Translation: Serrano Division. From the Policía de Plaza del Sol go four
blocks towards the lake (which is North in Managua). Corner House. Managua,
Nicaragua.

Absolutely crazy. No street names at all. Addresses are really directions from
well-known places (except when it doesn't exist anymore - "de donde fue" :
"from where there was.."). They use the old spanish unit 'vara' - 84 cm
instead of the meter to specify houses within blocks. Up and down aren't north
and south; they're where the sun goes up and down (east and west).

More information here: [http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical-
info/14-addresses.htm...](http://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical-
info/14-addresses.html)

------
acdha
See also “Falsehoods programmers believe about geography”:
<http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187>

------
sbirchall
As a complete aside about addresses and because falsehood number one needs
some clarification: even when you are living on a houseboat you are required
to have a mooring license unless you want to be classed as a "constant
cruiser" (moving beyond the parish borders every [arbitrary interval]) and in
order to get this license you have to provide British Waterways with a fixed
address - which by their own account they do not check.

I'm somewhat biased against BW as my (disabled) father had his boat
repossessed under a "section 8" with no warning and was made homeless because
he did not supply them with a "fixed address". When confronted a few months
before the eviction BW even refused to take an address my father's advisor
offered during the meeting because they knew it wasn't his. Even after
confirming that they do no background checks on addresses and knew full well
that most boaters were using addresses that were not their own.

There are real human costs to these sorts of things and my dad was one of
those people caught up in a self reinforcing loop that saw no solution.
Fortunately it is an edge case, and most likely the result of corruption - the
£30K+ boat was eventually sold on by BW for £5K and my dad never saw a penny.
He can't even contest the decision in court because it would cost a small
fortune.

------
greghinch
I worked for a US company for a while that had a satellite office in Costa
Rica. The street address, translated from Spanish, was "the office above the
chicken factory"

------
R_Edward
Slightly off-topic, but street names in the Twin Cities metro are broken. I
live in a subdivision in which nearly every street has the same name,
differentiated only by the road's "last name." I.e., Maplecliff Drive,
Maplecliff Circle (which is actually a cul-de-sac), Maplecliff Alcove (which
isn't even a type of street), Maplecliff Curve, Maplecliff Way, Maplecliff
Court...

In Minneapolis, all the streets are numbered by their distance from the center
of town, and the north-south thoroughfares are called Avenue, while the east-
west roads are called Street. So if someone tells you they're waiting for you
at the corner of 2nd and 4th, you have 8 potential intersections to check.

Everywhere else in the cities (OK, that may be hyperbole) building addresses
have something to do with intersecting streets. For example, 47 7th Avenue is
going to be between 4th and 5th Streets, closer to 5th (and on the west side
of the road). God help you if you try to apply that logic in St. Paul. Their
numbers bear no relationship at all to their cross streets.

Finally, while my Maplecliff example above evinces a certain laziness or lack
of creativity on the part of the subdivider, I think the height of laziness
has to go to the subdividers who don't even bother to come up with a whimsical
base name for their streets, and just name them after nearby, already-existing
roads. Especially when said existing roads are merely numbered roads. You'll
get road names like 172nd Street Circle or 163rd Avenue Way. And yes, I did
once see a 185 Street Lane Court.

