Hacker News Reader

Comment by mastax | Hacker News Reader

I remember CGP Grey talked about staying with his wife's family in rural Hawaii, on his Cortex podcast. His address included something like "take a left at the big tree".

The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!

So he would see packages slowly make their way to his island, then be marked as undeliverable, then slowly make their way back. Eventually Amazon stopped allowing him to ship packages at all.

View on HN

I recall that Costa Rican addresses are more like directions:

https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-ad...

At least for the neighboring country (Nicaragua) it's like that. Sometimes the reference points are not even there anymore, as in the case of some old buildings destroyed in the Managua earthquake in '72

>The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!

Two options:

* Specify both the PO box and street address in the mailing address, like

John Q. Public

PO Box 123

1 Main Street

Anytown USA 00600

This is best for situations where you don't know which carrier the sender will use. People who live in rural areas where they have both a PO box (because USPS won't deliver to their homes) and a valid street address that other carriers do deliver to might use this option.

* USPS PO boxes can receive from other carriers, if street addressing is used. <https://www.usps.com/manage/po-boxes.htm#streetaddress>

That's basically what he ended up doing, except that the address and PO box had different ZIP codes. Also any store that does address validation wont allow that.

Another reason why addresses should just be multi-line text boxes.

When we moved into our newly built house, the USPS wasn't quite ready for us and it took a couple months for them to recognize and validate our address. Fedex and UPS had no such problem. We had to order a bunch of stuff off of Amazon, and a couple of those packages were sent back by USPS. I contacted Amazon and they set it so all packages were sent via UPS and Fedex for a while.

Meanwhile, google maps already added all the streets for a new subdivision near me that hasn't even finished grading the terrain yet. It's funny to watch a doordash driver pull down a dead-end street that LOOKS like it ought to connect to mine, and then back out, take a massive detour, and enter my neighborhood from the exact opposite side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com