Singular 'They' Is Word of the Year - <AUTHOR> https://illinois.edu/blog/view/25/280996 <comment><USER3> My native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, and it is surprisingly difficult to learn to fluently and effortlessly use 'he' (or 'she') in English in situations when there is no need to specify the gender, or when the gender is not known ("After the user clicks the button, he/she receives ..."). My brain is just not wired that way, I feel like I am forced to create information when there is none, and potentially incorrect information, lies.

Almost as if a language didn't have a construct to talk about cars without specifying their color at the same time, so you all the time have to create random colors in order to talk about cars in the abstract.

I was very happy when I learned that 'they' is a mostly acceptable solution.

I understand gendered nouns can also be a politically loaded topic, but I only meant this as a perspective from someone who learned English as a second language.

<comment><USER4> This is pretty close to how I, as a native English speaker, feel about gendered inanimate objects. I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals.

I would've preferred not to have to learn that something as simple as 'milk' is feminine in Spanish, masculine in Italian, and neuter in Russian - <USER2> hunk of my brain could surely be put to better use.

<comment><USER5> The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof.

Unless you really think a turnip is feminine, and a little girl has no gender like in German.

All they're doing is describing a category of like nouns. The term for the grouping happens to be the word gender. The word is overloaded in this case to mean multiple things and is at best a false cognate.

The fact that the same thing can have multiple genders or lack thereof as you noted should be the biggest clue that grammatical gender has nothing to do with genitals.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't matter whether it's related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does/did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person.

Whether you call it "grammatical gender" or "gender" or "noun class" is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette butt.

[1] Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman, and male (cartero) with man; the little-girl exception you mention from German is because that diminutive suffix (-chen in Mädchen) takes the neuter case with higher priority. The (fact that this is such a predictable, rare) exception proves the (general validity of the) rule.

<comment><USER7> > Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the > female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of > woman

Languages with grammatical gender don't even consistently have "masculine" and "feminine" categories (though certainly that's the most common distinction, with or without a "neuter" category, in a grammatical gender system.) E.g., several have the grammatical genders of "animate" and "inanimate" (or something similar), but not "masculine" and "feminine".

<comment><USER6> I know -- I perhaps should have clarified that I meant "languages with [something commonly referred to as grammatical] gender for nouns", although I feel it was clear from context, since the footnote was referred to after " _these_ languages" (not languages in general).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always used this intentionally in spite of being fully aware that it's "ungrammatical." Saying that singular they is ungrammatical is rather like saying that irregular verbs are ungrammatical or uncountable nouns are ungrammatical. It doesn't matter because there are already a significant number of irregularities in English and having one more isn't going to cause any problems and, relatively speaking, isn't going to make English any less systematic.

<comment><USER9> I find myself doing the same, despite increasing preference for "she" by academicians and journalists.

See the top post in another HN thread for my criticism, copied below. When "she" becomes the default, I find myself veering off from the topic at hand to consider gender politics and try to infer the author's intention. Does OP see makers as "us" and managers as "them"? Is OP using "she" because /they/ believe managers are disproportionately male and so chooses a pronoun to prevent further exclusion? An ideal grammar solution should not require the author to disclose his politics, either by omission or commission, just to communicate effectively.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10658187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10658187)

"Manager time" is a small allocation. Since the manager's heap only uses blocks this size, she can do this all day without any problems or fragmentation.

"Maker time" is a large contiguous block. If the heap is empty, you can allocate them without any problem. But stick one manager-sized block in the middle and now you've split your heap such that the total time available is large enough, but it's not contiguous. Classic heap fragmentation[2].

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use this all the time. Easier than worrying about gendered nonsense.

<comment><USER11> +1. Reading Ben Horowitz's book, every fictional CEO is 'he' or 'she' which makes you think you've missed something and they're not fictional. 'They' could have sufficed perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've never liked this, but I have to admit that logically, a mismatch in number is no worse than the mismatch in gender we get by using "he," which has the disadvantage of being annoying to many people. And I don't think efforts to make up a new pronoun are likely to succeed. Singular "they" might well be the future.

But if I could have my pick I'd go with "um."

<comment><USER13> The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs.

I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."

<comment><USER14> One of the things I find weird in English is you do that too "you": "you are" even when talking to a single person; whereas in French (for instance) there are two different pronouns for the singular and plural use of "you" ("tu" and "vous"), with different forms forms for the verbs.

So using plural form of verbs with singular "they" does not seem that surprising to me.

<comment><USER7> English "you" is the grammatically plural (previously used also to denote formality, where it is not _semantically_ plural) form, corresponding to French "vous". The English grammatically singular form ("thee/thou") corresponding to French "tu" has generally fallen out of use, so "you" has in effect become the all-purpose 2nd-person pronoun, but its still _grammatically_ plural.

Likewise, "they" is grammatically plural, regardless of its contextual semantics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > turning either to invented pronouns like xe and zie

This made me pause...aren't _all_ pronouns (and for that matter, words in general) "invented?" Are they (see what I did there...) just making a distinction between words that are adapted or modified from other words, and ones that aren't?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps "Newly invented pronouns" would have been more clear. The distinction being Singular "They" has been around for a long time, and "Xe" can't be pronounced by the human mouth and confuses the older folk. Or something...

<comment><USER15> Ha, well as one of the "older folk," I will say that while "xe" doesn't confuse me, it is definitely a bit jarring when I see it used. I have no problem with it's use, I am just not used to seeing it. I recently read a book by a fantasy author whose stories I enjoy, but in this latest book she used "xe" quite often to describe some non-binary characters, and it always managed to pull me out of the story.

<comment><USER17> I'm reading Greg Egan's Diaspora right now and he uses ve, ver, and vis for the (post-/non-human) main characters. It's definitely exciting in a worldbuilding sort of way but I still prefer they, them, and their because it's much less jarring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I was taught italian grammar I was told explicitly that if the gender of the subject is unknown the masculine one should be used by default as a rule. Sounds totally alright to me.

Now I'm wondering how many people would be offended by this.

</comment><comment><USER19> When writing "he or she" \- they does seem like a viable substitute when gender is irrelevant.

But I cannot stand this new trend of making gender irrelevant for the sake of pushing gender lines. We use gendered pronouns for context clues, metadata, and comedy. It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.

<comment><USER20> 'They' isn't a viable substitute just when gender is irrelevant.

There isn't really a label for what I identify as, but it is not 'she' or 'he,' it's somewhere in-between and neither at the same time. So even 'he or she' wouldn't apply to me: I'm not one or the other.

I _prefer_ xe/etc; but I'm absolutely 100% fine with they/them. Just don't call me he (because I'm not) or she (because I'm not). ;)

Does that make sense?

> It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.

I think this ignores too much how language imposes itself on a culture - and a culture on a language. The gender neutral pronoun is a natural construct and universal to many languages, too. We just don't have an "official" one in English.

<comment><USER21> I saw a comic strip once where someone was talking to a nonbinary person. Somewhere in it, the (presumably) cisgendered person said "but then I won't know your gender!"

And the nonbinary person replied "that's okay, because I don't know it either."

(I probably mis-remembered parts, and I'm not telling it anywhere near as well)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Language Log has posted for many years about singular they, often spotting examples of it in well-edited publications.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27)

See also the wikipedia page on singular they, chock full of usage examples:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they)

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this article really not give a single example of use of singular 'they' or did I just read too fast?

<comment><USER24> > _or did I just read too fast?_

I must have read too fast as well. The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, to be frank.

<comment><USER25> > The author would have done well to include several examples, and they > doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, > to be frank.

"Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words, not singular forms: "I talked with a person today. They were interested in grammar.". (Rather than "They was interested", which sounds completely wrong.)

<comment><USER24> > _" Singular they" still normally pairs with plural forms of other words_

I'd point out those "plural forms" are now "singular forms" as well, so it looks like those terms will need refining.

