Comment by rented_mule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rented_mule | Hacker News Reader

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An annoyance for me is that I've yet to see any address validator get my current home address right. They all insist my address is on the road that leads to my road rather than my actual road. It's understandable that they can't be 100% accurate given the scale / complexity of addresses.

Most sites/apps will let me override the validator, but a few won't. The most common ones that insist on using the wrong address are financial institutions that say the law requires them to have my proper physical address and therefore they go with the (incorrectly) validated version.

USPS does not do home delivery in our area, and UPS/FedEx/etc. usually figure it out given that street numbers alone uniquely identify properties in our town.

Same! My wife ran a business from home during the pandemic and we actually went through the effort to work with Google Maps (they called us) to get it on the map. And of course USPS has no problem. But our address was originally a federal building with a letter, still only has a letter, no number, and there are now all sorts of work-arounds floating around on how resolve addresses in our neighborhood. What's wild is the Post Office is literally down the street from our house, and our house predates the founding of most of the big delivery services, which all manage to deliver to us, given their preferred incantation. If I can't get the shipper to pass the right incantation to their shipping service, shenanigans ensue. My (least?) favorite was an item that went across the Pacific Ocean 3 times over the course of 3 months.

I just replied to an earlier message on this thread with the same offer:

I’d love to have you email your mailing address to support@smarty.com with a link to this HN thread. We may be able to help fix some of this.

Send your address to support@smarty.com and link to this HN thread. I’ll keep an eye watching out for it. I’d love to see what our system does with your address.

We have non-postal addresses and a lot of other mechanisms to help here. We also have contacts at the USPS and others to help fix addresses.

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