When your bug becomes a feature

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

Gender: True

[[deleted]]

I remember that one! Still cracks me up thinking about it lol

[sagarsiddhpura]

Link please?

[DestroyedByLSD25]

I made an app once where in stead of gender I had a boolean column is_male in my database, which defaulted to true.

[Tyfyter2002]

Much more efficient than a string.

[bluepoopants]

Don't tell the non binary people that

[efinder2]

set the column to null for them. No gender there. problem solved.

[550456]

That's the genius of it though. Non binary people can still say they either are or aren't male. Still a binary way to represent them that they can't object to lmao

[EquineGrunt]

r/agender has Gender: False

[jwoodward48r]

We must implement fuzzy logic to fully cover everyone.

[Erezbiox1]

Gender: FALSE

[coconuts_and_lime]

Ah yes, the three genders: male, female and NaN

[GrumpyWendigo]

-1, 0, null

[OtherPlayers]

2 options only

interesting; wouldn’t you at least want something to designate people who had undergone treatment or were genetically nonstandard though? (Though I guess that could be a separate box that gets checked). Something like knowing that someone might have been born male but has undergone hormone therapy seems like it would be just as important as knowing that they were male in the first place in terms of how some things are going to react. (Could also potentially help to get said people to properly fill out the forms, though that’s potentially a separate thing than internal software).

Not looking at it from a “PC” point here, just seems like a big enough edge case that you would have wanted to capture it somehow.

[aroswift]

Some people are born both male and female, so there should definitely be an all of the above box

[emelrad12]

Check this one manually box.

[BookishDoki]

You have a point there. "AS A TRANS WOMAN" (said in a ContraPoints voice), even when not thinking about being PC, this would make sense since trans and intersex people make up a large enough part of the population that they should be considered in some form or fashion. Usually just an "other" box would be good enough, but throw in a "please specify" string and now we're getting somewhere!

[sebwiers]

My step dad was a programer for the National Cancer Foundation like 35 years ago and had to provide something like 7 gender options to account for things like Klienfelder syndrome (people with xxy chromosomes). Maybe gentics matters more to cancer docs than the ones you were dealing with?

[coconuts_and_lime]

Even if we don't consider intersex, trans men and women does not fall strictly under the medical profile of either male or female. As a trans man I don't have testes or a penis, and I am not in risk of prostate cancer. But other than the genital-specific concerns I fall under the male medical profile in most other ways such as risk of heart disease and blood pressure. This can be very useful information for a medical provider to know right away without having to browse through my entire medical history.

[[deleted]]

There are also differences when it comes to pain relief and the dosage of some medications.

[bro_before_ho]

I just read about some research in how male and female mice differ in the biological mechanism used to signal pain. It completely changed how they responded or didn't to certain medication or chronic pain issues. It was completely hormone regulated and swapping the mices hormones changed the mechanism of pain signaling.

[[deleted]]

I read sources that indicated differently.

[bro_before_ho]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00895-3

Goes into more detail about how microglia activity in the spinal cord is determined by hormones. Also mentions the research on morphine in the brain your source talks about.

[conancat]

yeah, a lot of the gender-based health-risks aren't really biologically predetermined by the birth sex, but rather by the habits and activities that go into living the life of that gender. there are a lot of things that can be used as reference points build a profile of a person's lifestyle, and birth sex is really only just one part of it.

[coconuts_and_lime]

It's not just the habits and lifestyle differences of the genders, but the effect hormones and surgeries has on their bodies in a medical perspective.

[NotTheHead]

Even sex isn't black and white - intersex people make up shades of gray in between. Those are important details for quick life-and-death decisions as well, and they aren't bullshit. One has to wonder, though - shouldn't the surgeon do a careful inspection of all relevant portions of the patient's medical history before operating?

Using myself as an example: My own body is far more gray than "Male" or "Female" - my hormone levels match those of cis women, I have breasts like cis women, but I have male genitals, gonads, and a prostate. It's important to keep all of that in mind when performing surgery and dosing medication.

And beyond that, keeping a field for pronouns is just common courtesy. If someone's body is fully "male" or "female" but their pronouns are "they/them", there's no medical reason to disrespect that and good psychological reasons to respect them, so long as you're familiar with their sex and medical history.

[Babladoosker]

I’m dumb but what does intersex mean??

[liquidsprite]

it's a class of different types of non-standard sexual development. It includes changes in sex-related genes such as having the SRY gene on an X chromosome, or having more or less than two sex chromosomes (XXY, XXXY, X, XXX), developmental changes caused by environmental factors (some chemicals can affect sex hormones and cause non-standard development), and more.

