In 2023, Finland was declared to be the world’s happiest country for the sixth year in a row. However, even this Nordic country has its own set of challenges.

Enter “Very Finnish Problems.” Created by Joel Willans, a Brit living in Helsinki, it hilariously highlights the quirks and idiosyncrasies of local life, entertaining both Finns and international audiences alike.

From popular spring activities to unorthodox road signs, continue scrolling to check out some of the most popular memes that have recently appeared on this fun corner of the internet.

More info: Facebook | Instagram | TikTok

In an American restaurant or taxi, it’s standard to tip 15-20%, even if the service isn’t outstanding. In many European countries, people are expected to round up to the nearest euro. Meanwhile, in South America, customers usually leave a 10% tip for their order. 

And then there are those who leave servers nothing at all. 

A waitress’ video has recently gone viral after she recounted an uncomfortable situation she experienced while working at a restaurant, as well as her strong reaction to the customer’s remark.

In the video, which received more than half a million views, a woman named Syd recreates the tense interaction, playing the part of the customer in question, who informed her after entering the establishment: “We wanna let you know up front we don’t tip. We’re not tipping. So you can just give us whatever service you need.” 

A server called Syd has recently gone viral after recreating a tense interaction with a customer who informed her up-front that they wouldn’t be tipping

Image Credits: poorandhungry

Instead of letting the customers sit in the dining area, Syd told them to return to the host stand and place a to-go order. She explained that there was a service charge for sitting in the restaurant. 

Syd’s response didn’t exactly sit well with the customers, who asked her, “So because I don’t believe that I should have to pay your salary, I can’t even eat here?”

“If you don’t want the great service, if you don’t want to pay the service charge for it, that’s totally fine,” the waitress responded, before adding that the restaurant “could still feed” them, but it couldn’t “deliver free services.”

After hearing that she wouldn’t be rewarded for her job, Syd told the customers that she couldn’t let them sit in the dining area, indicating that they should instead order to-go

Image Credits: poorandhungry

Image Credits: poorandhungry

The video, captioned, “Saved us both so much time, but I am not sure what exactly they expected to come next,” sparked mixed reactions, with some social media users praising Syd for standing up for herself and asking to be recognized for her service, and others arguing that tips are not mandatory.

“Love this! No tip, no service,” one TikTok user wrote.

“This is a brilliant response — tip is the service charge!” another person said.

A third user wrote: “Do I think restaurants should move away from tipping & pay their employees? Yes, 100%. Will I tip generously until that’s true? Yes, 100%.”

Syd’s strong reaction became the subject of debate online, with some people praising her for standing up for herself and others arguing that tips are not mandatory

Image Credits: poorandhungry

Those who disagreed with Syd’s reaction pointed to the importance of customer service, saying that clients are not to blame for waitstaff receiving low salaries.

“Everyone who works for a restaurant has been brainwashed into thinking the tips [are] their actual pay, the real villain here are the restaurants who pay below,” someone wrote.

“There NO WAY any manager would ever be ok with that,” another TikTok user penned.

Somebody else said: “I don’t understand why is the customer’s problem that your boss is exploiting you. I always tip, but a tip isn’t obligatory.”

Others suggested the tip should be based on whether or not the customer received quality service, writing, “Interesting, I always thought you tip someone when they do a good job. I was unaware it’s mandatory.”

Watch the viral video below

@poorandhungry Saved us both so much time but I am not sure what exactly they expected to come next #server #restaurant #serverlife #customerservice #tipping ♬ original sound – $yd

Last year, Syd shared a TikTok describing the time a Ben & Jerry’s cashier made their interaction really uncomfortable after noticing that she wasn’t going to give her a tip for the $2 cone she had ordered.

“I’m not tipping you $1 on a $2 cone that you just handed me. I’m not. So she hands me my cone, I put my card in, it gives me like how much you want to tip, I hit ‘no tip,” the TikToker said before adding that the cashier hit the counter with her hands in disapproval at her decision.

A report released by Toast, a restaurant management software company, indicates that the average restaurant tips servers received across all 50 US states was 18.9% for the second quarter of 2023.