A friend from Arizona reports that in his city, NS roads are Avenues, and EW
roads are Streets, but there was one road that cut diagonally through the city
--so they called it a Stravenue. Abbreviated Stra, if I remember correctly.

~~~
marssaxman
Here in Seattle, on the opposite side of Lake Washington from the city of
Bellevue, there is an intersection between streets named Bellevue Place,
Bellevue Avenue, and Bellevue Court. A block away from this strange triplicate
intersection you will find the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Belmont
Place.

------
fr0sty
Here is the State of Illinois catch-all approach to addresses (from their
voter registration form:

[http://www.elections.il.gov/downloads/votinginformation/pdf/...](http://www.elections.il.gov/downloads/votinginformation/pdf/r-19.pdf)

    
    
        IF YOU HAVE NO STREET ADDRESS, 
        below describe your home: list the name of subdivision; cross
        streets; roads; landmarks; mileage and/or neighbors' names.

------
chromaton
As a regular shipper, the addresses I have the biggest problem with are at
colleges and universities. No address verification/normalization software
recognizes things like "3948-B Engineering Wing, Richguy Hall, Anystate
University, Cityville, ST, 99999". But if you force the address through, the
local UPS guy will know where that location is every time and deliver the
package without a problem.

------
wiradikusuma
"The user will know their postal code/zip code. Most users will, of course."
Not in Indonesia.

Also, house numbers are sometimes not sequential. Some people have "favorite"
number and when they see it's not taken, they will use it ("Nobody in the
neighborhood has 123, so it's mine.")

------
XaspR8d
The "roads have only one name" rings very true for me. I usually denote my
road as "S Hwy X" (where X is a letter, not a number). But over the years the
official USPS designation has changed slightly and different organizations
have different naming standards, ranging from "Highway X" to "South County Rd
X" etc. One time while attempting to make a credit card payment I discovered
that the vendor validated the billing address against both my bank AND the
USPS standard, which were doomed to never agree. Needless to say I did not end
up buying anything from them.

------
latch
The worst is that every country has postal/zip codes. Hong Kong doesn't. When
the field is required (most of the time, even for core internet companies),
/(HK){1,3}/ tends to work..but not always.

~~~
jalanb
Ireland doesn't

------
arithma
Latitude and longitude based addressing is well-past due. Two around-10-digits
decimal coordinates and a building number is all we really need these days.

~~~
brooksmoses
Hah!

Actually, Salt Lake City in Utah is sort of vaguely like that, though with
street numbers (in the usual units of 100 per block) rather than latitude and
longitude per se.

The addresses are things like "250W 500S, Salt Lake City" -- which is going to
be on the fifth street north of the Temple (and marked as 500S on the street
signs), two and a half blocks west of the north-south street that's centered
on the Temple (which is Main street, not W. Temple Street. W. Temple Street is
what would be 100W if it weren't named).

I'm not sure what the history is on canonical orderings of the two parts of
the address. Currently it seems to be usually the one that's the "street
number" followed by the one that's the "street name", but I'm not sure if
that's a result of auto-regularization by systems that assume such a thing, or
if it's historical.

------
dasil003
Here's a funny UK one.

I was opening an account at the Lloyd's TSB Branch in Hanover Square
(<http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/directory/1063/11849.php>). Turns out their
address form requires the first half of a postcode to end in a number, even
though the address of the branch itself ends in a letter.

------
eclipticplane
Not all addresses in the US have streets, either. I grew up in rural Wisconsin
at a house that only had a fire number and county. "N3042, Rock County WI" was
a valid address.

I believe my grandparents only got a street assignment in the last 2 or 3
years -- and even then, the actual street is about 2/3 of a mile from their
house.

------
nradov
HL7 V3 (including ISO 21090) has a good, flexible data model for addresses.
Anyone can have zero or more addresses each of which has a use code (home,
work, postal, etc). Each address has zero or more parts each of which has a
type (line, street, city, postal code, direction, suffix, etc).

------
LarryMade2
One that applies to the US, many folks have TWO addresses.

One where they live, and the other where they receive mail. Up here in Rural
California, that is the case, postal delivery is not a given to most of the
residences. Sometimes the only delivery option is getting a post office box.