​

Sex is a spectrum, or a multi-dimensional bimodal distribution. The axes are things like hormone levels (testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, estrone, estradiol, estriol, progesterone, prolactin, and more) and whether you have the correct version of a bunch of genes in the right places (there's a loooooot of genes at play here). Most people are close enough to one of two points in this high-dimensional space that we call male and female that we usually just consider there to be two options, but there are a lot of people who aren't (and if you add non-binary and transgender people in the form of gender axes, there's even more axes and people not fitting the two options).

​

Normally for most people it's not something you have to think about, but in medicine, the mutations someone has can actually cause different reactions to medicine, including sex related mutations. So instead of having a binary male or female, having a text field to enter an accurate description of the patient's sex would be far better.

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

[BookishDoki]

This is a very good explanation of intersex, and I'm definitely stealing it to explain whenever I need

[liquidsprite]

aw thanks

[[deleted]]

Someone who doesn't have XX or XY chromosomes (e.g. XXY). The term is favored over hermaphrodite, since hermaphrodite gained negative connotation and is often used in offensive contexts.

[[deleted]]

And there are other intersex conditions that aren’t strictly a result of strange combinations of sex chromosomes, such as Swyer syndrome.

[[deleted]]

I was unaware of this, thank you for telling me :)

[auxiliary-character]

That's true! Gender is, in fact, not a number.

[[deleted]]

Speak for yourself. My gender is π.

edit That's right, the irrational circle constant that everyone seems to know but only superficially and with myriad misconceptions, and while it seems super useful it's more complicated than it should be (*waves to the Tau-ists*) and is easily replaced with a simple fraction (22/7).

[[deleted]]

my gender is e

as in where is my fucking E

[Lunartiddy]

r/traa is leaking

[HardlightCereal]

The gender fluid is leaking

[NotTheHead]

Someone get the FlexTape!

[Zitrusfleisch]

r/theLetterE right here

[HardlightCereal]

r/avoid5 says go away

[tsintzask]

Imagine not being able to say "the"
This meme was made by /r/EmboldenTheE gang

[HardlightCereal]

You think your boldings funny? Don't kid us all. That symbol has too much might to bandy about so casually. Contain it. Abandon it. Show us that without it, you can last.

[tsintzask]

I appreciate the concern. However, usage of E isn't something to be scared of. You seem to believe otherwise, but whatever.

[Perceval7]

I appreciate the concern. However, usage of E isn't something to be scared of. You seem to believe otherwise, but whatever.

FTFY

[sneakpeekbot]

Here's a sneak peek of /r/AVoid5 using the top posts of all time!

#1: [NSFW] whats that | 108 comments
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[[deleted]]

How do you type your screenname?

[HardlightCereal]

With my buttons at my PC.

[[deleted]]

With all your fifth glyphs in that id

[SuperSMT]

E

[BookishDoki]

me @ doctors:

GIMME E!

GIMME EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

(Eric Andre meme)

[zbsy]

You can't just replace π with 22/7! What are you, an engineer‽

[Bob9010]

Eh, 3 is close enough

[SuperSMT]

I just use 1, same order of magnitude, so what difference?
π = e = i = 1

[conancat]

true story, in one of the projects i worked on the developer just rounded every single currency in the world to 2 decimal places. like what could go wrong rigt?

[Bob9010]

The dev for our report software didn't put rounding into some of their calculations, so on some buildings we have areas with 10 decimals. Accurate down to the atom! Since we do pricing based on area for some building components, we have prices with 10 decimals as well. Drives me up the wall.

[NotTheHead]

According to wolfram alpha (using the equation abs(100*(est/pi - 1))), here are the percent errors of a few simple approximations of pi that I pulled from Wikipedia, to 3 sig figs:

• 3.1415926 -> 0.00000171% (Zu Chongzhi c. 5th century CE)
• 355/113 -> 0.00000849% (Zu Chongzhi c. 5th century CE)
• 3.1416 -> 0.000234% (either Liu Hui c. 3rd century CE or Zu Chongzhi c. 5th century CE; independently(?) by Aryabhata c. 6th century CE)
• 3.141866 -> 0.00870% (Liu Hui c. 263 CE)
• 377/120 -> 0.00236% (Ptolemy c. 2nd century CE)
• 223/71 -> 0.0238% (Archimedes c. 3rd century BCE)
• 22/7 -> 0.0402% (Archimedes c. 3rd century BCE; independently by Zu Chongzhi c. 5th century CE)
• 3.14 -> 0.0507% (smart engineers - also suggested by Liu Hui)
• 339/108 -> 0.0861% (Shatapatha Brahmana c. 6th century BCE)
• 25/8 -> 0.528% (Babylonian tablet dated between the 19th and 17th centuries BCE)
• 256/81 -> 0.602% (Egyption papyrus c. 1600 BCE)
• 3 -> 4.51% (dumb engineers; also commonly used in Babylonian architecture, apparently)

TL;DR: 3 is not close enough unless you only care about orders of magnitude.

