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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I should probably clarify something, given how heated the discussion is becoming.

I could have written the same thing as a nerdy techie article, pointing out flaws in input validation. Do you think this would have gotten my point across? How many people would have read that article? Would it have made it to Hacker News?

Look: this is not a rant about Americans. It just so happens that US has developed most of the internet as we know it and it just so happens that most of e-commerce happens there. I'm sure any number of websites in other countries are guilty of similar sins, but you have to start somewhere.

The point is, we should start thinking more carefully about how we validate forms and store user data in that "global economy" everyone is bragging about.

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"Would it have made it to Hacker News?"

Heaven knows, we never see nerdy, technical material on this site.

Are you trying to "clarify" or "justify"?

EDIT: Serious question. At the same time you're saying "this is not a rant about Americans", you're also saying but none of you would have paid attention if I hadn't made it one.

I think on some level this is a rant about Americans, even if you didn't intend it to be one. My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do. I would bet money on the same being true for Brazilians and Australians. I would bet money on Japanese people being aware of the fact that not every country is partitioned into prefectures.

Maybe this is because Indians, Germans etc. are not socialized to see their way of running a nation as the only way, at least not in the way Americans are. Maybe not. In any case it's a nice demonstration of how collective cultural ignorance leads to annoyed visitors and, one might presume, lost sales.

Brazilian websites are just as bad, if not worse than American ones about this, probably because websites that do online sales in Brazil tend to cater to a primarily domestic clientele. If you happen to live in Argentina, as I do, entering your address when you buy things in Brazil can be comically frustrating.

Americans definitely don't have a monopoly on ignorance when it comes to other countries' address formats.

See my post elsewhere, and maybe your German friends aren't Web designers, but I've had problems with addresses on German forms - just because I speak German doesn't mean I live there. So this is a universal problem, not an American one: internationalization is hard, because there is a tremendous amount of domain-specific knowledge that is not convenient to find.

"My Indian and German friends are aware of the fact that not every country has states, even though their countries do"

Apparently not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1232278

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