<comment><USER7> > I'd point out those "plural forms" are now "singular forms" as well

No, they're still plural, just as they are when combined with other grammatically plural pronouns that are used with singular semantics (the royal/editorial use of "we" and -- even more commonly -- "you", the second- person plural pronoun that has in virtually all uses displaces the singular one.)

<comment><USER24> Like I said: Those terms will need refining, and all you've done is add "grammatical" and "semantic" to differentiate the cases.

<comment><USER7> > Those terms will need refining

But they won't. We've used "plural" and "singular" fine in referring to the grammatical features of verb tenses and the nouns/pronouns they agree with just fine for centuries, despite the fact that grammatical number of "we", "they", and _especially_ "you" has often -- for longer than we've even _had_ formalized descriptions of English grammar -- disagreed with semantic number.

There's nothing new here to necessitate "refining" anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've noticed that economists and other academics like to use "she" in the same cases as the singular "they" \- a common-gender third-person pronoun, the "he or she". Yes, it intentionally uses the feminine third-person, but I guess it makes a point about inclusion this way.

<comment><USER27> It's a political statement.

Usage of the male pronoun is historic just like the usage of the plural pronoun. The choice to go agains hundreds of years of usage is very political.

Personally I prefer the plural when you do not know or do not wish to highlight the gender. It jibes more with my personal sense of right.

<comment><USER28> I was taught that "he" is gender-neutral as/when needed, and in true Humpty- Dumpty fashion that's what I use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This bit:

 _Singular they was Word of the Year back in 1365, when it first appeared in English as a gender-neutral English pronoun. It won again in 1885, when it was praised in the Atlanta Constitution for triumphing over the ignorant opposition of grammarians and lexicographers._

Reads like an Onion article. Am I not in on the joke?

<comment><USER30> _Truth in advertising: The Web of Language Distinguished Usage Panel, charged each year with picking the Word of the Year, consists entirely of me._

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A pretty fun read, I also like the disclaimer :-). I was always much more comfortable with the singular they and the plural yall.

</comment><comment><USER32> Tell CMOS then. You are in the same state after all.

They said (tee hee hee) this: A. I'm afraid your gender-neutral pronoun (at least in the sense you need) does not exist in our lexicon. I agree that the plural pronoun with a singular noun seems inadequate; I would suggest that you recast the sentence altogether or at least make "mind" plural for agreement: their minds. Other writers alternate between using "his" and "her" in such constructions in order to give equal status to each pronoun. [http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Pr...](http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Pronouns.html?page=1)

<comment><USER15> Elsewhere on that page they seem to give, if not approval of the construct, than at least acknowledgment that it is solving the problem:

> The use of they as a singular pronoun is a hot topic in online grammar > forums. By traditional standards, the sentence is incorrect because it > contains no plural noun for they to refer to. Traditionally, the correct > versions are "The telltale sign of right-wingers: they can't write in > English to save their lives" and "The telltale sign of a right-winger: he > can't write in English to save his life."

> The growing acceptance of they as singular is in response to a need for a > gender-neutral pronoun that avoids the use of he to mean he or she. Good > writers would make right-winger plural to avoid the appearance of > incorrectness or gender bias, but in other sentences the plural is not a > good option: "Someone ate my Twinkie, and they'd better watch out!" In those > contexts, many language experts now approve of the use of they. You can > learn more by searching online for "singular they."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One of the advantages of Spanish over English is that the problem that singular 'they' is trying to solve doesn't even exist. Gotta love that always- on gender alignment feature :)

</comment><comment><USER34> I've used this since the 90s, so -

oh God, I'm a pronoun hipster. ;-(

</comment><comment><USER35> I've noticed certain papers/essays posted here using "she" when referring to a hypothetical person, which I think is a nice touch—since "he" is contained within the word.

</comment><comment><USER36> Using the post's title on hacker news is probably misleading. It sounds more official out of context, whereas in the post the "award" is just a tongue-in- cheek framing device:

> _-Truth in advertising: The Web of Language Distinguished Usage Panel, > charged each year with picking the Word of the Year, consists entirely of > me._

The comments keep up the joke:

> _Kudos to the Distinguished Usage Panel! "They" chose wisely and well._

<comment><USER37> I see your point, but all "word of the year" awards are made up anyhow. If anybody suggests a more accurate title we can change it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> English already has a perfectly good singular, gender-netural pronoun: "it". We're just not used to using "it" for non-child people:

      When the baby is hungry, it eats.

      When the person is hungry, it eats.

If you adopt "they", you have to either adopt plural verbs, or allow "they" to be associated with singular verbs:

      When the person is hungry, they eat.

      When the person is hungry, they eats.

<comment><USER7> > If you adopt 'they', you have to either adopt plural verbs

Which we already do with semantically singular uses of the first-person and second-person grammatically-plural pronouns in English, so that's not really a big deal. (And already do with semantically singular uses of "they": its been "adopted" in English-as-actually used for over half a millennium.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've had enough of this discussion! The new gender-neutral singular pronoun is _thou_! That's right, _thou_ was the answer we were looking for.

<comment><USER40> I think thou is second person ("you"), not third ("he" and "she"). We _are_ in need of a second person plural though--at least outside of the South where they have "y'all" and NJ where they have "youse guys".

<comment><USER41> Don't forget "all y'all" when referring to more than a couple people.

"Y'all" is plural, "all y'all" is _more_ plural.

<comment><USER25> In conversations with people who also speak multiple languages, I've sometimes explained the distinction between "y'all" and "all y'all" as similar to the one between "allí" and "allá" in Spanish. Both "allí" and "allá" mean "there" (as opposed to "aquí", "here"), but "allá" is further away in a progression; informally you could translate it as "way over there".

For instance, suppose you know a family of people. Two people out of that family are currently visiting you. You might say "Y'all should bring the whole family over next time; all y'all are welcome anytime." The first "y'all" refers to the two people visiting; the "all y'all" refers to the whole family.

<comment><USER42> I've heard "These, them, or those?" used to indicate a 3-step progression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Scanned the article, can someone give me a solid example of how this is used in a sentence?

<comment><USER44> You see it in notifications from social apps. "Jenny has started following you. Follow them back", etc. Because a lot of apps don't ask people to enter their gender they just resort to "them" instead of "him" or "her". It's really as annoying as people just using "her" everywhere just to be safe.

<comment><USER45> Why is using "her" everywhere worse than using "him" everywhere?

<comment><USER7> > Why is using "her" everywhere worse than using "him" everywhere?

Because its just as gendered _and_ conflicts with standard usage (which, in English, accepts the use of the masculine linguistic gender for subjects of unknown sex or gender identity, so it is not better from either a "gender neutrality, regardless of accepted usage" standpoint or from a "clarity of communication through conforming to accepted usage" standpoint.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> They be utterly pretentious. Germanic languages have gender.

Language change should be natural, not forced based on some nebulous social engineering goal.

Speakers of Old English considered each noun to have a grammatical gender.

If anyone has a serious citation for "he" was imposed by "meddling grammarians", please let us know.

Don't we already have a neutral pronoun: "it"?

<comment><USER37> The point is that it has nothing to do with language change. It has been settled usage since Chaucer.

It's generic 'he' that was the interloper. Ironically, the language engineers of today have most in common with the meddling grammarians who tried (never entirely successfully) to impose it.</comment></comment>


Robocrop: world's first raspberry-picking robot set to work - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world-first-fruit-picking-robot-set-to-work-artificial-intelligence-farming <comment><USER2> I had a summer job picking raspberries on the Isle of Man. It was hard, boring, work. I left after only a few weeks, and got my first programming job (the island had a thriving offshore finance industry and no Manx coders).

So I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, awesome that yet another crappy job is being automated. On the other hand, that job literally saved my life - I was homeless and struggling until that opportunity came along, and it lead on to a career that has kept me secure ever since.

How do we replace the crappy low-skilled, low-paying jobs that we're automating, but that also allow people to stay alive while they sort themselves out?

