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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

The title reminds me of an oft-cited anecdote of how someone running an online shop of this or that sort can tell that an order is from the US — it will be the only one where the provided address doesn't include the country.

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On a similar note, it's also a common cliché in the context of international group introductions:

    "Hi, I'm Olaf and I'm from Lund, Sweden"

    "I'm Francisca and I come from Córdoba, Argentina"

    "My name is Jayalalithaa and I'm from Erode, India"

    "Hey everybody, my name's Peter but my friends call me Pete. I'm from Columbus, Georgia, and I'm super excited to be here"

The population of the state of Georgia is about that of Sweden, so that makes sense.

The population of other national subdivisions is greater than that of Sweden and of most US states. That doesn't make sensible to introduce oneself with "I'm from Minas Gerais", "I come from North Rhine-Westphalia" or "I'm from Kaduna State" in an international context.

I've never heard someone from Berlin clarify that it's in Germany either.

It might make sense if Francisca had just said "from Córdoba" and Jayalalithaa "from Erode, Tamil Nadu". Since everyone was talking about countries rather than states, one would reasonably expect Peter to do the same, and thus assume he is from Georgia rather than the USA.

On the other hand, for example every country's stamps say which country issued the stamps... except the UK. Our stamps just have a silhouette of Liz on them (eventually they'll have a picture of Charlie instead) because that's just how it's always been.

There is at least one US stamp design without a country name: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Flag_5c_196...

Interesting, I looked at the collection that's from (at the Smithsonian) and it didn't have any more in the pages I scanned. I wonder what the story is.

My American sister in law does this when she's posting stuff from America to her non-American relatives. Her parcels tend to bounce around America until some postal worker figures out she meant the original Worcester, or wherever.

I'm surprised they get delivered. Impressed too.

For fun I once send a postcard to my parents from Spain to Germany without a ZIP code, without the country, misspelling the town and street, and writing "the last house on the right" (in German) as a house number.

It arrived without problems.

I worked a summer as a postal carrier in the US, and I was surprised at how far off from the official address standard you can get and still get delivered.

For reference, our address standard is ## Street Name,<cr> City, State, ZIP.

There was one neighborhood in particular that had a name like "Edgeview Cottages", and instead of getting letters addressed to 20 Apple St, you'd see Edgeview #20. It's crazy how people expect the post office to be able to figure this out.

Embarrassingly, I didn't believe it when I was told USPS OCR rejects less than 5% of hand-written address. I assumed that even if you could read the writing, the format would be too irregular to parse a lot of the time.

Part of the reason I was wrong is that so much of the address is redundant. I think they only use four letters of the street name, for example, before they essentially always can narrow it down to one possibility in their database.

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