4 ms·
Sorry no. One interpretation, especially on this site, is that the problem was some kind of database bug, maybe where the same location was entered twice and a
by jp57 2y ago
Sorry no. One interpretation, especially on this site, is that the problem was some kind of database bug, maybe where the same location was entered twice and a tiny location error ended up creating two locations.
I expect that out of any random sample 500 million literate and mentally healthy English speakers, more than 450 million of them are totally unaccustomed to thinking about nautical miles ever. Even people in science, or even who might have dealt with nanometers in school do not typically think about nautical miles unless they are sailors or airplane pilots.
- snakeyjake 2y ago[flagged]
- s_tec 2y agoI assumed the post title meant nanometers. Why? Floating-point rounding bugs. A nanometer is about 9e-15 degrees of latitude, which is right about where a double-precision floating point number runs out of digits. So, if a piece of software uses exact `==` equality, it could easily have a bug where two positions 3600 nanometers apart are seen as being different, even though they should be treated as the same.
- SilasX 2y agoThank you. People can be very bad about judging which scenarios are truly implausible. Here’s a previous thread where someone thought it was absurd that there could exist native English speakers who don’t regularly go shopping, and treated that supposed impossibility as a huge “checkmate”! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32625340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32625340
- pests 2y agoI assumed nanometers. I see it every day in chip/design/a few others. I was confused how I caused an issue with the points being so close. I only realized NM means nautical miles only due to these comments.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]