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We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

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Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#311

Post by ryukoposting »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #270
ryukoposting wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, is the German postcode not used for transaction validation? I know the American payment processors definitely use ZIP codes for validation - see anecdote 1. That said, there are definitely situations where the payment processors don't require the ZIP code - see anecdote 2. Anecdote 1: When I worked in food service as a kid, I used card terminals that connected directly to a phone line. I remember a coupl…

> is the German postcode not used for transaction validation? No. The only time I have ever been asked for a post code was when a petrol pump in the US demanded my zip code. I have no idea what it meant, I just put some random zip code for the general area I was in and it was accepted. I've never been asked for my post code in Europe; I can't speak for the whole of Europe though, just UK, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Fr…

It's very interesting to know that postal code verification isn't the global M.O... I've been curious about this for a while and you've provided some valuable context.

FWIW: the pump was asking for the ZIP code of the billing address you have on file with your bank. If I typed in a random ZIP code, my card would get declined. I'm pleasantly surprised someone actually thought to handle the "foreign address" case, even if it's silly that the machine forced you to provide a ZIP code in the first place. That's how low my bar is for payment processing networks, I guess.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#312

Post by wkat4242 »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #295
wkat4242 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in Ireland 1 postcode (eircode) for 1 address. Very handy. Having said that, they took their time, postcodes were only introduced a few years ago!

Around early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes. IIRC, we were going to implement UK style postcodes much earlier but the OCR machines that an post had were good enough to read the whole address reliably by the time they got around to consideri…

> Around early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes.

Oh yes I know. Many many websites used a "validator" for a postcode for Ireland so in many cases just putting "None" would not be accepted. You had to enter random stuff to see what format was accepted. Often they accepted UK-style postcodes or just numbers.

I think part of the reason was anticompetitive though. In the smaller village in Ireland the postman would know the address of each person, but a courier like DHL or TNT would not. I used to work at customer service for a company doing RMAs and I'd often get calls from exhausted couriers trying to find a customer.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#313

Post by dang »

NeoTar wrote: post #158
TomK32 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts. According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own postcode) to none living in a demolished village of Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two people living in a district that had no postcode until the prob…

Sorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many German postal codes are there"!

Please don't do that on HN.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#314

Post by saxomoose »

Wizzah wrote: post #310
gabesullice wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cautionary example of how data meets reality… My address in France is listed in the BAN… but only to the granularity of my street number (e.g., 123 Main St.). Unfortunately, that number corresponds to at least 7 different structures, 5 of which are apartment buildings. Of those 5 buildings, each has multiple stairwells with their own door and no line of communication between them—they might as well be separate buil…

Belgium is a shitshow of governments (We have 7) but somehow one of these got to achieve a geolocated address register. Publicly available and they also have an API available to build your own application around. https://www.vlaanderen.be/datavindplaats/catalogus/adressenr...

Am currently working on that at Digital Flanders. Curious about any use of the API out there.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#315

Post by InsomniacL »

ascorbic wrote: post #222
InsomniacL wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> profoundly stupid mistake Surely the PAF formed part of the sale price when privatising Royal Mail? So if you removed it before selling (at a lower price), or you buy it outright after, is there really that much difference making it a profoundly stupid mistake?

Privatisations, like most IPOs, are deliberately under-priced, and I'd very much doubt that the valuation of Royal Mail would have been affected by adding "The universal service provider must maintain the postcode address file and make it available under the Open Government Licence" to the Act

> very much doubt that the valuation of Royal Mail would have been affected

To include a postcode lookup on your website costs nearly £7000 per year.

Given how popular that is I don't see how it couldn't have formed part of the price.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#316

Post by normangray »

johneth wrote: post #288
normangray wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The Post Office, the railways, the water system , for heavens' sake! The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised => efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive thi…

Minor pedantic correction: The Post Office (shops, services, government forms, etc.) is still fully government-owned. It's the Royal Mail (delivery) that was privatised. They used to be the same company but split in two before Royal Mail was privatised.

Thank you! – yes, it's a private company, fully owned by the Government. I think I sort-of knew that, but it hadn't properly registered; I may indeed have been confusing it with Royal Mail.

It means that the PO is quite closely analogous to the Ordnance Survey, in organisational terms. It's maybe describable as a quasi-privatisation, in that the company is run on a fully commercial basis, with correspondingly narrow goals in principle, but with the profits (or, in the case of the PO, the losses) going to the Exchequer, and the relevant minister (presumably) having some say about the appointment of board members.

It's organisationally tidy, I suppose, and manages to fit in with the long-standing 'private=efficient' doctrine. It still feels vaguely off, to me; not quite cricket.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#317

Post by Wizzah »

saxomoose wrote: post #314
Wizzah wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Belgium is a shitshow of governments (We have 7) but somehow one of these got to achieve a geolocated address register. Publicly available and they also have an API available to build your own application around. https://www.vlaanderen.be/datavindplaats/catalogus/adressenr...

Am currently working on that at Digital Flanders. Curious about any use of the API out there.

I use it through the wonderful QGIS plugin for georeferecing .csv's.

I coördinate an 'igs lokaal woonbeleid' and this has proven to be tremendously useful. Maps are the best way to visualise the impact that we have and being able to pinpoint an exact location has prevented a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings. 10 Years ago it wasn't unthinkable that my colleagues lost several hours in a day searching for certain houses. I was one of the first that started using capakeys instead of adresses in my company.

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