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Comment by poizan42 | Hacker News Reader

I have an 'æ' in my middle name (formally secondary first name because history reasons). Usually I just don't use it, but it's always funny when a payment form instructs me to write my full name exactly as written on my credit card, and then goes on to tell me my name is invalid.

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I live in Łódź.

Love receiving packages addressed to ??d? :)

I wonder how many of those packages end up in Vada, Italy. Or Cody, Wyoming. Or Buda, Texas...

I imagine the “Poland” part of the address would narrow it down somewhat.

I got curious if I can get data to answer that, and it seems so.

Based on xlsx from [0], we got the following ??d? localities in Poland:

1 x Bądy, 1 x Brda, 5 x Buda, 120 x Budy, 4 x Dudy, 1 x Dydy, 1 x Gady, 1 x Judy, 1 x Kady, 1 x Kadź, 1 x Łada, 1 x Lady, 4 x Lądy, 2 x Łady, 1 x Lęda, 1 x Lody, 4 x Łódź, 1 x Nida, 1 x Reda, 1 x Redy, 1 x Redz, 74 x Ruda, 8 x Rudy, 12 x Sady, 2 x Zady, 2 x Żydy

Certainly quite a lot to search for a lost package.

[0]: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/188,wykaz-urzedowych-nazw-mie...

Interesting! However, assuming that ASCII characters are always rendered correctly and never as "?", it seems like the only solution for "??d?" would be one of the four Łódźs?

Sounds like someone is getting ready for Advent of Code!

Interestingly, Lady, Łady and Lądy will end up the same after the usual transliteration.

So, transliteration to "Lady", "?ady" and "L?dy" respectively seems to work even better in this case than "Lady"

That's (one reason) why postal codes exist. Dunno about Poland, but town names here are not unique to begin with.

Experienced postal workers most probably know well that ??d? represents a municipality with three non-ascii characters.

Łódź seems to be the only one translating to ??d?, all others have normal ASCII characters in the places 1, 2 and 4

And the postal code.

And the packages get there? Don't you put "Łódź (Lodz)" in the city field? Or the postal code takes care of the issue?

Yep, postal code does all the work.

You live in a boat? But how do they know on what sea?

Ironically, there are no big rivers in Łódź (anymore)

anymore??

Sorry, I was thirsty.

There were no "big" rivers, ever. More like springs. We have lots of subterranean water, so out of the 18 rivers we have in the city, 16 have their sources here [0]. They were used to power mills in the 19-20th century during the industrialization. Many of the rivers that used to go through the city center flow underground.

I live close to the river Olechówka [1], which flows into a regulated reservoir that used to feed a mill - so the area is called Młynek, "Little Mill" :)

[0] https://podwodnalodz.blogspot.com/2013/09/o-wodzie-po-ktorej... [1] https://i.imgur.com/SIp8CxN.jpeg

It goes both ways.

I received a large delivery from Poland recently, and it was addressed to "K?benhavn", with similar mistakes in the street name.

As you may be aware, the name field for credit card transactions is rarely verified (perhaps limited to North America, not sure).

Often I’ll create a virtual credit card number and use a fake name, and virtually never have had a transaction declined. Even if they are more aggressively asking for a street address, giving just the house number often works. This isn’t a deep cover but gives a little bit of a anonymity for marketing.

It's for when things go wrong. Same as with wire transfers. Nobody checks it unless there's a dispute.

The thing is though that payment networks do in fact do instant verification and it is interesting what gets verified and when. At gas stations it is very common to ask for a zip code (again US), and this is verified immediately to allow the transaction to proceed. I’ve found that when a street address is asked for there is some verification and often a match on the house number is sufficient. Zip codes are verified almost always, names pretty much never. This likely has something to do with complexities behind “authorized users”.

There is so many ways to write your address I always assume it it’s just the house number as well. In fact I vaguely remember that being a specific field when interacting with some old payment gateway.

At American gas stations, if you have a Canadian credit card, you type in 00000 because Canadians don't have ZIP codes.

Are we sure they don't actually validate against a more generic postal code field? Then again some countries have letters in their postcodes (the UK comes to mind), so that might be a problem anyways.

Canada has letters in postal codes. That’s the issue the GP is referring to, since US gas stations invariably just have a simple 5 numeric digit input for “zip” code.

Funny thing about house numbers: they have their own validation problems. For a while I lived in a building whose house number was of the form 123½ and that was an ongoing source of problems. If it just truncated the ½ that was basically fine (the house at 123 didn't have apartment numbers and the postal workers would deliver it correctly) but validating in online forms (twenty-ish years ago) was a challenge. If they ran any validation at all they'd reject the ½, but it was a crapshoot whether which of "123-1/2" or "123 1/2" would work, or sometimes neither one. The USPS's official recommendation at the time was to enter it as "123 1 2 N Streetname" which usually validated but looked so odd it was my last choice (and some validators rejected the "three numbers" format too).

I don't think I ever tried "123.5", actually.

Around here, there used to be addresses like "0100 SW Whatever Ave" that were distinct from "100 SW Whatever Ave". And we've still got various places that have, for example, "NW 21st Avenue" and "NW 21st Place" as a simple workaround for a not-entirely-regular street grid optimized for foot navigation.

123 + 0.5?

The government of Ireland has many IT systems that cannot handle áccénted letters. #headdesk

I worked for an Irish company that didn't support ' in names. Did get fixed eventually, but sigh...

Bobby Tables enters the chat

Still much better when it fails at the first step. I once got myself in a bit of a struggle with Windows 10 by using "ł" as part of Windows username. Amusingly/irritatingly large number of applications, even some of Microsoft's own ones, could not cope with that.

For a similar reason many Java applications do not work in Turkish Windowses. The Turkish İi Iı problem.

"Write your name the way it's spelled in your government issued id" is my favorite. I have three ids issued by two governments and no two match letter by letter.

My wife had two given names and no surname. (In fact, before eighth class, she only had one given name.) Lacking a surname is very common in some parts of India. Also some parts of India put surname first, and some last, and the specific meaning and customs vary quite a bit too. Indian passports actually separate given names and family names entirely (meaning you can’t reconstruct the name as it would customarily be written). Her passport has the family name line blank. Indigo writes: “Name should be as per government ID”, and has “First And Middle Name” and “Last Name” fields. Both required, of course. I discovered that if you put “-” in the Last Name field, the booking process falls over several steps later in a “something went wrong, try again later” way; only by inspecting an API response in the dev tools did I determine it was objecting to having “-” in the name. Ugh. Well, I have a traditional western First Middle Last name, and from putting it in things, sometimes it gets written First Middle Last and sometimes Last First Middle, and I’ve received some communications addressed to First, some to Last, and some to Middle (never had that happen before!). It’s a disaster.

Plenty of government things have been digitalised in recent years too, and split name fields tend to have been coded to make both mandatory. It’s… disappointing, given the radical diversity of name construction across India.