<comment><USER3> You implement a Job Guarantee. The ability to sell your labour to the central bank at the living wage, who then allocates it to local democracy to use as local democracy sees fit working for the public good.

After all the 'interest rate targeting' function of the central bank, and the unelected wonks that run it, is supposed to guarantee full employment. If it isn't doing so, then those who screwed up should obviously pay the price of their failure.

That it acts as a powerful targeted automatic stabiliser injecting liquidity temporally and spatially on demand into local economies in a manner bank lending could never hope to match is just an added bonus.

<comment><USER4> For anyone unfamiliar, a job guarantee is a proposal of Modern Monetary Theory. Although the validity of MMT has neither been established nor disproven explicitly, it relies on, among other things, the ability of a nation to print its own currency, collect taxes in its own currency, and issue debt exclusively in its own currency. It is therefore not applicable in all nations.

> The ability to sell your labour to the central bank at the living wage, who > then allocates it to local democracy to use as local democracy sees fit > working for the public good.

How would a central bank determine allocations to various municipalities? This step necessarily requires discretion on the part of the central bank. Such a policy would distort the labor market, crowding out private sector employment and potentially producing malinvestment. It would also increase the power of the central bank, which is not necessarily desirable if the unelected nature of central bankers is a concern.

> the 'interest rate targeting' function of the central bank... is supposed to > guarantee full employment

The Federal Reserve bank has a dual mandate of stable, low inflation and low unemployment. Central banks in many other countries are mandated only to maintain stable, low inflation.

> That it acts as a powerful targeted automatic stabiliser

There are other automatic stabilizers that can be implemented independent of the central bank. In the United States, for example, tax incentives for employer provided health insurance have a procyclical effect, as decreased employment during recession causing reduced healthcare expenditures.

> bank lending could never hope to match

Global lending has been distorted since 2008 due to the Federal Reserve's interest on excess reserves policy. The combination of increased reserve requirements, increased bank reserves due to the fed's enlarged balance sheet, and the availability of a risk free return on reserves has reduced the overall quantity of loans relative to prior trends. Even small, local banks, who would otherwise like to make loans and are subject to less stringent reserve requirements, have increased the reserves on hand due to the breakdown of the federal funds market caused by IOER. It's hard to definitively state that bank lending is less effective than other policy when it's been hampered by central bank policy for a decade.

<comment><USER3> "It is therefore not applicable in all nations."

It's applicable to all nations. You could have a currency that is specifically for this job. As long as you remember to tax it out of existence at the other end.

"This step necessarily requires discretion on the part of the central bank. "

The process in the UK is straightforward. It follows the existing Universal Credit system. The indidividual presents themselves at the local Job Centre, the Job Centre signs them up and allocates them as local democracy dictates to jobs in the area (whether working for local councils, or local charities as the municipality dictates). The job program signs off timesheets which are filed with the UC programme, and then the UC is paid - directly by the central bank. Rather than a 'Treasury' account, you use a 'Job Guarantee' account to charge the bill to. Other than than the process is the same.

"The Federal Reserve bank has a dual mandate of stable, low inflation and low unemployment. "

Which it is failing to keep. Central banks without employment targets have high unemployment - particularly if government is constrained.

"There are other automatic stabilizers that can be implemented independent of the central bank."

Not and allow a balanced budget provision at the same time.

"Global lending has been distorted since 2008 due to the Federal Reserve's interest on excess reserves policy"

Without that central interest rates would be zero. The natural rate of interest is zero in the interbank - as any banker will tell you. Central banks interfere in the market to raise rates.

Reserves have no control function over bank lending. At all. Ever.

And anyway that misses the point. Bank lending _takes time_ , which as any student of dynamic systems knows introduces unstable harmonics into the response function. The reaction is precisely the same as trying to stabilise a skidding car with a steering wheel. Get too big a skid and you can't counter it because you can't respond fast enough. Then the car crashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate to be a downer but ill believe it when I see it. That robot is big, bulky, and does not look nimble or fast. A human could have picked a couple boxes worth of berries in the time it took that robot to decide to pick one berry. Anybody who has ever picked berries of any kind, be it strawberries or blueberries or blackberries will tell you, speed is the name of the game and even the average human versus an experienced picker isn't even a competition. An experienced picker is going to be grabbing multiple berries at a time with all of their fingers, not just one at a time. An experienced picker will have decided which berries to pick next before they even got done putting the ones they just picked into a basket which only takes a fraction of a second.

You will get far better returns breeding and genetically modifying the plants to be easier to pick or shake the berries loose than any robot ive ever seen. Sure, it is technically feasible, but nobody is going to spend a million dollars on a robot that doesn't pick faster than an experienced human, it would take multiple decades to pay itself off even if you assumed the power and maintenance was free.

Maybe in another 10 years it will be worth seriously looking into berry picking robots again, but berries are literally the hardest and most difficult fruit for a robot to pick. Uneven ripening, very delicate fruits, tangled messes of plant vines, very little maneuvering room, ect. It is like trying to automate a rally car before you are able to automate an oval track race.

<comment><USER6> They did start with the hardest berries so that it's easier to work backwards for easier fruit. Also the plan is to hire them out to farmers at a price per kilo picked,which is aimed at less than the cost of a human.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I genuinely expected Raspberry Pi inside.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure one of the end products will include pie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hearing my dad talk in the past about machine designs to automate both tomato and strawberry machines. He recommends cutting the stalk with either a laser or a scissor. This is significantly faster than trying to pick a vulnerable fruit.

<comment><USER10> If you do that with raspberries then you need to have people process the fruit again as they're sold without stems. Tomatoes and strawberries are sold with stems as they don't detach without cutting. Don't know what the effect would be, commercially and in terms of preservation, of selling raspberries with stems.

<comment><USER11> I think if robotically trimmed fruits with stems sold for 10% cheaper than slow picked stemless fruits, there'd be no market left for stemless by the time the season is over.

<comment><USER10> If selling with stems works fine, no doubt. But raspberries detach from stems as they mature so you may end up with a messy box after a while. Or maybe this is just done because it's easy to pick manually by grabbing the fruit and picking with stems works as well. I'll have to try picking some with stems and see what happens.

<comment><USER12> > _raspberries detach from stems as they mature_

If the problem can be reduced to separating objects of different characteristics from a process flow, existing food processing techniques like vibrating belts and air guns can handle it, no need for robot arms.

<comment><USER10> Ripe raspberries are very delicate. Some of these small fruits are sometimes picked directly into the final retail boxes to minimize handling. I don't know if you can apply those methods if you're not then processing the fruit further into jams or juices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Imagining if robots can pick raspberries at leak ripeness, in the near future one machine can do the same for all crops, plus weeding. This seems more economically viable than the current monoculture and chemical based approaches.

And if one field can support a wider array of crops, they can produce more for local consumption, and lower transportation distances and costs.

<comment><USER14> You can not mix a bunch of random crops in one field. This is such a HN comment.

<comment><USER15> Well you can, permaculture advocates do that but it's not viable for industrial agriculture yet, if ever.

Of course, by random I mean specific crops chosen for their compability to each other...

[0] [https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-...](https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture- design-principles/9-diversity/) (I really like that image of corns, beans, and squash together from traditional Mesoamerican farming)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "Analysts attribute this lack of economic efficiency to a shift towards more > low-skilled jobs since the financial crisis, a lack of business investment > and a decade of austerity."

Stopping austerity would help then?

</comment><comment><USER17> "worlds first" seems to be a misnomer here. There are machines for tractors that can pick raspberries. The machine works by shaking the entire raspberry bush and collecting the berries that fall.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOG85YtZhII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOG85YtZhII)

<comment><USER18> I suspect that damages a very large proportion of fruit, so either yield ends up being terrifically low, or its only suitable for jam.

I suppose you could be pedantic and point out it isn't actually _picking_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The whole time I expected it to just smash the berry. This would fit into the "one day this will be neat" vibe.

</comment><comment><USER20> dynamixel servos are a ton of fun to play with, if you ever have the chance.

