[HN Gopher] The Many Lives of Null Island
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The Many Lives of Null Island
Author : sebg
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-07-25 21:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (stamen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stamen.com)
| BWStearns wrote:
| There was a drone that had a new return home failsafe mechanism
| (for when there's low battery or some fault etc). Unfortunately
| it was possible to misconfigure it so that home was not set and
| the failsafe was still armed. This led to several drones
| perishing in the Atlantic as they bravely tried to fly home to
| Null Island.
| dgfitz wrote:
| An old mmo, Star Wars galaxies, when it first released back in
| like 03 or 04, had an issue where, over time all the player-
| built buildings would slowly drift towards 0,0 of whatever
| planet they were on.
|
| Not nearly as impactful as your example, but amusing I suppose.
| Dwedit wrote:
| This is very similar to the geolocation systems where whenever
| they had no information other than "United States", they pointed
| to a specific farmhouse in Kansas. Unwanted visits from Police,
| FBI agents, and people seeking revenge.
| jwilk wrote:
| Discuessed on HN in 2016:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849 (39 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259518 (3 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12274203 (125 comments)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Isn't that an argument _for_ nulls in data, rather than against
| them? :p
| audiodude wrote:
| Philosophically, you could make the argument that it really does
| exist.
| samatman wrote:
| It definitely exists.
|
| It isn't an island, despite having Island in the name. But
| that's true of Coney Island as well, and it also exists.
| cperciva wrote:
| Coney Island _was_ an island when it got its name, though.
|
| A closer analogy might be Vancouver's False Creek, which as
| the name suggests is not a creek (it's a tidal inlet).
| samatman wrote:
| There's always Rhode Island. There is an island by that
| name, but the state itself is very much not (and it's
| usually called Aquidneck now, the island, I mean).
|
| Pine Island in New York State is both not an island, nor
| named after one, it's just slightly elevated.
|
| Point is there's precedent.
| killion wrote:
| In the Bay Area there is Alameda Island, which didn't start
| as an island either...
|
| https://www.kqed.org/news/11983858/alameda-the-island-
| that-a...
|
| It's only barely one today.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've worked in mapping software and GPS in some capacity for 20
| or so years, and Null Island is always my go-to example of why
| it's bad to use an actual valid value for a variable as a
| default-initializer, as a sentinel value, or as a signal for
| "invalid". 0,0 is a real location and should not mean anything
| special besides "that exact location in the Atlantic" to your
| code. There are an infinite number of actually invalid lat/lon
| pairs, if you really, really need some constant that gets
| interpreted as "an invalid lat/lon". 0,0 is not one of them.
|
| I always joke that if nuclear war ever broke out, that spot in
| the Atlantic is going to bear the brunt of the explosions from
| all of the poorly-coded computer systems firing the missiles.
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