Forgot which country (iran, turkey..) but one diacritic on a phone text got a girl killed because it altered the meaning one word. Turning the sentence from loving to threatening or insulting.
The important thing for engineers to note is a technical shortcoming caused a tragic misunderstanding. Focusing instead on the well-known fact that some people have poor impulse control, knowing full well that is a non-controllable input, instead makes an excuse for poor engineering and implicitly expresses powerlessness to do anything about the problem.
But yes, misunderstanding or not, we should not kill people.
The story in the sibling comment is about a man attacking his daughter's ex because the ex came to apologize about a confusion over the Turkish dotless I. That's still a violent attack that the father could have kept his emotions in check. I don't condone calling the daughter names, even accidentally, but it is not a crime and the right response is not attempted murder.
I don't know who you're arguing with, but it isn't me. Nobody is saying it was.
I'm saying it is an irrelevant non sequitur.
Imagine that Dad instead misunderstood an instruction related to a financial transaction and lost a ton of money. Would you now be discounting the technical problem that caused the misunderstanding and berating Dad for being foolish?
If I were on a code review and I spotted an issue affecting Turkish dotless I, I assure you I would rant about it more than is reasonable.
As a contrived example if you had a symbol for 'happy' you want to be very cautious that it doesn't get converted to 'gay' because in your language gay and happy mean the same thing, in some repressive regime it means the leadership gets to execute you with the approval of the law.
Edit: weirdly HN refuses to display that emoji.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226853 (18 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mate#Name_and_pronunciat...
Maybe, though it's still halfway the same word.
> maté
Not a change, both spellings are valid.
Malé parties are a lot of fun.
Those are some pretty lamé runners.