(the robot featured seems to be using MX-64T's on the wrist)

</comment><comment><USER21> No Raspberry Pi inside?

</comment><comment><USER22> > The world's first raspberry-picking robot

The majority of raspberries are harvested by machine and have been for decades. Handpicking is only necessary for high quality fresh berries.

</comment><comment><USER23> 3D printed parts and dynamixel servos do not inspire confidence.

</comment><comment><USER24> It picks ~700 per day at most, not counting acquisition and repositioning time for finding a new fruit. Article is intentionally misleading, video is a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER25> For the cost and maintenance of the machine over a year, you could probably exploit backpackers for--in my expert estimation--approximately one billion years.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll believe it when I see a video of the "final version".

Until then it's just like any other flaky and slow robot grasper demos out there trained using various flaky deep reinforcement learning algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER27> As mentioned, the "25k/day" is for a future model in 2020. According to a linked video in the article, a human does about 10k/day.

I believe that right now we're at the very start of this. Robots were supposed to come for all our manual labor jobs years ago, but they never did, because if it's not a pure assembly line environment, robots can't cope with the uncertainty. Research in robotics is increasing and getting places fast, largely due to advances in reinforcement learning.

I give it another 2 or 3 years until we have a robot hand with a camera that acts as dexterous and capable as a human hand. Once we have that, tons of opportunities like this raspberry picking are open for automation.

<comment><USER28> "I give it another 2 or 3 years until we have a robot hand with a camera that acts as dexterous and capable as a human hand."

-some guy, circa 1975

<comment><USER29> The original 1958 AI proposal was expecting to crack it over a summer hackathon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> blogspam for [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world- fir...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world-first-fruit- picking-robot-set-to-work-artificial-intelligence-farming)

Also the title is bombastic, 25k/day is what they expect to be able to build by 2020

<comment><USER31> Yes. This is an academic prototype. And it's really, really slow.[1]

There are much better robotic fruit pickers.[2][3]. And the commercial ones that do this entirely by mechanical means.[4]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFemWAXx-3I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFemWAXx-3I)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaL3UxUclKY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaL3UxUclKY)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt73GOk4JRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt73GOk4JRY)

<comment><USER32> 1 = Raspberries outdoor. Camera and two-finger gripper + pull.

2 = Apples outdoor. Camera and three-finger gripper + twist + pull

3 = Strawberries indoor/outdoor. Camera and two-finger gripper + pull.

4 = Blueberries + raspberries outdoor. Multiple general agitator designs + fall. (see [https://youtu.be/bt73GOk4JRY?t=100](https://youtu.be/bt73GOk4JRY?t=100))

I think the fourth is the only honestly commercially viable option. However, it's never going to work with most fruit, because it relies upon general agitation to disconnect the fruit.

Additionally, all of the solutions require neatly cropped rows. Whereas, the promise of robotics is that it will allow intercropping which creates more productive land with a stronger and more natural ecosystem, reducing outlays on pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer and related labour and increasing effective crop density and land use. None of these solutions even touch on these very real opportunities.

FWIW, I am personally confident that my R&D team (who normally work on food production and packaging robotics) could produce a functionally superior prototype to the OP video in a matter of weeks, for a fraction of the budget.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So much for the HNer who confidently claimed that robots wouldn't be doing this kind of work any time soon, and used that as the basis for flaming me.

</comment><comment><USER34> With the current state of deep learning, this kind of application is so easy to make, it could be a science fair project.

</comment><comment><USER35> We used to call this "vaporware".

Certainly with my own robots I can pick raspberrys much faster and better than those guys can currently do.

This thing is extremely slow. I am wondering what kind of engineering those people have used for it to be so slow. Probably they are using java or python or mathlab code, instead of using things like C, shaders and FPGA code, expecting the creation of this low level code to be the "easy" part(in the future of course).

From my experience, your greatest advantage is the ability to master those low level technologies. It has to be designed around this technologies and not as an after thought like this project looks.

<comment><USER11> As someone working in automation, I don't think the real bottleneck here would be python. It seems more like it's waiting for accurate sensor input and trying to properly position itself. Slight mechanical imperfections with a delicate fruit like a raspberry means disaster, while a machine like this could probably recognize and tug apples off a tree without any delay.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to proxify emails? - <AUTHOR> I'm running a store platform for which buyers coordinates are sensitive. In order to prevent sellers to store the buyers coordinates to be independent, I am looking for ways to alias phone numbers and emails.
So far, I've found Twilio which seems great for SMS and Call with Virtual Phone Numbers.
But I can't find a similar way for emails. Is there any I missed? <comment><USER2> For email forwarding, you can have a look at [https://github.com/danisola/forward-cat](https://github.com/danisola/forward- cat). However, I do not know if this would work for your setup. On top of that, I do not think it handles replies to the email alias, but I am not sure.

What could work is to just use an internal system for messaging, so that each of your users has a private inbox in your store platform. Kind of like direct messaging in a forum...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for following up but they lack an API which is mandatory for my needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> you can use mailgun for that. it has an api and concepts of "routes". you will be able to intercept email from seller@seller_domain.com to buyer@your_domain.com, handle it in your app (mailgun will POST to your web app), and then send from seller@your_domain.com to buyer@buyer_domain.com. really transparent. you can tweak any part of the workflow. have all conversations and all stats in your app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I found out after a while. I ended up doing just that. Last thing to figure out is how to send the mail as is, meaning for now I pick the HMTL part and send it setting the content type. But this way lacks the Text version of the email.

I'll keep digging up.

Thanks for following up!</comment></comment>


Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses - <AUTHOR> https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ <comment><USER3> I read this article a long time ago and I took it seriously. So instead of asking for address, postal/zip code, city, state/province, I just put up a big text area labeled "Full address" so that people have complete freedom about what to fill in.

80% of the users ended up only filling in their street address, not their postal/zip code, city and state/province, even though they're from countries where (most?) addresses satisfy that format.

We ended up reverting to the previous form where we explicitly asked for postal/zip code etc.

<comment><USER4> This is where most of the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles fall flat.

The thing to do is _not_ try to design a single form that accommodates every possible address or name or whatever. The thing to do is examine your use case, design a form that works for, say, 99.9% or more of the people you want it to reach, and then if you really want to get the last 0.1% have someone who can do customer service and has access to a freeform text box into which _they_ \-- not the end user -- will enter the information.

Because when you get right down to it, the freeform text box is the only thing that accepts 100% of valid addresses (or valid names, or whatever). But it also necessarily accepts a ton of _invalid_ ones, too, and so it causes more trouble for the common cases than it saves in the uncommon ones.

<comment><USER5> "Punt and let customer support handle it" is a pretty lazy solution, in my view. Additionally, what a developer might think of as a "99.9%" solution is more often than not a 99% solution, or a 90% solution. With enough customers, dealing with everyone who can't use your slapped-together form will be more expensive than doing it right.

Software doesn't become great by assuming someone else will handle the edge cases and details, although you may get away with selling it for a while until your user base grows.

<comment><USER6> Except, in this scenario, it's relatively easy to come up with a good 99.9% solution:

Seven text fields will cover greater than 99.9% of users:

      Name
      Address Line 1
      Address Line 2
      City
      State
      Country
      Postal Code

So much of that article discussed stuff that was irrelevant - Live in Singapore? Great, just fill in Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. I've done that on many, many sites and it's always worked fine. Don't have a postal code in Ireland? Most people there learn to try EIRE or 00000.

I think a better article would have been: "Here are the scenarios in which the 7-text address system doesn't work, and how you can make it better." \- But I couldn't find anything that suggested it wouldn't work just fine.

