undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmalux852y ago0 comments

Curious, where are you from? If I Google N/A every single hit on the first page is explaining it means "Not applicable"

are you from a non-english country? Maybe its cultural?

0 comments

The first entry on Google is Wikipedia [1] for me:

> N/A (or sometimes n/a or N.A.) is a common abbreviation in tables and lists for the phrase not applicable, not available, not assessed, or no answer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N/A

malux85OP2y ago

Thats interesting, wikipedia is not on the first page for me, my first hit is Cambridge dict: (and then a bunch of other dicts) - Im flying right now but IP geolocation puts me in the US

Meaning of n/a in English written abbreviation for not applicable: used on a form to show that you are not giving the information asked for because the question is not intended for you or your situation: If a question does not apply to you, please put N/A in the box provided. COMMERCE.

TIL

Jensson2y ago

In a data table "not available" is usually the right word for it, like if you have a list of national statistics then some of the values wont be available due to political reasons etc. But all of those means basically the same thing to the end user, this value isn't there.

mewpmewp22y ago

I'm from North Europe, so not a native English speaker, but still it seems like based on my experience in life it seems as the first idea is that it's Not Available.

If I was to code something and for whatever reason some data wasn't available I would use N/A.

"Not applicable" doesn't feel right to me about N/A.

For instance if there is a table of comparison and for whatever reason there is data missing for some entity, while there should be, I would use N/A. So not applicable feels wrong for me for that reason alone.

This all is coming from intuition though.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse