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I agree using the preferred city name works just fine for USPS, though maybe not for UPS/Fedex.

What I want to know is: Why isn't this preferred city+state mapping dataset for zip codes publicly available from USPS? It would be like 40kb of data for the entire thing. Why is this not public domain from the US Government?

Edit: or is this what I'm looking for (the "Physical City", "Physical State" columns? https://postalpro.usps.com/ZIP_Locale_Detail

It's missing 00501 at least (which zippopotam has), and military zip codes (which zippopotam doesn't have). Military zip codes are included in this file: https://postalpro.usps.com/areadist_ZIP5

Also fun fact 88888 is for "Operation Santa" uspsoperationsanta.com, which zippopotam is missing, but appears in the areadist_ZIP5 file.


Unfortunately these USPS datasets are not public because USPS sells them. Or in some cases, the pattern tends to be that USPS has a contract with a provider (part of what I call the Postal Industrial Complex) that maintains the database and then sells it to both USPS and everyone else. Since these databases are used primarily by bulk mail services, they're fairly expensive and represent an important revenue source to USPS. Remember that USPS is semi-privatized, so they're looking for fees they can charge like everyone else... especially fees that can be changed more easily than postage rates.

That said, the ZIP DB is indeed not very large, so you can find copies of it. You won't generally find complete copies of the City State file but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one out there.


That's not nearly as good as Canada's H0H 0H0.

Which thankfully Zippopotamus supports: https://api.zippopotam.us/CA/H0H

I suspect they have generic SVG drawing that they focus on.


Yes, this is super annoying.

I keep getting SMTP errors like: 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Authentication unsuccessful [BL1PR13CA0304.namprd13.prod.outlook.com 2026-01-22T20:59:23.476Z 08DE59C2EA6C3D25]

and: '550 (x.x) [x.x.x.x]:xxxx is currently not permitted to relay through this server. Perhaps you have not logged into the pop/imap server in the last 30 minutes or do not have SMTP Authentication turned on in your email client.'

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=46725075

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724812

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1qk45c0/microsoft_serv...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qk3tg7/microsoft...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qk518l/email_ser...


Yes, this is super annoying.

I keep getting SMTP errors like: 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Authentication unsuccessful [BL1PR13CA0304.namprd13.prod.outlook.com 2026-01-22T20:59:23.476Z 08DE59C2EA6C3D25]

and: '550 (x.x) [x.x.x.x]:xxxx is currently not permitted to relay through this server. Perhaps you have not logged into the pop/imap server in the last 30 minutes or do not have SMTP Authentication turned on in your email client.'

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724962

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724544

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1qk45c0/microsoft_serv...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qk3tg7/microsoft...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qk518l/email_ser...


Yes. This is super annoying.

I keep getting SMTP errors like: 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 Authentication unsuccessful [BL1PR13CA0304.namprd13.prod.outlook.com 2026-01-22T20:59:23.476Z 08DE59C2EA6C3D25]

and: '550 (x.x) [x.x.x.x]:xxxx is currently not permitted to relay through this server. Perhaps you have not logged into the pop/imap server in the last 30 minutes or do not have SMTP Authentication turned on in your email client.'

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724812

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724544

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1qk45c0/microsoft_serv...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qk3tg7/microsoft...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qk518l/email_ser...


> it could not be more unpopular right now to tell people to stop eating meat

If we phrased it from a carbon perspective that would probably help it be more popular, at least for beef which is a huge methane emitter.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat


Yeah that seems phrased wrong, but here's xkcd visual: https://xkcd.com/1338/


Can you rsync a repo from GitHub?


I consider apt kinds slow. I wish it were much faster.


Some issues I noticed were:

> PEP 658 went live on PyPI in May 2023. uv launched in February 2024. uv could be fast because the ecosystem finally had the infrastructure to support it. A tool like uv couldn’t have shipped in 2020. The standards weren’t there yet.

In 2020 you could still have a whole bunch of performance wins before the PEP 658 optimization. There's also the "HTTP range requests" optimization which is the next best thing. (and the uv tool itself is really good with "uv run" and "uv python".)

> What uv drops: Virtual environments required. pip lets you install into system Python by default. uv inverts this, refusing to touch system Python without explicit flags. This removes a whole category of permission checks and safety code.

pip also refuses to touch system Python without explicit flags?

For uv, there are flags that allow it, so it doesn't really "removes a whole category of permission checks and safety code"? uv has "permission checks and safety code" to check if it's system python? I don't think uv has "dropped" anything here.

> Optimizations that don’t need Rust: Python-free resolution. pip needs Python running to do anything.

This seems to me to be implying that python is inherently slow, so yes, this optimization requires a faster language? Or maybe I don't get the full point.

> Where Rust actually matters: No interpreter startup. ... uv is a single static binary with no runtime to initialize.

This one's pretty petty/pedantic, but "Rust technically has a very lightweight runtime." https://users.rust-lang.org/t/does-rust-have-a-runtime/11406...


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