According to the Pew Research tipping report, Americans’ tipping behaviors vary widely by situation, with 92% of survey respondents saying they would always or often leave a tip at sit-down restaurants and 12% of people responding they would pay the server after eating at a fast-casual restaurant.

“This is a brilliant response,” a social media user wrote

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Today’s anonymously submitted story is a case where the WTF isn’t the code itself, per se. This arguably could be a CodeSOD, and we’ll get to the code, but there’s so much more to the story.

Our submitter, let’s call them Janice, used to work for a financial institution with a slew of legacy systems. One such system was an HP3000 minicomputer. “Mini”, of course, meant “refrigerator sized”.

The HP3000 itself is an interesting, if peripheral story, because it’s one of the tales of a product launch going incredibly wrong. Let’s talk a little history.

We start with the HP2100 in 1966, which Hewlett Packard did nothing to design, and instead purchased the company that designed it. The core innovation of the HP2100 was that it was architecturally similar to a PDP-8, but supported full 16-bit memory, instead of PDP’s 12-bit.

HP didn’t really know what they had bought- they marketed it as a “test and instrumentation” system, and were surprised when businesses purchased it for back office operations. They ended up with one of the most popular minicomputers for office use, despite it not being designed for that purpose.

Thus began the projects “Alpha” and “Omega”. Alpha was a hardware refresh of the 2100, with a better memory model. Omega was a ground-up redesign for 32-bit memory, which would allow it to support a whopping 4MB of RAM. There was just one problem with the Omega design: they didn’t have funding to actually finish it. The project was killed in 1970, which threw some of the staff into “wear black armbands to work” levels of mourning.

Unfortunately, while work was done on Omega, the scope of Alpha crept, which resulted in another project management wasn’t sure could be delivered. But the market was there for a time-sharing minicomputer, so they pressed on despite the concerns.

The HP2000-line had time sharing system that used multiple processors. There was a front-end processor which handled user interactions. Then there was the actual CPU, which ran programs. This meant that time-sharing was simplified- the CPU just ran programs in a round-robin fashion, and didn’t have to worry about pesky things like user inputs. Essentially, it was really just a batch processing system with a multi-user front-end.

The designers of Alpha wanted to support full multiprogramming, instead of this hybrid-ish model. But they also needed to support traditional batch processing, as well as real-time execution. So the team split up to build the components of the “Multi-Programming Executive” module, which would allow all of these features.

The Alpha, which was still 16-bit, didn’t have the luxurious 4MB of RAM- it had 128kB. The MPE used much more memory than 128kB. This led to a massive crunch as the programmers worked to shrink MPE into something usable, while marketing looked at the deadlines and said, “We were supposed to be selling this thing months ago!”

The result was a massive war between engineering and marketing, where marketing gave customers promises about what the performance would be, engineering told marketing what the actual performance would be (significantly worse than what marketing was promising), and then management would demand engineering “prove” that marketing’s over-promises could be met.

The initial ship-date was November, 1972, and by god, they shipped on time. Nothing actually worked, but they shipped. The first computer out the door was returned almost immediately. It could only handle two simultaneous users before slowing to a crawl, and crashed every ten minutes. By December, HP had gotten that to “crashes every two hours”. They kept shipping machines even as they had to cut features and reliability promises.

Those frequent crashes also concealed another bug: after running for 24 days, the HP3000’s clock would overflow (2^31 milliseconds) and the clock would magically reverse by 25 days. As one sysop of a purchased HP3000 put it: “The original designers of MPE never thought the OS would stay up for 25+ days in a row”.

After a bunch of management shuffling, the titular Packard of Hewlett Packard sent a memo: production was stopping and all sold computers were being recalled. Customers were offered HP2000s in its place, or they could wait until fall 1973 for a revised version- that would only support 4-6 users, far fewer than marketing’s initial promises of 64. This pleased no one, and it’s reported that some customers cried over the disappointment.

With sales paused, the entire computer underwent a design overhaul. The resulting machine was faster and cheaper and could actually handle 8 simultaneous users. One year after the botched launch, the HP3000 went back on the market, and ended up being a full success.

