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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Falsehoods US programmers believe about addresses: there are no other countries than the US of A, and if there are, they don’t really matter.

This person bought a whole domain for something that doesn’t work for 90% of the world, claiming it does, never even testing their assumption. Great job!

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Yeah, this is 100% an instant classic in the lies programmers believe series.

How long have we had browser auto complete for addresses? A long time, I assume it's devs like this one who just can't be bothered to support it and have to pretend their flawed approach is somehow faster than literal auto complete.

He just doesn't understood that every country has his own zip codes. He just comes from the land of the free invention of units of measurement ;)

Freedumb

I don't disagree with you generally but does he really claim it does? The entire page only mentions US, near as I can tell.

> From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country

And the country field is completely useless as you can’t change from USA.

Why would a US only address need a field for country?

> Fine, maybe country first. The purists in the comments are technically correct — postal codes aren't globally unique. You could do country first (pre-filled via IP), then postal code, then let the magic happen. The point was never "skip the country field." The point is: stop making me type things you already know.

It’s addressed in the article (at the end, admittedly).

Perhaps the author should make the country dropdown consist of just two items: "US" and "Purists in the comments".

The existence of countries other than the US is not a "technicality".

But it doesn't matter because the whole article is AI generated.

Actually, visiting from The Netherlands showed me a popup congratulating me on the quality of our postal code system.

The name and shame tactic is underrated these days. :)

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