Weird that they even bothered to list the app for download in the Canadian app-store.
Anyways, with the Clipper card if you're going to use the app just add it to your phone's wallet and use your phone to tap the card readers. Alternatively you should still be able to top your card up at any place that sells Clipper cards – but that may take a day or two to update. As annoying as that is, both BART and Muni made paying for a subway ride with cash as excruciating as possible. You were boned if you wanted to pay with a $20 bill. Or if you wanted to use a credit card to pay for a BART ticket at the some of the ticket machines at some of the poorer stations.
Reach out to Streetsblog or SFist if you want to bubble up the complaint.
How in the world did you figure out that trick?
Unlike some Visa cards, MasterCard is apparently a global network with very little difference crossing borders. So this trick works outside the US too. Generally the address is checked by humans at some step, and an address “close enough” (at least the street address and name needs to match), then the transaction is often allowed through. If it doesn’t go through, tell your credit card company you often make purchases online from country X and your card will usually be flagged to allow it in future.
A hint ; the padding doesn't have to be zeros (for my bank, when it approves during checks). So for example if you are doing 12300, this may not be a valid zip code.
In my case, my 12300 wasn't valid. I clued into this, because the code worked in most places where it should, but not a few others. I then looked up some codes, and realised that 12300 wasn't a real zip code.
So I Googled, and tried 123xx, where xx matches a real, valid zip code.
This gets by some checks, which table-lookup against valid zip codes, before sending a request to validate the zip remotely.
Even better, I then found an address for a condemned building on that same zip code. When required, I used that address as the 'bill to' address, and even that works sometimes. Very helpful when snowbirding, and spending 4+ months in the US.
Online shops will usually accept 00000, but if it asks for your zip at a physical terminal you’re screwed.
Seems like the author is nostalgic since the machines are being replaced.
The original show (Beverly Hills, 90210) ran 1990-2000, and the remake 2008-2013.
2 minutes of new yorkers doing the double metrocard swipe. (Contains opera)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KExZw3hh1Ic.
And a few going over/under…
(It does have the curious upside that your postal code + street number is almost always a unique identifier, so most forms start by asking for those and then autocomplete the rest.)
Historically they were directly functional, the first part (it doesn't matter to a machine how the code is written, but they notionally have an "Out" section first and an "In" section) SO1 told sorters which local postal sorting office to send this to, SO1 would be in Southampton, a port city on the south coast because the first two letters are somewhat mnemonic.
But today actually a machine translates post codes into numeric codes that aren't used by the general public (although they are published, and you can mechanically annotate bulk mail with the newer numeric codes for a discount). This is fortunate because once the codes were broadly accepted and used, they became a matter of vanity, like other aspects of addressing in the UK (and presumably other countries)
For example, I grew up in Prestwood, an unimportant dormitory village (ie most of the adult population work in London, and just come back to Prestwood to sleep) in Metroland. But the nicest houses in Prestwood didn't consider themselves to be "in Prestwood" at all, they'd argue that since they're on a hillside near the more notable and expensive town of Great Missenden, they're actually living in Great Missenden. And they'd insist their post codes should match this er, Truth.
So making the post codes merely a human artefact, and the real coding is numbers humans are normally unaware of, allows a house that is clearly in Prestwood to instead have an address in Great Missenden, complete with Post Code, yet the sorting people can give it to a guy whose job is to deliver to Prestwood, because that's where it actually is.
(One downside to the sort of people who live in a dormitory village, beyond the fact that they aren't really around most of the time and so don't care about lack of amenities, is that they see themselves as important and powerful and so they might waste a lot of taxpayer money demanding that some minor bureaucrat "fix" their address and it's just easier to say OK than fight them. There are upsides though, they have plenty of cash, so you get pretty good loot on Halloween and decent donations to charities)
Anyway, back to the HN relevant point, there are commercial products which can go from a post code to a list of "delivery points" (addresses, but the postal delivery people only really care about where the post is delivered to, so from their point of view that's what we're encoding) and that can be turned into a drop-down, or it can be auto-completed from the house number if that works, or whatever you customise. This is a place where you can do a poor job, produce a working product but maybe cut your purchase completion rate slightly, because your address entry is annoying and customers walk away. Or you can do a really slick job, but miss one edge edge case and find oops, buying your product from one town in Yorkshire was virtually impossible due to a bug (there's usually a manual entry option, but obviously normal users hate that and won't bother)
It’s been a trick to increase rental property values for awhile.
Which also helps a lot when some stupid form insist what I need to enter an American ZIP code... though I typing in an address in a completely another part of the world.
It never seems to cause credit card validation issues though. I guess my bank just ignores that field.