<comment><USER7> My country unfortunately doesn't fit that scenario. Here in the UAE there is no residential postal delivery, so if you want to receive letters you have them sent to a PO Box. Most people usually use their office's, but I have my own. That means you can reach me with simply:

        PO Box XXXX
        Dubai
        UAE

For sending parcels to be delivered by a courier you can include a physical address, however most streets here don't have names (and even if they do people have no idea what they are) so people go by directions. Which means something like:

        Flat XXXX
        Building Name next to / opposite / near Landmark
        Area Name

In most cases it's best to include a phone number so the courier can phone for directions if they get lost (without street names it's easy), and of course everyone requires a name even though I'm the only person living here and using this PO Box. That means my 'full address' ends up being:

        Name Surname
        Tel: 05XXXXXXXX
        Flat XXXX, Building Name
        Next To Landmark
        Area Name
        PO Box XXXX
        Dubai
        UAE

In most cases that never fully fits in the length of the fields, or they do something silly like requiring a postcode but limiting it to 5 digits (luckily my PO Box number is only 4 digits in length, but in reality they are [0-9]*). Anything I order from eBay has "NOTPROVIDED" on it as I left out an optional field they think should always be included :D

Edit: Area names have their own fun: There is a road going from one end of the country to the other which in Dubai is called Sheikh Zayed Road (it has a number and different names in other emirates :D), but that is also the name of an area along part of the road.

<comment><USER8> So what would fix this for you? Same 7 fields, but longer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "An address will exist in the country's postal service's database"

This is the one that I've run afoul of -- not because I live in a brand-new building, or a houseboat, or 30 miles from anywhere on an unnamed road; it's just that there is no door-to-door delivery for houses within a 2-block radius of the local post office, so we have a PO box.

The trouble happens when a business that needs my street address uses the USPS database for address verification. One example is online stores that don't ship to PO boxes. Some of these sites have a form with a sort of "Are you sure" prompt when my street address isn't recognized; others just refuse to accept it.

Even worse was when the local company that picked up my trash was bought by one of the larger regional "waste management" operations, and all the drivers' routes were re-planned for "efficiency" (evidently using software that hit some USPS database); the upshot was that everyone on my street had their address removed from the pickup routes.

<comment><USER10> I have this problem too, but just because the UK postcode database that a lot of sites use is wrong. There's not even a way to report it.

It means I can basically never pass a credit check at this address.

<comment><USER7> A lot of companies verify postcodes with QAS, so probably worth reporting it to them:

[http://www.qas.co.uk/knowledge-centre/product- information/ad...](http://www.qas.co.uk/knowledge-centre/product- information/address-postcode-finder.htm)

They are run by Experian who one of the main credit check companies in the UK, so you might be able to hit two birds with one stone :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A falsehood only distantly alluded to:

That people have addresses at all, or can describe their residence in an unambiguous or clear way (even using GPS coordinates).

I used to live in a place I couldn't even remotely give directions to. It was deep within a neighborhood of a poorer country, none of the streets had names, none of the buildings are numbered. I lived in an building where none of the apartments had numbers or names.

If I wanted something delivered, I would go to a local shop for the company delivering it, and show my ID, and they would have it routed there if it wasn't in the building already.

If you wanted a billing address for, I don't know, tracking me down, initiating lawsuits, something like that? I honestly just assume that's impossible.

<comment><USER12> Furthermore, just because you don't have an address doesn't mean you can't receive mail! At least as recently as a few decades ago, there were rural communities in the US where nobody had a street address; the postal service knew where everybody lived and would deliver mail given just a name and town. I'm not sure whether this arrangement still exists in the US, but I'm pretty sure it still does in Ireland and probably elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> The push for 911 changed a lot of places by assigning street names, but the 911 folks are sometimes the only ones who know the names. UPS still delivers to some vague addresses on the reservation. Shipping to "House 311 behind the school" does tend to confuse a few Internet merchants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 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](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](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](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."

<comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER16> 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...](https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/handling-leading-zero-in-csv/)

<comment><USER17> 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.

<comment><USER14> Oh god office workers love putting everything in Excel. Even when it makes no sense...

<comment><USER18> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> some usefull links:

\- The free and open global address collection : [http://openaddresses.io/](http://openaddresses.io/)

\</comment><comment> "OpenAddresses Hits 100 Million" [https://www.mapbox.com/blog/openaddresses-100m/](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/openaddresses-100m/)

\- OpenStreetMap "addr:housenumber" FREQ [http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Ahousenumber#val...](http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Ahousenumber#values) [ more "14" than "13" ]

\- OpenStreetMap "addr:street" FREQ [http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Astreet#values](http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Astreet#values)

\- OpenStreetMap "addr:postcode" FREQ [http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Apostcode#values](http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/addr%3Apostcode#values)

\- Derek Sivers: "Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers." [http://sivers.org/jadr](http://sivers.org/jadr)

\- Wikipedia : "Address (geography)" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_\(geography\))

</comment><comment><USER20> There are so many misconceptions from developers, even more when building apps used worldwide. If you plan to accept data from different countries, free text with no validation is the only acceptable answer.

I remember once we had to remove validation from names because some countries don't even have last names, and others have real names with two or even one characters.

<comment><USER21> _free text with no validation is the only acceptable answer._

Unfortunately, it's not an acceptable answer in practice.

In my experience, users aren't clear what to do when presented with a free- form, multi-line text box in which they can enter their address. This results in frequent missing data – users aren't aware they need to include a postal code, or county, or country…

This is probably because users are generally conditioned to expect separate text fields for separate tokens in their addresses.

There's a middle ground though – extract the tokens you need (postal code, country) and allow the user to freeform the rest. And don't even think about trying to validate addresses in any real way – you'll fail!

<comment><USER20> Of course I'm not saying single multiline textbox for every app out there. That would be crazy. :-)

But I'm always surprised how many sites ask for information that will never be used for anything, and assume things like the lenght or characters valid in zip codes or phone numbers.

I heard these days on "There is no such thing as a fish" podcast there is a country somewhere where the post office locates places by directions given by the sender! And that is officially accepted! Crazy world, try validating that. :-)

<comment><USER22> So, what's the proper way to deal with this then?

Ask a series of questions and adapt the follow up to the questions depending on the answer given.

Starting out with 'select your country' and then expand from there, the more you know the more you can narrow down the remainder of the input.

That would be a nice little widget to be able to throw onto a form 'world accurate address input fields'.

And for some localities it will indeed display a freeform text field, but for localities where there is more structure it could supply that structure and make certain bits mandatory.

<comment><USER23> Picking an arbitrary starting point like 'country' still has problems. I'm in Jersey Channel Islands, which isn't a country at all (much like Vatican City & other territories).

We are British but not part of the UK nor members of the EU. We're served by the British Royal Mail system and use UK-style postcodes, but sometimes when I input my address I _must_ chose a country, so pick UK, which triggers UK VAT on my order. We're exempt from UK VAT so dealing with this is frustrating. Some retailers do waive it when I raise the point but I have to remember every time.

Total edge case I know, but I hope it demonstrates that even picking a really broad starting point like 'country' can still fail sometimes.

<comment><USER24> Sorry I'd this comes off as tangential:

What kind of internet service do you have where you live (speed wise) ?

I've always considered island life, but poor internet service has put me off.

<comment><USER25> Jersey is a tax haven (40% of the economy is evading tax), lying 20km from France and 160km from Britain, so there's no reason the internet access has to be bad.

[http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/Broadband/Products/H...](http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/Broadband/Products/Home- broadband-tariffs/) — it's a bit expensive, and has a usage cap, but that seems more to do with the lack of competition than it being an island.

<comment><USER23> > (40% of the economy is evading tax)

Citation needed. You are welcome to pay maximum taxes where you live if you like, but jurisdictions with lower tax rates keep the pressure on governments to deliver a good return on investment to their citizens. When I moved from San Diego to Dallas after the dotcom bust I slashed my taxes which was great (no income tax in TX). This wasn't tax evasion, it was common sense. San Diego was no longer a good investment.

Also, you totally missed the Gigabit fiber-optic broadband plans[0]. I have a 1GB __unlimited __plan from their competitor for £55 /month[1]. Standard fair use clause applies but I've never been throttled and I use massive amounts of data every month.

