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Comment by ericyd | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always thought the US Postal Service is such a technological marvel. They somehow manage to identify and route billions of pieces of mail and I have to imagine their tech is significantly more primitive than this. Not only that but US addresses are absurdly non-standardized, you can often write the same address multiple ways and have it deliver to the same location. I’m sure there’s plenty of published knowledge in this area, but whenever I see announcements about OCR it feels like this should be a solved problem if it’s been accomplished at the scale of USPS for many years.

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My father once received a letter from Algeria, with 3 words on the envelope : his first name, "Créteil" (the town where he lived, ≈100k inhabitants), and "France". Of course, in the 70s there was no Internet nor central database to find him, yet the postal service managed to deliver the letter. He was a very active social worker, managed a youth football team, etc. which made him locally well-known by his first name.

Nowadays, many people can't find anyone or any place unless their phone helps them. And postmen never stop to chat. Such a letter would not pass through the technology process, and probably not through the human network.

> And postmen never stop to chat

I can say that at least where I live (Brisbane Australia's inner-ring suburbs) that's still the case: my postie is super friendly, loves my dog, and always has a couple of minutes to say hi!

And its great, because I live at a house number that is <number>A, and there is a <number>... but no <number>B or anything, which trips up a surprising amount of people/delivery drivers, so having a postie who cares helps

Since the 70s the world population has almost tripled.

sadly, over here in the netherlands and I assume elsewhere, the job as a postman changed drastically when they privatized. room for the human element has been all but squeezed out for profits long ago.

I used to part time for the (Danish) mail service. The only sorting that was done automatically was the post codes. That was enough to get the letter to the right post office. The rest was done by the mailmen/women early in the morning. It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what was meant by some of the addresses. The older people in particular often knew the story of why certain places were sometimes addressed in certain ways, or could guess the addresses based on the names of the people living there.

Great video by Tom Scott on this subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c

haha this was great!

IIRC the USPS was one of the first big budget orgs behind early OCR systems all the way back in 1965.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4LJs2ZoDR4

The USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City examined 841,260,847 images of poorly written addresses in fiscal year 2025. [0]

Unfortunately the page does not have a base rate--the total number of mail pieces that were not prepared for automated processing. Total first class mail, which includes a lot of bills prepared for automation was 25.7 billion [1]. If 10% of that are non-automated, then .8 / 2.57 = .31 or a third of mail not prepared for automation is handled by "employees look at the image and type in address information"

0. https://facts.usps.com/remote-encoding-center-rec-decipherin...

1. https://about.usps.com/what/financials/10k-reports/fy2025.pd...

I can't help you with any of those questions... but back in the 90s I use to be one of those employees that looked at the image on the screen and typed the address information in Salt Lake City.

Quantitatively, I don't know the stats, but qualitatively I can confirm it felt like a lot.

I’m not totally sure what your point is, but my response is that most OCR technology is reading “automated” (i.e. computer-printed) documents such as PDFs and things like that. So I think parsing the numbers by “automated” vs “non-automated” is not a very helpful way to think about the success of USPS OCR technology; the gross percentage of manual reviews compared to total mail volume is a much better way at looking at the success of their OCR. That’s my perspective anyway, but maybe commercial OCR is really optimized for reading handwriting and I’m just not aware of it. I’m not an expert in the area.

My response was to your thesis: "whenever I see announcements about OCR it feels like this should be a solved problem if it’s been accomplished at the scale of USPS for many years." I think the USPS has "solved" much of the problem by getting the most prolific generators of mail to conform with more basic tech than OCR, the bar code.

Much commercial mail (including first class non-junk mail) is physically presorted and bundled as it is dropped with USPS and has a bar code that states the routing needed. Stuff that has had OCR performed by computer or human gets a little sticker near the bottom with the barcode.

The barcode is applied by the sender; the Postal Service required use of the Intelligent Mail barcode to qualify for automation prices beginning January 28, 2013. Use of the barcode provides increased overall efficiency, including improved deliverability, and new services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode

Ah that is an interesting point!

There's a lot of weird edge cases with US addresses. Carmel by the sea doesn't have street numbers. Florida keys addresses are often just a mile marker. The mail gets delivered because a human on the route is familiar with them.

>... US addresses are absurdly non-standardized.

Laughs in Indian addresses.

Fun fact: one of Yann LeCun's first 'deep learning' projects was on OCR for postal codes (MNIST).

USPS can also make a list of every address, that's not possible generally with freeform text

Well I guess a lot of humans are involved as well, so that helps

Also the census, literally hundreds of millions of hand-written forms that have needed to be processed. Which was the foundation of MNIST!

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