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Comment by markstos | Hacker News Reader

The shirt may be less funny for some residents of Butler County, Kansas who got swatted because a mapping firm did't resolve unknown locations to Null Island, but rather than to the geographic center of the United States. Their house.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-su...

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The implication that "unknown locations should default to Null Island", as opposed to some more robust error handling, is also questionable.

They should default to the point at infinity.

I mean, they should default to an out of band error; these days, especially for something as high level as mapping, there's no good reason to need to fold "this is an error case" in with "this is a set of valid coordinates X"

Psst, the math joke here is that "the point at infinity" is literally the mathematicians version of folding in "this is an error case" with "valid coordinates". The "error case" in question being division by zero. Turns out there is good reason to do it, because it means the co-ordinate is always defined.

If you have to explain the joke...

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.

I'd also add that I appreciate a good maths joke, but that's far outweighed by an irrational (in degree) anger at APIs where the error case is a member of the success cases type

180°0'0.0"N 180°0'0.0"E Degrees

Some of the fault for that issue is with the application developers and not the mapping firm.

At least one of the popular data sources does NOT return a long,lat coordinate, it returns a long,lat coordinate plus an "accuracy radius". For unknown US locations this was the "center" of the US plus a 1000km radius.. but most people never used the radius value and only blindly returned the center coordinate as truth.

You can see this in action if you go to https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-precision-demo and search for 17.1.2.3. it comes back with (37.751, -97.822) with a radius of 1000km.

(37.751, -97.822) being the new "adjusted" center that's now in the middle of a reservoir.

This is also the problem with some "zero value postcodes", at least in Netherlands[1] – I'm not sure how that works in the US. People just manually fill in "1111 AA", "1234 AB", etc. and forms blindly accept that – it is a valid postcode after all. People have had their utilities disconnected, have debts ascribed to them, are unable to register for services, etc.

[1]: (In Dutch) https://www.vice.com/nl/article/wj8b4x/wonen-op-postcode-123...

That sounds like bad policing being blamed on technology.

Why not both?

This shirt about a computer bug may not be funny to people who have died from computer bugs.

The House at 56°00'00.0"N 10°00'00.0"E was once shot at by criminals who thought it to be their target.

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