~~~
jtroyer
Or said another way, the falsehood is "Addresses don't depend on delivery
mechanisms." I'm also in California without home postal delivery. If you're
going to deliver a package via USPS, you need to use my PO Box. If you're
going to deliver via FedEx/UPS, you need my street address. If you don't tell
me which way you're going to send it until the end of the order process, I
have to go back and fix it if I guessed wrong.

~~~
mikeash
When I was little, we had no address. We did live next to the local post
office, so using a PO box for mail was nice and simple. For UPS, we had to
give an address like, "the house next to the post office on the east side". It
usually worked, but occasionally they'd get their directions mixed up and
deliver to the house on the other side.

------
snarfy
The situation is pretty similar to email addresses. You could _try_ parsing
them, but it's pointless, and usually not what you want. What you want isn't a
street, 'zip code', or city name. What you want is a route from point A to
point B.

------
webmonks
I live in India and most of the points mentioned are common sense stuff here -
in other words just don't assume anything apart from Country and State. Just
give two/three fields and let the user write his address... :-)

------
bruceboughton
A house will have just one postcode.

\- Not if it is a new build, had a temporary postcode during construction and
has since been assigned a new postcode.

(In the UK) an address will contain a county.

\- Not if it is in London (city and administrative county).

------
mmuro
Addresses, like phone numbers, are difficult to normalize.

The best you can do is hit the 80/20 rule: provide a solution for most
addresses/phone numbers out there and minimize the edge cases.

------
Zikes
I read recently that Dubai doesn't even have physical addresses. All package
and mail delivery is done via detailed directions and descriptions of the
destination.

~~~
1rae
In the places I have been in Dubai, they definitely have addresses, but its
more like "Office X, Jumeirah Business Tower, Jumeirah Lakes, Cluster W." (I
am not sure about post boxes or post codes) Sometimes the building names are
arabic, so you would instead say "Building 4" in english as they are well
numbered.

In some places in Africa this is definitely true, an example of an address in
Mauritius would be "Second house on the right, past the hindu temple, the
house with the red wall".

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superuser2
It sounds like we should just make name and address Unicode-compatible
textareas no validation.

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qwerta
Here in Ireland there are no postal/zip codes. I always have to enter 00000 on
websites.

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angersock
So, the obvious temptation here is to say "fuck it" and just leave a textbox
for users to put in their address.

I cannot help but feel, though, that this is inviting ruin and disaster. I'm
currently dealing with some of this myself--what's the best solution other
than just forcing people to use a five-line US-stle address and hope for the
best?

~~~
saraid216
I would look at what you need the address for and actually make the request
based solely on that. Generally speaking, you ask for an address in order to
send mail of some kind. Inside the US, you basically never _need_ the
city/state: they're for error-checking (wait, XXXXX isn't actually in
California; it's in Iowa). I had a friend give me an address that the postman
told me didn't make sense (no city field), but it still got to him fine: I'd
lay good odds that the post office people local to my friend simply had a
modified convention.

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seivan
Next article should be about times/dates. Times and dates are F*cking hard
sometimes :-)

~~~
InclinedPlane
It still annoys me that unix-time is not monotonically increasing. It was such
a beautiful idea and it got totally screwed up by the lame idea of leap
seconds.

~~~
Thrymr
Unix time is monotonically increasing, as long as there are no negative leap
seconds (and there never have been). It's just not uniformly increasing, since
it tracks UTC.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I think you have the concept of leap-second backwards. A positive leap-second
means that the time-of-day is held for one additional second. Since unix time
does not respect leap seconds there are 35 different unix time values at the
resolution of seconds which refer to periods of time lasting 2 seconds instead
of one.

And that means that unix time at a resolution higher than a second will _jump
backwards_ at those 35 different leap seconds.

~~~
masklinn
> I think you have the concept of leap-second backwards. A positive leap-
> second means that the time-of-day is held for one additional second. Since
> unix time does not respect leap seconds there are 35 different unix time
> values at the resolution of seconds which refer to periods of time lasting 2
> seconds instead of one.

Monotonic functions can yield repeated values, they don't have to be strictly
increasing or decreasing. A constant function is monotone.

> And that means that unix time at a resolution higher than a second will jump
> backwards at those 35 different leap seconds.

Yes sub-second timestamps won't be monotonic, but UNIX time (or POSIX time) is
only defined with a resolution of a second, so it _is_ monotonic.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This isn't quite correct, and as the grandparent applies the concept it is
definitely incorrect. A monotonically increasing function may never repeat a
value. A constant function is not monotonically increasing; it is
monotonically nondecreasing (and of course, also monotonically nonincreasing).

