zlacker

>>voxada+(OP)
ZIP codes are an emergent property of the mail delivery system. While the author might consider this a bad thing, this makes them "good enough" on multiple axes in practice. They tend to be:

- Well-known (everybody knows their zip code)

- Easily extracted (they're part of every address, no geocoding required)

- Uniform-enough (not perfect, but in most cases close)

- Granular-enough

- Contiguous-enough by travel time

Notably, the alternatives the author proposes all fail on one or more of these:

- Census units: almost nobody knows what census tract they live in, and it can be non-trivial to map from address to tract

- Spatial cells: uneven distribution of population, and arbitrary division of space (boundaries pass right through buildings), and definitely nobody knows what S2 or H3 cell they live in.

- Address: this option doesn't even make sense. Yes, you can geocode addresses, but you still need to aggregate by something.

>>jonas2+Xd
This is a tangent, but addresses are also way more complicated than most people realize - especially if you’re relying on a user to input a correct address or if you need to support multiple countries, somewhere with unique addresses like Queens[0], or you need to differentiate between units of a specific street address that uses something other than unit numbers for a unit designation.

At that point you need something like Smarty[1] to validate and parse addresses.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2783155/how-to-distingui...

[1]: https://www.smarty.com/

>>ericra+Um
Addresses are a huge ordeal in banking. Easily one of the most tortured domain types when it comes to edge cases and integration pain.

Every customer I've worked with insisted on having all addresses ran through the USPS verification API so they could get their bulk mailing discounts.

Even if you get the delivery/cost side under control, you still have to make sure you are talking about the right address from a logical perspective. Mailing, physical, seasonal, etc. address types add a whole extra dimension of fun.