[0] [http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/JT-Fibre/Fibre- Tarif...](http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/JT-Fibre/Fibre- Tariffs/Tariff-details/) [1] [https://web.sure.com/jersey/internet/home- internet/unlimited...](https://web.sure.com/jersey/internet/home- internet/unlimited-broadband/plan/15172)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "A road will only have one name"

This one's particularly common in Edinburgh. In fact in the example they use - "Regent Road" connects to Princes Street, which becomes Shandwick Place, then Atholl Place. At this point the main fork becomes Dalry Road which then becomes Gorgie Road which becomes Stenhouse Road and then Calder Road - all of which are roughly a straight line:

[https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Calder+Road,+Edinburgh,+UK/S...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Calder+Road,+Edinburgh,+UK/Stenhouse+Rd/Gorgie+Rd,+Edinburgh,+UK/Dalry+Rd,+Edinburgh,+UK/Atholl+Pl,+Edinburgh,+UK/Shandwick+Pl,+Edinburgh,+UK/Regent+Road,+Edinburgh,+email@example.com,-3.179938,15z/data=!4m44!4m43!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c427942a3bbb:0xb5f6c3bd2a7a564c!2m2!1d-3.2872785!2d55.9230398!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c6f3045dd509:0x37d6bdd187c2d7d9!2m2!1d-3.2590407!2d55.9296972!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c6f92cf9f363:0x1e2575905cb7c023!2m2!1d-3.2400333!2d55.9365554!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c7a8bc280a39:0xdd1e5bdda92e84e7!2m2!1d-3.2218567!2d55.9425158!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c7a48581d1f5:0x1f38a0b91d4eebab!2m2!1d-3.214204!2d55.9474842!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c7a325f46fc1:0xd4ba3dd16343dd18!2m2!1d-3.2105438!2d55.9491457!1m5!1m1!1s0x4887c789c2b1a9ff:0xb23c9c457a777421!2m2!1d-3.1777818!2d55.9538905!3e2)

<comment><USER27> There's also the chance a single segment of the road has several names. For example when crossing a bridge or a round-about. Never mind all local names vs official names, old names and translations.

<comment><USER26> Correct, and indeed having the same name on different sides of the _same road_. I just recalled another example from Edinburgh[0] where one side of the street is called "Lochrin Buildings" while the other side of the street is called "Gilmore Place" (then both sides of the street become Gilmore Place, which then invisibly changes its name to Granville Place before changing into Polwarth Gardens.

[0] = [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-3.203582,3a,75y,341.7...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-3.203582,3a,75y,341.75h,100.38t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sT0PUyqDdTmZ8msxqf8Yt4w!2e0?hl=en) (I think the smaller lettered "Gilmore Place" underneath hints at a "yeh we know this is sorta Gilmore Place but not really)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seldom are the only restrictions that apply to an address only the ones in a single software system. In fact, your address data could be the least of the problems you have to worry about.

When actually using all the addresses you stored for shipping stuff, it is almost guaranteed that the shipping company will cut off or drop lines from labels, and of course every shipping company is going to have its own quirks. Maybe just because not every address is going to fit onto a fixed label area in a fixed font size.

I have in fact lost several shipments to my address(es) due to every single kind of the above caveats.

</comment><comment><USER29> Of course, they're falsehoods that _everyone_ believes about addresses (except maybe for postal workers), but programmers are the only ones who have to actually think about them.

It would be nice to come up with some sort of conclusion or recommendation. Should addresses just be used as one big blob of text, and never parsed at all? should there be individual per-country libraries for parsing them? should we just address everything by coordinates (which doesn't solve the houseboat problem)? How about a unique identifier for every person on the planet, plus a gps tracking system that guarantees big brother can deliver to you whenever, wherever?

Now that the average piece of post is a prig package that needs signing for, rather than a small letter that can just go through the letterbox, I quite like the idea of centralised pigeon-hole buildings, that have existed in many towns as the only method of delivery, but are now being born everywhere thanks to amazon, etc. That's quite a different problem, though :-)

<comment><USER30> I think the consensus is to go with the "big blob of text" approach. You mentioned that postal workers are the only people qualified to parse addresses—let them do it. The validation done on your end shouldn't be much more than asserting that addresses contains non-whitespace characters.

I don't know how well this works in practice, but it's the most "correct" thing to do.

<comment><USER31> Bad mistake you get a metric fuck ton of shit in your data that way.

You should always police your input data properly one big text field is lazy programming that leads to a big technical debt later on.

And yes that does mean handling apostrophes and all those other edge cases properly.

<comment><USER32> Name of recipient, state/province/etc., postal code and country, maybe. But for the rest, that bit (at least in the UK) that goes in the middle... what policing can you do? That part is just a text blob. You can't do much meaningful with it except for showing it to somebody (e.g., on a label affixed to the package you're sending) and have them figure it out.

<comment><USER33> Well sure, once you've separated name and country and postal code you've already pulled out most of the data.

The blob has been tamed to 1-2 lines, and you're probably best off giving 'line 1' 'line 2' 'line 3' fields. At this point the chance of confusion is minimal, even if you can't validate very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Wikipedia has a photo of a parcel where a Russian/Cyrillic address was displayed on a computer with the wrong character encoding, and transcribed from that. Reportedly a russian postal worker was able to reverse the mapping and deliver the parcel."

The linked URL doesn't work anymore but thanks to Archive.org and reverse image search in Google I managed to find it:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130909052627/http://en.wikiped...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130909052627/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_to_Russia_with_krokozyabry.jpg)

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ru/thumb/f/fa/Letter_t...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ru/thumb/f/fa/Letter_to_Russia_with_krokozyabry.jpg/755px- Letter_to_Russia_with_krokozyabry.jpg)

<comment><USER35> That is one dedicated postal worker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's not even true that a single building has only one address, must exist in one town or even in one country. There's a house that has one address in Baarle Hertog (Belgium) and another address in Baarle Nassau (Netherlands), with different house numbers too.

</comment><comment><USER37> An observation:

My street address is

XXXX Martin Luther King Jr Way, Apt XXX

The number of organizations that accept the address, but chop off the apartment number when they send mail because it is too long is ridiculous. Even better, it tends to be government departments. For example, the IRS does this.

Martin Luther King Jr Way has to be one of the most common street names in the US. Many orgs can't even get the simple cases right; I don't hold out much hope for the obscure cases.

See the Google 'real-names' debacle for just how wrong people can get this kind of thing, even when they're being loudly told that they're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER38> Pro-tip: no one will ever, ever misdeliver a package addressed to {house#} MLK #{Apt#}. I've lived on an MLK. If you live on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, LSD works just as well. Where MLK is concerned, he has an official holiday, Americans know what those three letters mean.

<comment><USER39> MLK Jr. for extra clarity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> That article can also be read as a list of things that need to be fixed by the various postal systems.

We can issue addresses to computers, many of which cannot be considered to be in a fixed place, yet somehow we can't issue a permanent, unique address to something that's not likely to move around much.

<comment><USER41> Reminds me of a quote from a geocoding session at an OpenStreeMap conference. "Addresses are not a theoretically hard problem. The problem is that people don't follow standards, or have the same standard."

Trying to get everyone on the planet to massively change how they view the world is not easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I didn't see this one mentioned: in addition to crossing city and county lines, ZIP codes also cross state lines.

[http://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_zipcodes_cross_state_lines](http://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_zipcodes_cross_state_lines)

</comment><comment><USER43> One more: in SW Portland there is a section east of the 0 line on the street grid where all buildings have a leading zero. 0634 and 634 are different addresses on the same street.

</comment><comment><USER44> And the solutions for C++, Java, PHP: [https://github.com/googlei18n/libaddressinput](https://github.com/googlei18n/libaddressinput) [https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing](https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing)

</comment><comment><USER45> This article was submitted here nearly two years ago (as you will find out if you click the link to the HN discussion at the bottom of the article). But I thought of one not included in the article.