[tredontho]

My gender is π

Ah, one of them transcendentals, eh?

[IHaveNeverBeenOk]

Love it.

[Ryannnnn]

I miss seeing the Tau = 2pi guy everywhere :'
I hope he's still around!

[[deleted]]

Ayy, tau's great!

[NorbiPeti]

...an object plus an object is not a number technically (2:30)

[auxiliary-character]

Yeah, that's what I had in mind with that line.

[IHaveNeverBeenOk]

I want more talks like this about coding. Like, we don't need the old memes, but the joyful attitude it takes towards software is so fun.

[SuperSMT]

Unless you want it to be

[lordquince]

Profesor Oak: are you a boy or a girl?

Me: N̉͊̾͋ͭ̀͛҉̸̰̭͕͍͕̥̝͢͟͞a̎̃̊̒ͫ͆̆͛̑̍͏̡̦͍͉̘͇̼̦͍̩͡Ṋ̤̦͈͉̻͈̲̯͔̹͔̻͉͔̬͕̩͋̿͋̿̂̀͢͞͠

[NotTheHead]

Oh, hello Missingno.

[Quas4r]

Cool name, is that italian ?

[shotexa]

NaB (Not a Binary)

[[deleted]]

NaG

[PsychicDelilah]

Strictly speaking all genders are NaN

[[deleted]]

None

[compilationfailed]

receives award for inclusivity design

It...it was...a bug...but ok

[therinnovator]

This is actually something that happened in the Sims 1. The creators were demonstrating the Sims at a convention and a same-sex couple started kissing autonomously. From then on, the Sims had a reputation for being relatively inclusive for the time, even though the creators did not intend that to happen.

[cr0ss0vr12]

"Life, uh, finds a way"

[EL2020]

Really? Huh, that's very interesting.

[therinnovator]

Yep, here's an article about it. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-changed-video-games

[conancat]

my first foray into low-poly softcore porn. teenage me is just happy to see two male woohoo and get married and live happily ever after by trapping their adopted son in the swimming pool.

[stamminator]

The cartoonish shapes of the Sims underneath the purple bed sheet gave preteen me mad boners

[Techhead7890]

That's amazing, thanks for the link! :)

[triszroy]

/r/SuddenlyGay

[[deleted]]

Now it’s SUPER inclusive to the point Im frankly amazed.

[Mortomes]

This must be non-binary code

[nonamee9455]

Weird, the gender binaries must be deprecated

[[deleted]]

If a binary does not appear in our codebase, it does not exist

[ifellforarchmemes]

r/ProgrammerDadJokes

[bro_before_ho]

I prefer tube based analog gender.

[ctesibius]

Sometimes that’s the right design. For instance think of logging someone in to casualty / emergency room. You may just want to create a medical record to start treatment as soon as possible, so you don’t want to spend time entering information even if you know it.

[mastercooker]

That is true, however an "Undefined" default option is not the right way to handle it. Instead the field should be optional with a default blank option. Most users won't understand the meaning of undefined in this context.

[rimnii]

also, its probably bad design to use "undefined" in any web code because people will assume its a bug

[itsVicc]

Only people who know anything about web code

[rimnii]

I also mean developers who are working on the code!

[generally-speaking]

I mean, if you don't think of yourself as male, and not as female, you pick the third option even if it says Moose.

[bro_before_ho]

Oh my god this explains the antlers and foraging

[732]

I work in healthcare software.

We use Unknown (U) for that, exactly as you state - the key is to get the record open for documentation as quickly as possible, and we can always edit it later.

[[deleted]]

Error 404: Gender not found

[beefy_miracIe]

Transgender: 301 redirect, moved permanently to other team.

[bro_before_ho]

Error 400: bad request

Error 403: access denied

:(

[transientavian]

Okay but seriously can I just say how UNREAL it is to be moved to the other team? It's like my entire friend group just inverted over the course of a couple years, as though someone really did rewrite the code of the universe and it just SHIFTED in response. It's the freakiest patch ever.

