Reminds me of the story of Ireland's worst Polish driver who never got caught: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....
NULL license plate not such a bright idea
141–150 of 484 posts
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the humans have decided that an empty value will be typed, by hand, into their terminals as the characters "NULL" Almost certainly because of software constraints, like the form not allowing the plate number field to be blank.
Yeah, I addressed that: >employees with access to the system are required to enter a 'valid' value.
... did you edit that second line in after the fact, or am I losing it?
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#143Confusing the value NULL for a non-null string-sequence which says “NULL” shows the clear sign of a system where no data can be assumed to hold any integrity.
These bugs and categories of errors should simply not be possible in sane languages or frameworks.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#144Tangentially related somewhat-common bug: YAML files will interpret the literal 'no' as boolean false if it's not quoted, instead of as a string. Many developers have wondered why, when they stuck country-specific configurations in a YAML file, that things suddenly stopped working when they expanded support for Norway.
I always felt Yaml is far too complicated of a format for storing hierarchical data. JSON is too simple (no comments; hard to store multi-line strings).
HCL, the hierarchical data storage language used by Terraform, is the closest thing I’ve seen to a happy medium between JSON and Yaml.
Another option, if the string values are not multi-line, is CommentJSON (use the Python module or write 10 lines of code that strips out comments from JSON if using another language).
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#145I recently saw a car with a license plate of B8B88BB8 (or something to that effect) that I am almost certain the owner chose to make it hard to read and transcribe correctly by either humans or computer vision systems. I was honestly kind of impressed.
I'm surprised more places don't do what Nintendo did with course ids in Super Mario Maker 2. They intentionally removed some characters that are visually similar to avoid confusion when writing out codes.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Die on? But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.
Figure of speech... I just mean he is making a stand for something not that important but causes him (and only him, really) inconvenience
I know what "die on" is - it's just inappropriate in the context: nothing bad has actually happened to him.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#147[deleted]
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#148Should have gone with NaN
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Die on? But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.
>he can challenge the fines in a court of law. If he sees spending time and effort expunging his record every few weeks as worth the trade-off for the 'extra notoriety', then power to him. I wouldn't do that.
I'd presume - the court decision may force the agency to fix their code.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#150Years ago (in the late 90's or early aughts) when ordering vanity plates online became a thing, I got approved for the plate "127.0.0.1". This was a California or NC plate- can't remember as I lived in both states. I checked the mailbox excitedly every day like Ralphie from A Chrismas Story for my uber cool plate. When I finally did get something from the DMV, it was too small to be a license plate and was simply a note that said "Sorry, your requested plate conflicts with a motorcycle plate, so we have to deny your request." Huge bummer, but I guess 127.0.0.1 becomes 127001 in their systems.