From Portland's Wikipedia page:

> On the west side, the RiverPlace, John's Landing and South Waterfront > Districts lie in a "sixth quadrant" where addresses go higher from west to > east toward the river ... East-West addresses in this area are denoted with > a leading zero (instead of a minus sign). This means 0246 SW California St. > is not the same as 246 SW California St. Many mapping programs are unable to > distinguish between the two.

<comment><USER46> The city deserves a "bug" for that. Computers might not be able to distinguish between those easily, but I'd bet most humans (especially ones not from Portland) would have no idea either. Addresses are not set in stone -- it's easy enough for them to fix and avoid the entire issue.

edit: I've had my zip code changed within the last few years. That causes the same amount of pain as changing any other part of the address and is done without much fanfare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm not sure how many of these falsehoods programmers actually believe. But one falsehood I've actually seen in the wild isn't included:

"(Direction) Street" is necessarily the same (or different) than "Street." Or even if they're different, users will understand the difference, at least on a local basis.

I had a GPS that would always omit any directions that prefixed a street name. I was occasionally thrown for a loop when it told me to turn on Beacon St in Boston, when it really meant North Beacon St, which is a nearby, but unrelated, street.

</comment><comment><USER22> Patrick has an excellent variation on this theme:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

I live on a road that has two sets of numbers, both identical (but several hundred meters removed from each other) in two different towns but with the same name. Getting mail and packages delivered here is for want of a better word a challenge.

<comment><USER48> Is it because the post sucks at its job? I would expect this to be handled correctly for the sole reason that you could have two unconnected roads with the same name in two different cities and end up in essentially the same situation, no?

<comment><USER22> I think if they would be further away from each other it would be less of a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Now I understand why PayPal lets scammers register with an address that reads "asd, asdf,asdff, Turkey" and immediately allow somebody with that address to send me funds. (Ultimately stealing/using the credits they purchased instantly from my site with the fake paypal account setup on a stolen credit card)

Without a current streetmap of the entire world, how would you really know it's a bogus address?

</comment><comment><USER50> Similar to "Street names don't recur" \- A named road will be continuous: a friend lives in a condominium, in one of a group of 8 buildings bounded by 3 fairly normal roads. There are 4 separate driveways between buildings leading to parking.

At some point the condo units were renumbered with street numbers, and the disjoint driveways were all given the same name: <Condo> Lane.

Regular delivery drivers - USPS, UPS, FedEx, and pizza seem to cope, but taxi drivers or other irregular visitors who expect numbers to be continuous along streets are almost always baffled.

Similar to "A road will only have one name", for emergency services - fire, ambulance, and police - a similar case arises when a route passes through several small towns, each with its own set of street numbers, possibly with variations of proper street name, and perhaps with different direction/cardinality mappings.

For a motorist calling 911, reporting that one is at street number 123 on El Camino Real (on the SF peninsula) will probably map to several possible locations, depending which of the 12 or so towns one is in.

</comment><comment><USER51> When I moved to London and opened up a Lloyds Bank account (then Lloyds TSB), I was confused to find they did not consider my office postcode W1F 7RB valid. I poked at it a bit and found some programmer assumed that the first half of a UK postcode was \w+\d+. The hilarious part was the branch I was opening an account at was in W1S, so their form wouldn't even take their own postcode.

</comment><comment><USER52> Isn't it a false dichotomy that you can either have a complicated multipart form or a freeform text box for addresses? Why not by default show the multiform box that provides some nice (optional) validation to catch that vast majority of cases and also give the user an option to fill out a freeform text box if the former doesn't work for them?

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe a good approach would be to use a format that somehow fits 99% of the addresses and a link on the bottom of the form with the text "Problems fitting your address in that form?". When the user clicks the link, all the fields of the form would be substituted by just a multi-line input field. Then you have a solution for the 1%.

</comment><comment><USER54> This hit home for me as a couple of months ago we faced the choice between continuing to develop a parser-based approach to location extraction from free text, or moving to an entity extraction and search approach, i.e. geotagging or geocoding. Notably we were just trying to get city and state, and even limiting ourselves to the U.S. the combinations we were seeing made parsing seem like a game of increasing complexity delivering diminishing returns. We ultimately went with a search-base approach and it's been working much better and is more tolerant of format variations.

</comment><comment><USER55> > No buildings are numbered zero > Counterexample: 0 Egmont Road, > Middlesbrough, TS4 2HT

A more fun counterexample: the Black History Museum in Richmond Virginia is located at "00 Clay Street". That's 00, not 0.

</comment><comment><USER56> My mainland European address saves me a fortune in online shopping - <USER2> and delivery both usually fail.

My two neighbours and I share a driveway but we have our own gates and house numbers. The street is unnamed and unnumbered like the other roads in the immediate area.

There are at least two valid postcodes for the property, which is a few minutes walk from a major administrative boundary. Postal deliveries might turn up once in four to six weeks.

When I put this info into card validators, then tell them that my bank is in a different country to the one I'm ordering from, they generally barf.

</comment><comment><USER57> One I always enjoyed that's not on the list (because it's UK specific, I guess) is:

Buildings don't have multiple postcodes in different outcodes ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom#Outward_code) ).

Counter example:

* Merchant Venturers building, Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UB

* Merchant Venturers building, Park Row, Bristol BS1 5UB

</comment><comment><USER58> So I guess this is nothing more than a fantasy: [http://www.xkcd.com/208/](http://www.xkcd.com/208/)

<comment><USER14> "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> repeat: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489) ?

<comment><USER60> It still as worth to read as it was 598 days ago. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> There are so many formats - is there anniversary format for addresses? In all seriousness, this is where XML and XSDs would really shine!

<comment><USER61> However, turns out this is a problem that is solved by Google :-)

[https://github.com/googlei18n/libaddressinput/wiki/AddressVa...](https://github.com/googlei18n/libaddressinput/wiki/AddressValidationMetadata)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> As someone from Ireland, a country with unusual addresses, this is spot on.

</comment><comment><USER62> I've personally seen a building with a fractional street number, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I've also had to deal with irregular addresses in Canada. Working on a Canada-only program, I was expecting addresses to have the components:

      [unit-number, ]building-number street-name
      city/town, province/territory, country
      postal-code

I was fortunately already expecting characters from the two official languages of Canada, English and French, so I was prepared to deal with accented characters.

Later, I had the opportunity to work in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, which violated most of my assumptions, both explicit and implicit. First, the territory (not province) of Nunavut is a relatively recent creation, having been created by splitting off a part of the Northwest Territories on April 1st, 1999. Before that, the addresses were all in a different territory.

Second, Iqaluit uses a system where every building in the city has a unique number. Currently (2015) the highest number is rapidly approaching 7000, but at the time it was in the 5000s. In addition to their unique number, some buildings also have a name, which is sometimes written only in the Latin alphabet, sometimes written only in the Inuktitut syllabary, sometimes either, and in at least one case both. When a building has both a name and a number, people may use just one or the other. (I haven't found a building without a number yet, but I'm no longer going to assume there aren't any.)

Street names were not introduced until 2003, and when they were, all street signs were labeled in both the Latin alphabet and the Inuktitut syllabary. Since the system of uniquely numbering every building is continuing, most people ignore the street names unless they're actually talking about streets, not buildings. Nonetheless, some attempts have been made to get everyone to change their mailing addresses to include the street. In every case, everyone has agreed that use of the Inuktitut syllabary should be encouraged.

All these peculiarities are in the territorial capital, where almost all the territorial government and law-enforcement addresses are, so anyone dealing with addresses for the Canadian government should be aware of this (but probably isn't).

On a related topic, the US has long had a system of two-letter abbreviations for its states, commonly used in its addresses. Canada eventually introduced a standard set of two-letter abbreviations for all its provinces and territories, being careful not to duplicate any of the US state abbreviations. However, many people still use the traditional abbreviations, which are of variable length, sometimes have completely different French and English versions, and sometimes include hyphens to prevent confusion with US state abbreviations. (So 'T-N' might appear, meaning 'Terre-Neuve', the French name for Newfoundland, with the hyphen mandatory to prevent it from being mistaken for the US abbreviation for Tennessee. Periods and capital letters with accents also appear, e.g. 'Î.P.É.')

