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Put the zip code first

zipcodefirst.com

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Re: Put the zip code first

#321

Post by reincoder »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #263
twodave wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP geolocation is increasingly not useful for anything, especially for mobile users. The best it can do is give you the correct country and maybe get you in the right region.

That link nailed me perfectly. I'm on my phone. Connected to wifi, like most people probably are. Chilling in bed or on the toilet. If you're on cell service.. yeah probably less accurate. Not sure if it makes the form harder to fill out if you have to change some of the fields. What I've started doing for my personal app though is I've added a "guess" button. It fills in the form using heuristics but it's opt in. Fi…

I work for IPinfo. The accuracy you see is inferred data actually. Our IP address location should not perfectly pinpoint anyone, unless that IP address is a data center of some sort. The highest accuracy for a non-data center IP address is usually at the ZIP code level. In terms of carrier IP addresses, currently we do one data update per day. If we did more, I guess the accuracy of mobile IP addresses would improve, but on an overall scale, it would be quite miniscule.

Our country-level data (which is free) is 10-15 times larger than the free/paid country-level data out there. We constantly hear that the size of the database is an issue. The size is a consequence of accuracy in the first place. So, it is a balancing act.

Re: Put the zip code first

#322

Post by kiliankoe »

zettabomb wrote: post #21

I fail to see how you can claim this to work for sites which serve areas outside the United States, but have either no ZIP code, an overlapping code, or something else entirely. Germany has 5 digit PLZs, but putting some valid ones in doesn't get a result. It really seems like the author does not think about other countries. I don't disagree with reordering the entry by relevance, but you have to start with country.…

As a side note, it's 2026, and there's still German software that thinks our postal codes are integers. Mine has a leading zero, and it hasn't been too long since I've seen (German-built!) software that silently truncates the 0 and then complains that it's just 4 digits and should be 5.

Re: Put the zip code first

#323

Post by sjs382 »

The hubris of buying a domain to loudly demonstrate that you don't understand the complexities of a topic. And then you don't even put your name on it...

Anyways, further reading:

https://aldavigdis.dev/2023/03/25/falsehoods-programmers-bel...

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood?tab=readme-ov...

Re: Put the zip code first

#324

Post by quesera »

kiliankoe wrote: post #322
zettabomb wrote: post #21

I fail to see how you can claim this to work for sites which serve areas outside the United States, but have either no ZIP code, an overlapping code, or something else entirely. Germany has 5 digit PLZs, but putting some valid ones in doesn't get a result. It really seems like the author does not think about other countries. I don't disagree with reordering the entry by relevance, but you have to start with country.…

As a side note, it's 2026, and there's still German software that thinks our postal codes are integers. Mine has a leading zero, and it hasn't been too long since I've seen (German-built!) software that silently truncates the 0 and then complains that it's just 4 digits and should be 5.

This happens in the US too, and even if you're wise enough to treat postal codes as strings (which they are) and not integers, someone is going to paste the data into Excel which will promptly blow things up on you anyway.

Re: Put the zip code first

#325

Post by quesera »

nottorp wrote: post #259
YokoZar wrote: post #11

The author complains about country selector drop-downs as part of the address flow, but if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States. I don't think there's a country-inferer from completely generic postal code tool out there yet, is there?

> if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States From outside the US: I always thought "zip code" is just what you USers call a postal code. I only found out it's a trademark today, from this HN discussion. So most people outside the US will see "zip code" and think "oh, they mean postal code but they have this weird term for it".

It's "ZIP Code™", trademarked by the US Postal Service (this is mostly to prevent others from misusing the name). It is exactly equivalent to a postal code, and most US residents will know both terms, although they will always say "ZIP".

ZIP is an acronym for "Zone Improvement Plan", but no one knows that and it's not meaningful if you do!

Re: Put the zip code first

#326

Post by hdjrudni »

reincoder wrote: post #321
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link nailed me perfectly. I'm on my phone. Connected to wifi, like most people probably are. Chilling in bed or on the toilet. If you're on cell service.. yeah probably less accurate. Not sure if it makes the form harder to fill out if you have to change some of the fields. What I've started doing for my personal app though is I've added a "guess" button. It fills in the form using heuristics but it's opt in. Fi…

I work for IPinfo. The accuracy you see is inferred data actually. Our IP address location should not perfectly pinpoint anyone, unless that IP address is a data center of some sort. The highest accuracy for a non-data center IP address is usually at the ZIP code level. In terms of carrier IP addresses, currently we do one data update per day. If we did more, I guess the accuracy of mobile IP addresses would improve,…

> Our IP address location should not perfectly pinpoint anyone, unless that IP address is a data center of some sort.

By perfectly, I meant it got my city and zip correct, but I looked up the lat/lng and its a 5 min drive away. So pretty dang close!

Not sure how you got it that close if its only supposed to point to the nearest data center.

Re: Put the zip code first

#327

Post by Breza »

modeless wrote: post #37

> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country False. Many zip codes include more than one city, and some even cross multiple states. And you can't always tell the difference between codes from different countries. Now you're not just instantly filling the rest of the form, you're implementing fancy multi-country filtering logic, editable drop downs, etc. Given the obvious incompeten…

Good point. France uses the same postal code layout as the United States. At one job where a data feed only had Zip for userlocation, we would look for suspiciously large numbers of people from Idaho because they have an overlap with the numbers used for Paris.

Re: Put the zip code first

#328

Post by Breza »

quesera wrote: post #324
kiliankoe wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note, it's 2026, and there's still German software that thinks our postal codes are integers. Mine has a leading zero, and it hasn't been too long since I've seen (German-built!) software that silently truncates the 0 and then complains that it's just 4 digits and should be 5.

This happens in the US too, and even if you're wise enough to treat postal codes as strings (which they are) and not integers, someone is going to paste the data into Excel which will promptly blow things up on you anyway.

Head of data science at a corporation here. People pasting into Excel has been a bane of my job for over a decade.

Re: Put the zip code first

#329

Post by quesera »

Breza wrote: post #328
quesera wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens in the US too, and even if you're wise enough to treat postal codes as strings (which they are) and not integers, someone is going to paste the data into Excel which will promptly blow things up on you anyway.

Head of data science at a corporation here. People pasting into Excel has been a bane of my job for over a decade.

Yes! I'm sure you know this, but for anyone with similar problems:

You can disable this conversion "feature" in the Excel "Automatic Data Conversions" preference pane.

...and I hope you have better luck getting people in your company to remember this than I have! :)

Re: Put the zip code first

#330

Post by slartibardfast0 »

TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #213
slartibardfast0 wrote: post #68

This works really well in Ireland. Eircodes (our late adoption postal codes) resolve to individual addresses rather than areas, so Irish sites mostly do this.

You have to be careful with this. Building sites (translate that into American as "houses under construction") may want to order stuff, but won't yet have eircodes. Indeed, I believe that they're issued only twice a year, so new-built houses may not have them either. So you cannot make it a required field.

yes, once the 'footings' are in you need to order an eircode straight away, no fibre-to-the-home without any eircode :)
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