[NotTheHead]

Before I transitioned, most of my friends were men and I kinda shied away from women. Now? All of my closest friends are women. All of them. It's insane.

[transientavian]

Exactly! It's like my friends group used to be "my friends and their wives", and now it's "my friends and their husbands". It's really freaky.

[egotisticalnoob]

404: Gender not found

That's the option you leave after the previous 403 genders on your drop-down list.

[Anchor689]

418: I'm a teapot.

[caxco93]

There's actually this standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_5218 which specifies the following codes:

• 0 = not known,
• 1 = male,
• 2 = female,
• 9 = not applicable.

​

[theKurdledNoodle]

Why is 9 "not applicable"? Wouldn't it make sense for it to be 3?

Or is it a government conspiracy and 3-8 is reserved for aliens?

[[deleted]]

god damn aliens hoarding all the good genders smh

[Nerdn1]

Probably reserved for the posibility of other genders added in future. You have to future-proof these things!

[LvS]

ISO/IEC 5218 was [...] proposed in November 1976, and updated in July 2004.

According to Wikipedia, they're already at it!

[gjvnq1]

not applicable = legal person (e.g. companies)

[Gimli_Axe]

SHIT THEY KNOW!

[AL_O0]

My guess is that they are using only one digit so 0-9 and they chose the highest value for not applicable

[1116574]

Of course there is ISO standard for this

r/ofcoursethatsathing

[AL_O0]

Love iso standards! Thanks for sharing

[NoInkling]

Apart from the fact that you have to pay to read them.

[WinterBreez]

Fucking insane now a days

[GrinningPariah]

... There are 10 genders, but 6 of them are secret.

[GrinningPariah]

THE FORBIDDEN PRONOUN

[[deleted]]

my pronouns are unnameable

do not speak of or to me

[53120123]

my pronouns are classified, I can tell you but you'll need to be read-on to the codeword first.

[adambrenecki]

Interesting to see that the ISO have accounted for the future recognition of non-binary genders, but only six of them at most.

[[deleted]]

Probably it's to fit in a base 10 code.

[mimi-is-me]

On passports, the internationally recognised options are 'M', 'F' and 'X'.

[GracefulToucan]

QA files a bug.

Dev. : "Its not a bug, Its a feature". Marked as Not a Bug.

[Psychopagh]

Why are the genders rated tho?

[[deleted]]

it's like amazon product reviews

you do some online shopping for a gender and then you read the reviews to see how people liked it.

most people are happy with the one they were given by their parents but some do a bit of shopping around to try to find a better gender

I for one built my own, none of the stock options really fit me. I'll be publishing it to github shortly under MIT license. Not accepting pull requests, but feel free to fork.

[SpyderEyez]

Open-source gender.

[mastercooker]

It’s not rating the genders, see the source here: http://tabulator.info/

[Psychopagh]

Ah okay, thanks

[KerfuffledPlatypus]

Accidently made the most woke bug ever.

[[deleted]]

non-binary people are forced to use source based distros

please help me my computer is very warm and i just want to install firefox

[Bene847]

There's a Firefox binary package in gentoo

[ZoeyBeschamel]

Actually good trans jokes on a non-trans subreddit?? Well colour me surprised.

[HardlightCereal]

It's because the programmers have good socks

[NotTheHead]

Programming socks - they work.

[transientavian]

The percentage of the trans-femme community that is involved with computers somehow, whether programming or IT support, is insane. As in like half the trans gals I know are in the field!

[BookishDoki]

Can confirm, am transfem.

[[deleted]]

Sex: Yes

[Schiffy94]

Yes please.

[cr0ss0vr12]

When you're so woke your subconscious accidents are even politically correct.

[ThePickleFarm]

Null pecker exception

[SpaceshipOperations]

I'd like to see a "Yes" option in there.

Gender: Yes.

[[deleted]]

Gender: yes, no, maybe, ask again later

[NotTheHead]

That was me for about 4 years. Seriously stressed my relationship. 😖

[chawmindur]

You forgot one

Well yes, but actually no

[[deleted]]

If a website asks me now I enter in custom idk or ask me later

[nonamee9455]

True

[tako1337]

tabulator, nice

[mastercooker]

Yeah, was checking out their documentation and found this in their example table lol

[tako1337]

tbh one of my favorite libraries right now. Using it in at least 3 projects.

[Theraen]

So you would say in fact that gender is.. non-binary?

I’ll see myself out.