Since its introduction, the "standard" two-letter system has seen at least three name changes. Quebec was PQ before 1991 and is now QC, although sometimes QU or QB show up, Nunavut was added in 1999 (previously part of NT, now NU), and Newfoundland changed its name to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001, and its abbreviation from NF to NL in 2002. Also, the territory formerly known as "Yukon Territory" officially changed its name to just "Yukon" on April 1st, 2003. (What is it with the Canadian territories and changing important stuff on April 1st?) Their postal abbreviation did not change however. It's still YT, not YK, despite the latter being used fairly often and making more sense now.

This matters because not all two-letter abbreviations appearing in the database (this includes your database) are on the standard list, either because they were entered incorrectly, or because they were correct when they were entered, but have since changed, and the database wasn't updated for fear of breaking working code. As a result, a naive lookup-table to get the full province name from the two-letter abbreviation will fail.

<comment><USER63> > I've personally seen a building with a fractional street number, in > Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

There's at least one fractional street number here in Victoria, BC along Fan Tan Alley: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/goddess_spiral/3377009251/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/goddess_spiral/3377009251/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Once you look at Korea, all those rules are only the basics...

</comment><comment><USER65> I know a UK semi-detached house that has 2 postcodes.

</comment><comment><USER66> > Addresses will have a street

> An address will include a state

These two are quite annoying whenever I have to write my address somewhere that presumes them. Here an address is city, city area (by name), block inside the area (by number, sometimes a letter). Blocks are numbered in the order they're built, so their numbering doesn't follow any pattern. And while there is a street passing by and it does have a name, the building itself doesn't have an address on the street.

And no, we don't have states. From the description above, you might think that the city:city area might be used like state:city, but no. City is city-sized, city area is neighbourhood-sized.

Additionally, there are addresses on streets, but those are not the same places as area-block numbers. Sites around here that need to get your address either include every possible field and ask you to only fill in the applicable ones, or give you a free-form text area after asking for which city and post code you're at.

I think amazon gets it right - country, administrative area (state in the US, something else in other countries, maybe nothing in some), city, postal code, two freeform lines.

</comment><comment><USER67> I thought this was going to be about memory addresses. :)

<comment><USER68> Yeah me too, although I must say it's a quite interesting article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> awesome! nice list.

</comment><comment><USER69> Developers can't know everything there is to know in the world. Developers aren't suppose to know specific stuff like this. Some parts of modern society are easy to digitalize, other (often historical) parts aren't. I think it's up to entrepeneurs to find ways to solve these problems, and create a better world by doing that. Don't blame/shame developers for stuff like this. It's not even remotely fair.

When you're training developers remember that you're not training demigods.

<comment><USER22> Well, after reading this article and other variations on the theme that's one less set of mistakes to make.

Even if developers are not demigods they shouldn't be above learning.

Entrepreneurs have very little chance of fixing this, it's mostly a local government thing and since it isn't actually broken I highly doubt that something will change. So 'deal with it' is the appropriate response.

<comment><USER69> Learning is important. Part of being a developer is that you must keep learning new techniques and facts that help you accomplish your goals or your clients goals. So I'm not saying we don't need to deal with internationalization, localization, and globalization. When the time comes, deal with it. I'm just saying there's no shame in being a developer with little or no expertise in those subjects. Many commenters here don't seem to acknowledge the many amazing technical things that developers generally do know about.

Thanks for taking the time to respond in words.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: The SICP book readers? - <AUTHOR>

Everyone is saying that it's one of the best books for CS, and you can learn a lot from it, but I feel they're just bluffing because no one explains WHAT they have learnt exactly. <comment><USER2> They can't explain what they've learned, because SICP covers so much ground. The best way I can explain is by negative examples. SICP is not:

\- A learn X in 7 days book

\- A technique driven solution book (cookbook)

\- A quick overview of the new hotness library/language/api/framework

\- A list of all the functions that you should know

\- A reprinting of the half complete wiki documentation of a weekend github toy

\- A one off read that you dump in the recycle bin

SICP gives grounding to some of the core problems in computer science. I've returned to it several times, and I always learn something from what I've missed before. Understanding how functions/closures/namespaces/objects all interrelate, how to think in recursion, building higher order programs from pieces, it even covers simple examples of VMs. It's a very strong entry text that has stood the test of time, and is still providing value. Few texts in comp-sci can say the same. SICP does a good job of connecting the theory of comp-sci with a real language without overwhelming the student with absurd language syntax problems.

When any one asks me to recommend a computer book I recommend SICP. Best of all no one has to take my word for it, the book is free. [https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) go read it and form an opinion.

Who is SICP not for? If you are at a high level with programming with multiple languages under your belt, most of this would seem like a refresher. If you really "know" VMs then this is going to very low level stuff. If you want a quick read to learn the syntax for scheme this is not the book for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm reading SICP at the moment and have to say it's been a real eye opener.

I'm finding that seeing concepts I take for granted when I'm programming being built up from first principles changes the way I think about the languages I use.

I'm not sure it's made me a better programmer, but it has given me a better understanding of why programming languages are the way they are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you give me ONE example?

<comment><USER3> Sure, checkout Chapter 2 ([http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-13.html...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-13.html#%_chap_2)). It shows how you can define data structures such as lists or trees from a simple pair concept and then define generic operations over them, such as map.

For me that's been one of the great things about the book, it shows how you can build higher and higher levels of abstraction from relatively simple structures.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently looked at SICP again after first reading it many years ago. I had retained the overall impression that SICP demonstrates how to build many of the celebrated creations of computer science - interpreters, compilers, databases, logic programming systems, circuit simulators - using a very simple programming language with just a few constructs.

But I had forgotten many of the details. Here is just one: in 3.1.1, Local State Variables, SICP shows how to, in effect, define classes and create objects using only function definition with lambda and set! (that is, assignment) in the definition body. The function you define this way is a like a class, the functions it returns are like instances. So you can do all this without any specifically object-oriented language features. This occupies just a few pages near the beginning of a long book - the whole book is dense with worked-out ideas like this.

<comment><USER4> I would add that the cumulative effect of all these examples in SICP is to demonstrate that you can solve any programming problem from first principles - that is, by combining a few simple but powerful constructs in the several ways they describe. Moreover, a solution constructed this way might be simpler and easier to understand than a solution made the more usual way: by looking for a specialized language construct or library that seems to offer an already-made solution to the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What SICP teaches is how to use various types of abstractions to build software.

(It is lacking syntactic abstraction, as provided by Common Lisp macros, but one can argue that metalinguistic abstraction, which is covered, supercedes syntactic abstraction).

Also, for normal programmer, it works (along with the videos) like a mind- openner: you won't understand programming the same way after having studied it. It has a mind-freeing effect.</comment>


Knowledge in software development: what's your wood lot? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2592 <comment><USER2> This is a nice taxonomy of knowledge. I tend to feel that discussion in development circles revolves too much around the newest technologies (long before they've proven themselves), and not enough around the stable mainstays of the profession. This is fine for seasoned professionals, but lulls newcomers into investing into niche tech, like Meteor or the blockchain. That time is probably better spent learning a text editor, GNU/Linux, Postgres, and Python. I guess that's the lesson: the technology that's most discussed is not necessarily the tech that's the best to learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Learning a command line and a text editor cold is the best ROI for any developer. (As long as text is the primary interface, which it will be for a while.)</comment></comment>


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 'Automated Out of Work' a Good Thing - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/03/11/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-automated-work-good-thing/ <comment><USER2> "We should be excited by that. But the reason we're not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem."

Until we fix the issue of homelessness, it is good to be wary of automation. Especially because you can't just invent new jobs for people that had no demand before just to employ them.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's only good if we have a UBI</comment>