[HN Gopher] Two Dots Too Many (2008)
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Two Dots Too Many (2008)
Author : Alifatisk
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-08-29 10:04 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
| omnicognate wrote:
| A tragic consequence of people being homicidal cretins. Nothing
| to do with localisation.
| crummy wrote:
| ... Nothing?
| omnicognate wrote:
| Nothing. In this instance fixing the localisation might have
| prevented the deaths, but in any specific event there is an
| array of details that could have produced a different outcome
| had they been changed, but which aren't causal. Improving
| localisation is a good thing, but it isn't going to reduce
| the murder rate.
| davemp wrote:
| > The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reports a tragic consequence of
| the failure to localize cell phones. . . only to be attacked by
| his wife, her father, and two sisters. He was stabbed in the
| chest but succeeded in grabbing a knife, stabbing his wife, and
| getting away. Emine died of her wounds; Ramazan killed himself in
| jail.
|
| Sorry, I don't think you can blame this on technology. Stick and
| stones and all that.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| There's the root cause of an incident and systemic problems
| that escalated it to a tragic outcome. The systemic problems
| are the culture. The root cause is incorrect localization,
| because the causal link is clear and in the chain of events it
| comes earlier than culture-specific behavior. So yes, UX killed
| them.
| roenxi wrote:
| Localisation isn't the root cause because he'd probably have
| been stabbed regardless. If you walk into a room to apologise
| and 4 people attempt to kill you, it was not 1 poorly
| transcribed text message that was the problem.
|
| > She showed the message to her father, who angrily called
| Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute.
|
| This is the point where the father found out that the text
| message was a localisation error. If they were confused about
| his meaning when they tried to knife him then the root cause
| was his poor communication skills. Otherwise it was some
| unknown issue.
| trgn wrote:
| The root cause is that first fish crawling on land
| Akronymus wrote:
| "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made
| a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a
| bad move."
| KineticLensman wrote:
| In the beginning was the word, and the word was 'Damn!'
| Verily, several other words followed.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Not everything needs to reduce down to all blame assigned to a
| single party.
| mauriciolange wrote:
| At first I was confused by the title (my fault) and thought that
| the article had to do with geo-localization. And only after
| several paragraphs I could switch to language localization :D
| Scoundreller wrote:
| (2008)
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you
| angry until you have carefully investigated the situation
|
| Indeed
| K0balt wrote:
| Nah, careful consideration is generally the enemy of homicidal
| rage.
| teekert wrote:
| Perhaps a person may even consider refraining from violence
| even after having carefully investigated the situation,
| regardless of the outcome of said investigation.
| animuchan wrote:
| But that would mean no stabbing people in the chest for
| arbitrary reasons! Not even a little bit!
|
| How do we, as a society, resolve arguments then? :)
| teekert wrote:
| Just imagine Picard looking down on us through a force
| field porthole of the Enterprise, slowly shaking his head
| in disappointment, whispering to himself: "Savages."
| krater23 wrote:
| We would not have talked about that interesting tech topic when
| there was not some runt shit people that stabed each other for
| nothing. I would say, their dead was not in vain. But I miss no
| one of them.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I like to journal when traveling and in the late 90s or early
| 2000s I sometimes went to local Internet Cafes and send travel
| report of the past few days to myself via email.
|
| One time in Turkey on a computer with a filthy monitor and a very
| worn out keyboard I was close to despair because my emails were
| undeliverable.
|
| It took me quite a while to realize that the key where every
| other keyboard layout has the letter i had an i without a dot.
| The regular dotted i was some key combo.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| My "high-security" email password for a while was a couple of
| words, but typed one key to the right.
|
| Even I didn't know what my password was.
|
| While travelling, Had to lookup an image of a qwerty keyboard
| to figure out what it was.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Hah, I had something similar when travelling in Norway. The
| keyboard was almost identical but I think two keys were the
| other way round.
|
| It took me far too long to work out why I kept miss-typing
| things.
| croes wrote:
| I don't think the cell phone localization is here to blame.
|
| The wrong sentence doesn't even make sense.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Yeah, tensions were already high. People were looking for any
| excuse. If it wasn't this text message, it would have been
| something else.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Maybe it seemed to make sense in context. Although I must admit
| I'd be hard pressed to come up with a context in which it would
| make sense.
| batch12 wrote:
| One apology too many - a tragic consequence of the failure to
| proofread before sending
|
| Edit: my failure to verify before sending ruined my bad joke.
| sandwell wrote:
| > The problem was that Emine's cell phone was not localized
| properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <i>; when it
| displayed Ramazan's message, it replaced the <i>s with <i>s.
|
| So it was the wife's phone that changed the meaning of the
| message, not his.
| batch12 wrote:
| Thanks, I missed that.
| djha-skin wrote:
| Lots of comments about how murder is murder, no need to involve
| UX. I mean, _yes_ , but it's still a good lesson in why UX
| matters. Even if there weren't a stabbing and the husband was
| forgiven, there would still have been a misunderstanding, even if
| perhaps the text had been one that was intended to be positive.
| gbacon wrote:
| This is a failure to apply the principle of charity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| In cases where the consequences for misunderstanding, and one's
| reactions are much less extreme, but people still let themselves
| be led into a problem by misunderstanding, i'd partly blame the
| technology because it should accommodate the possibility of
| people paying attention poorly in situations with minor
| consequences.
|
| In this case however, where they decided on murder and the worst
| kinds of interpretation because of what they'd read, the people
| are to blame far more than any text problem. They're murderous
| idiots who couldn't pause to think that maybe trying to kill an
| ostensible family member shouldn't be done before very, very
| carefully reading what they had said and later first hearing them
| out if they want to say something more in person.
|
| For that kind of violent stupidity, the stupid itself would have
| to be fixed if at all possible. No reasonable amount of tech
| optimization will help because They'll always find something to
| snag them into deep trouble.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Two Dots Too Many (2008)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758 - July 2015 (38
| comments)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| The phone didn't autocorrect "fucking" to "ducking"?? :D
| Muromec wrote:
| "It's not like I write software for a nuclear reactor, making a
| mistake will not kill anybody".
| morning-coffee wrote:
| Not only reminds of "Punctuation Saves Lives!" (Let's eat, kids)
| but also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFeVfwDvTyM
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