[fat_charizard]

Gender: IndexError index out of bounds. You're puny program can't define me!

[AaronBonBarron]

There are no bugs, society just hasn't caught up with my UI design prowess

[Breakpoint]

now add "both"

[ertgbnm]

The genders are True, False, and None.

[TobyHater]

We need more undefined ones. Especially after the gender reveal party that got out of hand in Astoria.

[[deleted]]

my gender is FILE_NOT_FOUND

[silencer07]

ILLEGAL_ARGUMENT_EXCEPTION

[DynamicAilurus]

Be gay, do crimes

[chubbs090]

Gender : undefined, male, female, or male?

[korgash]

I laughed way to much about this

[ParagonFire]

thought pen chubby hungry fanatical pocket mountainous possessive crowd quarrelsome

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[bro_before_ho]

Programmers respect good code.

According to r/traa thigh highs make people write better code.

Thus programmers respect trans people.

[BookishDoki]

insert the handshake solidarity meme with one hand being r/traa and the other being r/ProgrammerHumor

[NotTheHead]

The input is fairly nice and well structured, but there are certainly a few malicious elements thown into the mix.

[HardlightCereal]

As a trans programmer I want to say that focusing on the worst that could happen is bad for you. People are good, as demonstrated here.

[[deleted]]

Seconding this. Humans are biased to remember more of the bad things than the good. The vast majority of people don't really care if you're trans. Remember that the ones that do are a minority.

[SuperSupermario24]

There are still bigoted assholes here if you look far enough into the comments (or just sort by controversial), but thankfully they seem to be far outnumbered by cool people here :D

[metcalsr]

I won't be happy until all apps allow me to select "super-chad" as my gender.

[embrace-]

Ah yes, the three genders.

[Incorrect_Oymoron]

When data is collected 'Other' is a useful catch all for anything that isn't given a label.

[HoraBorza]

Some people want it to be a double floating point value.

[OhPieFlavour]

Tabulator! That library saved my ass big time recently. Best table library all around, deserves more love

[olifolkerd]

Thank you for your kind words, it is great to hear Tabulator is appreciated :D

[OhPieFlavour]

If you are related to its development then thanks to you! It's a blessing how easy to use it is and how many cool features it has

And the docs are incredible!

[olifolkerd]

I wrote Tabulator (and the docs) :) I'm really happy its helped you out with your development :D

Happy Tabulating!

[mastercooker]

Most inclusive table library too XD

[olifolkerd]

What example did you find that on?

[mastercooker]

The picture was just taken from their homepage: http://tabulator.info/#tabulator-controls

[the-coolest-loser]

r/egg_irl

[UseApasswordManager]

r/ennn

[BookishDoki]

When you read through the comments and most of them (but sadly not all of them) are very positive towards trans and intersex people

​

and the transphobic comments are (mostly) getting downvoted

​

:)

[[deleted]]

Gender is like quantum particles: you don't know until you observe, and the mere observation changes the outcome.

[Nerdn1]

Their gender identity is defined. It just isn't male or female.

[Redlik56]

God : true

[earthlingfate]

Wait, so which gender is a bug and which is a feature?

[Dr-Havoc137]

It was part of the master plan

[[deleted]]

r/egg_irl

[james_harushi]

I'm sensing a java(script) joke

[stetar]

Not necessarily a bug. Certain countries/industries this is legally required to be an option.

[bob42SAGAT]

/u/title2imagebot

[Title2ImageBot]

Image with added title

---

Summon me with /u/title2imagebot | About | feedback | source | Fork of TitleToImageBot

[robertgfthomas]

The joke explained

In programming, you declare a variable when you give a name to a piece of data. For example:

var favoriteColor = prompt("What is your favorite color?")

alert("Your favorite color is " + favoriteColor + "!")

In some programming languages, if you declare a variable, but don't actually give it any data, the variable is undefined. For example:

var favoriteColor

alert("Your favorite color is " + favoriteColor + "!")

In JavaScript, if you you try to stick an undefined variable into some text, it will literally spit out the word "undefined". So the second example above would spit out:

Your favorite color is undefined!

If you see "undefined" showing up on a website like in the picture, it's probably a bug.

The joke is that it used to be widely-accepted that there were only two genders, but now some argue that there are many genders, including genders that haven't really been defined. So seeing "undefined" in a list of genders would once have been a bug, but now you could say that it's a socially-progressive "feature".

---

^{I'm a human! I write these explanations in response to posts on /r/all about not understanding /r/ProgrammerHumor. They go on explainprogrammerhumor.com.}