It was so successful, HP continued supporting the HP3000 until 2010, which is where Janice enters our story. Circa 2006, she needed to update some Pascal code. That code used a lot of bit-masks to handle flags, which is normally a pretty easy function in Pascal- the language has a standard set of bitwise operations. So Janice was surprised to see:

FUNCTION BITON(A , B : INTEGER): BOOLEAN;
VAR
        C : INTEGER;
BEGIN
        CASE A OF
                15 : C:=1;
                14 : C:=2;
                13 : C:=4;
                12 : C:=8;
                11 : C:=16;
                10 : C:=32;
                9 : C:=64;
                8 : C:=128;
                7 : C:=256;
                6 : C:=512;
                5 : C:=1024;
                4 : C:=2048;
                3 : C:=4096;
                2 : C:=8192;
                1 : C:=16384;
                0 : C:=32768;
        OTHERWISE
                BITON:=FALSE;
        END;
        IF ((B DIV C) MOD 2) = 1 THEN
                BITON:=TRUE
        ELSE
                BITON:=FALSE;
END;

FUNCTION SETBITON(A, B : INTEGER) : INTEGER;
VAR
        C : INTEGER;
BEGIN
        CASE A OF
                15 : C:=1;
                14 : C:=2;
                13 : C:=4;
                12 : C:=8;
                11 : C:=16;
                10 : C:=32;
                9 : C:=64;
                8 : C:=128;
                7 : C:=256;
                6 : C:=512;
                5 : C:=1024;
                4 : C:=2048;
                3 : C:=4096;
                2 : C:=8192;
                1 : C:=16384;
                0 : C:=32768;
        OTHERWISE
                C:=0;
        END;
        IF NOT BITON(A,B) THEN
                SETBITON:=B + C
        ELSE
                SETBITON:=B;
END;

FUNCTION SETBITOFF(A, B : INTEGER) : INTEGER;
VAR
        C : INTEGER;
BEGIN
        CASE A OF
                15 : C:=1;
                14 : C:=2;
                13 : C:=4;
                12 : C:=8;
                11 : C:=16;
                10 : C:=32;
                9 : C:=64;
                8 : C:=128;
                7 : C:=256;
                6 : C:=512;
                5 : C:=1024;
                4 : C:=2048;
                3 : C:=4096;
                2 : C:=8192;
                1 : C:=16384;
                0 : C:=32768;
        OTHERWISE
                C:=0;
        END;
        IF BITON(A,B) THEN
                SETBITOFF:=B - C
        ELSE
                SETBITOFF:=B;
END;

FUNCTION LAND(A,B : INTEGER) : INTEGER;
VAR
        I : INTEGER;
BEGIN
        I:=0;
        REPEAT
                IF BITON(I,A) THEN
                        IF BITON(I,B) THEN
                                A:=SETBITON(I,A)
                        ELSE
                                A:=SETBITOFF(I,A)
                ELSE
                        A:=SETBITOFF(I,A);
                I:=I + 1;
        UNTIL I > 15;
        LAND:=A;
END;

This is a set of hand-reinvented bitwise operations, culminating in an LAND, which does a bitwise and (not a logical and, which makes it annoyingly misnamed). I wouldn’t call the code a horrible approach to doing this, even if it’s definitely an inefficient approach (and when you’re running a 33 year old computer, efficiency matters), but absent built-in bitwise operations, I can’t see a lot of other options. The biggest problem is that LAND will set bits on that are already on, which is unnecessary- an AND should really only ever turn bits off.

Which, as it turns out, is the root WTF. The developer responsible wasn’t ignorant about bitwise operations. The version of Pascal that shipped on the HP3000 simply didn’t have any. No and, or, not, or xor. Not even a shift-left or shift-right operation.

In any case, this is what happens when I start doing research on a story and end up getting sucked down a rabbit hole. As always, while Wikipedia’s true value is as a bibliography. A lot of those links have much more detail, but I hope this quick overview was an interesting story.

Prince Harry arrived in London after an overnight flight from California, US, on Tuesday (February 6) to visit his father, King Charles III, after his cancer diagnosis was made public.

