• (nodebb)

    Orna is obviously having cash flow problems, and wants some money from their customers so they can get the servers back up...

  • DQ (unregistered)

    The last one reminds me of a VCR I once had (yes, I'm that old).

    When it told me to wait, it translated 'minutes' to 'notulen' which is dutch for 'meeting notes'.

    So I was told: 'This can take a few meeting notes...'

    (Feels just like the last meeting I had, that also took somemeeting notes...)

  • Eric (unregistered)

    It should be “someone whose first language isn’t English”, not “someone who’s”. A grammar mistake in a submission making fun of someone else’s grammar. The irony…

  • Valts S. (unregistered) in reply to Eric

    Should I note that English is also not my first language? :D

    Also, my wife thinks that the Orna one might actually be intentional, since the game is not overly serious to begin with. Who knows. Might indeed be that TRWTF is me. :D

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    Steve Ballmer famously said "developers developers developers developers". Well I say "shipping shipping shipping shipping".

  • Brian (unregistered)

    If someone asked me for a "barista parlor", I'd send 'em to another town too.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Eric

    A grammar mistake in a submission making fun of someone else’s grammar.

    It's a result of Muphry's Law.

  • (nodebb)

    Trying hard is the first step towards failure!

  • (nodebb)

    On the other hand, they spelled "maintenance" correctly -- many native English speakers don't get that right.

  • (nodebb)

    Hillsboro Village is a neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, located 3 miles southwest of downtown.

    I think that it's perfectly reasonable to expand a non-exact search to a town 3 miles away. No WTF seen here.

  • Hehe (unregistered)

    I like to the think the "original" "quoted" "query" should be read in a stilted, mocking fashion.

  • Airdrik (unregistered) in reply to Ross_Presser

    Except that it wasn't just the location that DDG "fixed" for them, it was all of the search terms.
    Fixing of search terms is very helpful to correct typos, but in this case it wasn't a matter of typos since everything looks to be spelled correctly and it looks like they were looking for something very specific that for all we know actually exists in Hillsboro Village.
    I've had a number of occasions where DDG's "helpful" fixing of my search query did exactly what I didn't want it to do because I'm only interested in the specific thing I'm searching for. The suggestions to expand their search should have been provided as suggestions instead of replacing their original search. Though I suppose that's subject to refinement and subjectivity because how do you draw the line between what's a typo that deserves auto-correction and what's merely a specific thing with very few hits.

  • LHPSU (unregistered)

    I don't think the check/cheque error is a translation error.

    The most likely explanation is an overzealous auto-correct set to UK English. The second most likely is that the sentence was 'typed' using voice recognition.

  • Gordon S (unregistered) in reply to Ross_Presser

    The original intent was to find information on the new Barista Parlor location opening in Hillsboro Village, a very exact search. To be fair to DDG, there's really only one or two real results out there (and it doesn't find them), but it should say that and offer less specific phrasings as suggestions (as Airdrik pointed out) instead of throwing in a very different set of results.

  • Neveranulll (unregistered)

    In the US, we’d just say “What’s a cheque?” No such word. By the way, I had to go through seven blurry reCAPTA screens to get authorized to leave a comment. Then it expired and I had to start all over again with five more.

  • Borolev Mushkin (unregistered)

    Had to look up what Orna was, and disappointed that it was nothing to do with the finance industry. That one is less funny than I thought it would be.

  • markm (unregistered)

    In the NOAA table, it seems likely that "-1" means that there was no report from the snow gauge. It appears the gauge was returned to service for the last line in the table, which shows no snow. A broken snow gauge would not be a priority for repair until there was a chance there would be snow. "NaN" would be better, but isn't available in all number representations, nor would I count on a weather scientist understanding it.)

    OTOH, if they are using a floating point representation without NaN, how would this show a missing temperature reading? It's possible that it's using floating point with a NaN code for temperature and an integer for snow depth, but is the precision of the snow gauge so low that 0.5 inch never has to be represented? (I get annoyed at programmers who introduce floating point's rounding errors into a countable quantity, but it is equally bad to treat "3 inches" as an exact number like "3 apples".)

    On the third hand, a good user interface does not display or print "NaN", "-1" for a quantity that physically cannot be negative, or other special codes. It intercepts them and substitutes text the user will understand, such as "No reading".

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Given the blank time column, I thought the weather table might be a data parsing error. E.g. comma-separated values with extra or missing commas. Or maybe the API changed, and the "date" and "time" values are now returned in one value, instead of split into two, that sort of thing.

    The min/max/avg temperatures look reasonable (no mins > max, etc.), as do the dates. Maybe it parses those first, then fell over on some of the other fields.

  • Thomas J. (unregistered)

    That is the library code handling the file format has a check.

  • markm (unregistered)

    But this time it's producing gigabyte dumps full of negative snowfall. It's perfectly normal at most locations to have over 6 months of zero snowfall, but you probably don't want it to show '0' when a squirrel chewed the cable from the snow gauge in midwinter. OTOH, someone will always rush out to fix a broken thermometer ASAP, but when you're sure it won't snow for months, a broken snow gauge at a remote location is just going to be scheduled for the next routine maintenance visit. Sometimes you need a code to show that the snow gauge is broken but you're still collecting temperature data.

    I just realized something: they seem to be measuring snow but not rain. Does this make any sense to you? Back when I was in school a long time ago, precipitation gauges caught rain and snow, melted the snow, and reported the depth of water. You could assume a multiplier to get snow depth from water depth, but in the real world that ratio varies considerably. If you wanted actual snowfall, someone had to walk out into the middle of a flat field large enough to avoid drifting and stick a ruler in the snow. This seems to be different.

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