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Comment by UrMomReadsHN | Hacker News Reader

Is it common to believe that post codes don't start with zero? All of New England (ME, MA, NH, CT, RI, VT) have zero starting post codes. Plus apparently a part of New Jersey. Map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code

Also, since it brought up naval vessels, here's the addresses of all US Navy ships: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/lists/ship-fpo.asp

Anyways, the post office does a wonderful job delivering mail considering how complex addresses can be and how people can have messy handwriting.

Also - You can have an address that doesn't map to a physical location that totally looks like it should (not just PO boxes). Consider RPIs address.

http://rpinfo.rpi.edu/locateRPI.html

"Correspondence to and from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute uses the official address of 110 Eighth Street, Troy, NY 12180. This address serves as a mailing address only; you will not find a building with that number on 8th Street."

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I got in to an argument in school with my computer programming teacher. A BASIC course, we were having to design a system to accept an address, and I was treating my ZIP code as a string.

IIRC, something like

50 INPUT "Your ZIP code?", ZIP$

Everything was reviewed via handwritten code and flowchart before we were allowed to type it in in the lab, and I was told "ZIP code is a number, but you're putting it in to a string, that's wrong, fix it".

"But a ZIP code starting with 0 would then not have the 0 at the front when we show it back to the user" I said.

"ZIP codes don't start with 0"

Me: "Some do"

Her: "No, they don't"

I lived in Michigan, but was a huge infocom fan, and they were in MA, and had a leading 0 in their ZIP code. We argued about this for a good few minutes, and it wasn't until I brought in something the next day that demonstrated legit ZIP codes starting with 0 that I 'won'. Crap like this reinforced my distrust of authority and cynicism in life (for better or worse).

EDIT: Anyone else remember the "New Zork Times" newsletter? :)

EDIT 2: It wasn't until much later that I learned the ZIP code system we had wasn't actually completely formed until after she was at least a teen, if not a full adult - she simply wasn't exposed to stuff that I was earlier, it didn't really impact her, and she just assumed they were all numbers with no leading 0s. In some ways a minor point, but... it also taught me about stuff I took for granted not always having been there, even something as basic as addresses. Didn't really learn that until much later after that class.

"I am the authority in these matters."

" Why?"

"Because I am in authority."

>EDIT: Anyone else remember the "New Zork Times" newsletter? :)

Yep. I went to school with a bunch of the Infocom guys and was an unofficial beta tester for them at one point.

did they have any clue how groundbreaking their stuff was at the time?

People really need to learn the difference between ordinal, cardinal, and nominal numbers... And what 'semantics' are.

Are ZIP codes actually number? I'd say they're really numeric strings, and should be handled as strings.

The worst is when you store it as a string, having learned from others' mistakes, but then upon exporting to CSV... Excel kindly strips the leading 0 and you get a bug report that your software is screwing up the ZIP codes!

Took a bit of searching before finding this: https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/handling-leading-zero-in...

Excel is the bane of my existence. I give a lot of speeches about how to preserve data precision. However It seems to be largley in vain, as there is often a lot of back and forth when handling data between different groups, even programmers don't seem immune from screwing up a csv file with excel.

Oh god office workers love putting everything in Excel. Even when it makes no sense...

Can't blame them. The only other choice they usually have is some crappy, poorly thought "database system" written by IT people who are poster children of this article. I'm a programmer and I defend use of Excel in the offices - I've actually worked in such an office before and I know that all the alternatives suck more.

And I guess that's one of the biggest mistake programmers make - assuming that real-life data will conform to some imaginary, bureaucratic, fixed format. Even schemas ain't fixed in real life. That's why people use Excel.

The other awesome is taking a screenshot, pasting it in to MS Word, then mailing the docx file. The entire screenshot then ends up being 3 inches across.

I remember when we did MS Access basics in my ICT class in what Americans would call middle school, and my teacher correctly mentioned that a telephone number is text, not a number. :)

> Is it common to believe that post codes don't start with zero?

It may be less of an explicit belief and more of a case of "This looks like a number! Let's store it as a number!" which wipes out leading zeros.

Gotcha! I understand now.

Which also won't work with post codes that are not numeric. The UK has those, for example.

Yea, this seems to be the case. I've had the leading zero stripped on a few occasions when receiving items at an FPO AE address (all APO/DPO/FPO AE zip codes start with a zero).

Ireland usually does not use post codes :-)

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