Buckingham Palace announced on Monday (February 5) that the king, 75, had been diagnosed with a form of cancer and that he would be forced to step back from public duties for treatment. 

 The Palace didn’t give details about the king’s diagnosis or specify what type of cancer he is being treated for. They did, however, confirm it was discovered during a recent procedure to treat an enlarged prostate.

Following King Charles’ cancer diagnosis, Prince Harry arrived in London and met with his father for 45 minutes

Image credits: James Manning/PA

Prince Harry and his brother, the Prince of Wales, were both informed about the diagnosis before it was publicly announced, along with Charles’ siblings, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward.

Charles and Harry met for around 45 minutes before the king left for his flight to Sandringham, his estate in Norfolk, East of England, according to the BBC.

Meanwhile, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is expected to remain in the US, where the couple live with their two children, Archie and Lilibet.

Harry’s reunion with Charles marked the first time he has met with his father since May, when he traveled to the U.K. to attend his coronation

@dailymailroyals♬ original sound – Daily Mail Royals

Shortly after the private meeting with Harry, Charles was photographed in a car alongside Camilla Parker Bowles, England’s queen consort, as the two traveled to a helicopter to fly to Sandringham.

Harry’s visit with Charles marked the first time he has met with his father since May, when he traveled to the U.K. to attend his coronation.

There are no plans for Harry to meet his brother, Prince William, during his visit to London, the BBC reported.

Buckingham Palace announced on Monday (February 5) that the king, 75, had been diagnosed with a form of cancer that will force him to “postpone public-facing duties”

Image credits: Samir Hussein/WireImage

The exact location where he will be staying in the English capital is unknown; though, reports suggest Harry “would have gladly accepted” a reunion with his brother but instead has “spent a night in a London hotel.”

Additionally, it’s believed he would have preferred to have spent more time with his father, but Charles was forced to cut their reunion short because he was “very tired after his procedure he’d had the day before,” Sunday Times Royal Editor Roya Nikkah said on Good Morning Britain.

The royal editor also revealed that reports suggest Harry and his father have not ruled out another meeting while the Duke is in England, according to Mirror UK.

After the brief meeting, the king left for his flight to Sandringham, his estate in Norfolk, East of England

@dailymailroyals Royal Update: Mysterious Helicopter has been spotted going into the palace. More updates to follow. #helocopter #fyp #news #buckinghampalace #royal #kingcharles #princeharry #kingcharlescancer #royalfamily ♬ original sound – Daily Mail Royals

The youngest son of Charles and Lady Di wrote candidly about his distant relationship with members of the Royal Family in his memoir, Spare, in which he recalled incidents of physical violence with his older brother. 

The memoir’s title originates in a story that Harry recounted of his father supposedly saying to his wife, Princess Diana, on the day of his birth: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an heir and a spare – my work is done.”

Additionally, Meghan Markle suggested the British royal family had speculated about the skin color of their firstborn child, Archie, during a 2021 television special hosted by Oprah that ignited backlash towards the members of the House of Windsor.

The couple stepped down from their senior royal roles in January 2020 and moved to Southern California following the tensions with the family.

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Let’s say you have a database table containing a list of countries. Given the primary key of a country in that table- an arbitrary ID field- you need to look up the name of that country.

Curtis‘s predecessor dropped this solution:

function return_country($id) {
        $sql = "SELECT * FROM countries";
        $qry = db_query($sql);
        if(mysql_num_rows($qry)>0){
                while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($qry)){
                        $a[$row['id']] = $row['name'];
                }
        }else{
                return array();
        }
        return $a[$id];
}

I guess they got the memo about not doing SQL injection flaws, but missed the “because you use query parameters”. Instead, this queries the entire list of countries, iterates across them to build a mapping of ID to country name, and then uses that map to return the correct result.

This code really “shines” in its details. Sure, we could solve this with a query, but even if we opt to iterate across the table, we could just return from inside the loop. But no, we build an associative array.

And while it’d be better to return an error when the ID can’t be found, we could return an empty string, but no- we return an empty array.

Return country? I’d rather return this code.