jonathanoliver

I came here just to post that link. I still have that song in my head when I hear the word "floppy".

Kinda reminds of the time Microsoft used git internally but was pushing Team Foundation Server.

Founder of Smarty here, so there's some obvious bias.

We've been in the geocoding space for over 12+ years. A geocoding API should be easy to set up, deliver rooftop-accurate geocodes, be transparent about accuracy, persist in perpetuity, have a clear pricing structure, and be lightning fast.

Smarty has geocodes for 210 million US addresses, including 20 million non-USPS addresses. Our US Rooftop Geocoding product is 97% accurate to the rooftop or parcel of the property. Perpetual use of our geocoding data is also available, and Smarty does have licensing available for re-syndicating lat/long points in your APIs. Our entry-level plans for US Rooftop Geocoding have rate limits of 25,000 addresses/second. (Most customers won't reach this speed, but you're welcome to try.)

The best way to determine a company's geocoding accuracy is to test their products directly.

Debian is fat?? I always thought it was a nice, minimalist server distro.

We use Nomad where I work and we LOVE it. Previous to Nomad we used K8s for several years which, at that point, allowed us to become cloud agnostic. With the move to Nomad about 3+ years ago, we were able to transition away from cloud and back to leased, bare metal machines. During our time with K8s, it didn't have a good bare-metal strategy with their ingress mechanism. In contrast, as we investigated Nomad, it was easy to deploy on pure metal without a hypervisor. The result of our migration to Nomad was having so many capable and far-less-expensive hosting options. Lastly, as part of our Nomad control plane, we also adopted Vault and Consul with great success.

I know there are horror stories around this acquisition and lots of predictions about what will happen, but only time will tell. On a minimum, it has been a delight to use the Hashicorp software stack along with the approach they brought to our engineering workflow (remember Vagrant?). These innovations and approaches aren't going away.

I just replied to an earlier message on this thread with the same offer:

I’d love to have you email your mailing address to [email protected] with a link to this HN thread. We may be able to help fix some of this.

Send your address to [email protected] and link to this HN thread. I’ll keep an eye watching out for it. I’d love to see what our system does with your address.

We have non-postal addresses and a lot of other mechanisms to help here. We also have contacts at the USPS and others to help fix addresses.

Thanks for the shout-out. Founder of Smarty here.

Regarding article, it really depends on the use case of whether to use ZIP Code (TM), postal code, Canada Post Forward Sortation Area, lat/lon, Census Bureau block and tract, etc.

As has been noted, the ZIP Code is often good enough for aggregating data together and can be a good first step if you don’t know where to start.

A.Z. Fell has a decent bookshop but when I called recently they said: "Fell's Bookshop. We probably don't have what you're looking for and we wouldn't sell it to you if we did."

Aeron is another awesome project from Martin Thompson (Disruptor, Simple Binary Encoding, Mechanical Sympathy, etc.).

That guy really knows his stuff regarding performance.