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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

A 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

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I 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)

Error translating "Context" to Korean... timeout.

To 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).

In 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.

Fun 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 :)

Asia also starts in a different place, depending on who you ask. It can start anywhere between Istanbul and the Urals

I 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...

I think only the fifth is missing.

But 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.

They 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.

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