awesome-falsehood

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<p align="center"> <i>The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.</i><br> — Ludwig Wittgenstein<sup id="intro-quote-ref"><a href="#intro-quote-def">[1]</a></sup> </p>

A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in. A falsehood is an idea that you initially believed was true, but in reality, it is proven to be false.

E.g. of an idea: valid email address exactly has one @ character. So, you will use this rule to implement your email-field validation logic. Right? Wrong! The reality is: emails can have multiple @ chars. Therefore your implementation should allow this. The initial idea is a falsehood you believed in.

The falsehood articles listed below will have a comprehensive list of those false-beliefs that you should be aware of, to help you become a better programmer.

Contents

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• Meta
• Arts
• Business
• Cryptocurrency
• Dates and Time
• Education
• Emails
• Geography
• Human Identity
• Internationalization
• Management
• Multimedia
• Networks
• Phone Numbers
• Postal Addresses
• Science
• Society
• Software Engineering
• Transportation
• Typography
• Video Games
• Web

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Meta

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe - A brief list of common falsehoods. A great overview and quick introduction into the world of falsehoods.
• Falsehoods about Programming - A humbling and fun list on programming and programmers themselves.
• Falsehoods about Falsehoods Lists - Meta commentary on how these falsehoods shouldn't be handled.

Arts

• Falsehoods about Music - False assumption that might be made in codifying music.
• Falsehoods about Art - Common misconceptions about art.

Business

• Falsehoods about Online Shopping - Covers prices, currencies and inventory.
• Falsehoods about Prices - Covers currencies, amounts and localization.
• Falsehoods about IBANs - International Bank Account Numbers are not international.
• Falsehoods about Economics - Economics are not simple or rational.
• Decimal Point Error in Etsy's Accounting System - The importance of types in accounting software: missing the decimal point ends up with 100x over-charges.
• Twenty five thousand dollars of funny money - Same error as above at Google Ads, or the danger of separating your pennies from your dollars, where $250 internal coupons turned into $25,000. My advice: get rid of integers and floats for monetary values. Use decimals. Or fallback to strings and parse them, don't validate.
• Characters < and > in company names lead to XSS attacks - Because UK allows companies to be registered with special characters, a hacker leveraged them to register \"><SCRIPT SRC=MJT.XSS.HT></SCRIPT> LTD, but also ; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES";-- LTD, BETTS & TWINE LTD and SAFDASD & SFSAF \' SFDAASF\" LTD.
• Minutiae of company names - How the rules of the State of Delaware and the IRS does not intersects.
• CLDR currency definitions - Currency validity date ranges overlap due to revolts, invasions, new constitutions, and slow planned adoption.
• tax - A PHP 5.4+ tax management library.

Cryptocurrency

• Falsehoods about Bitcoin - A list of mistaken perspectives on Bitcoin.
• Falsehoods about Ethereum - Misconceptions and common pitfalls in contract programming.

Dates and Time

• Falsehoods about Time - Seminal article on dates and time.
• More Falsehoods about Time - Part. 2 of the article above.
• Falsehoods about Time and Time Zones - Another takes on time-related falsehoods, with an emphasis on time zones.
• Critique of Falsehoods about Time - Takes on the first article above and provides an explanation of each falsehood, with more context and external resources.
• Falsehoods about Unix Time - Mind the leap second!
• Falsehoods about Time Zones - Has some nice points regarding the edge-cases of DST transitions.
• Your Calendrical Fallacy Is Thinking… - List covering intercalation and cultural influence, made by a community of iOS and macOS developers.
• Time Zone Database - Code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe.
• The Long, Painful History of Time - Most of the idiosyncrasies in timekeeping can find an explanation in history.
• You Advocate a Calendar Reform - Your idea will not work. This article tells you why.
• So You Want to Abolish Time Zones - Abolishing timezones may sound like a good idea, but there are quite a few complications that make it not quite so.
• The Problem with Time & Timezones - A video about why you should never, ever deal with timezones if you can help it.
• $26,000 Overcollection by Labor Department - The consequence of wrong calendar accounting.
• RFC-3339 vs ISO-8601 - An giant list of formats from the two standards, how they overlaps, and live examples.
• ISO-8601, YYYY, yyyy, and why your year may be wrong - String formatting of date is hard.
• UTC is Enough for everyone, right? - There are edge cases about dates and time (specifically UTC) that you probably haven't thought of.
• Storing UTC is not a silver bullet - “Just store dates in UTC” is not always the right approach.
• How to choose between UT1, TAI and UTC - Depends on your priorities between SI seconds, earth rotation sync, leap seconds avoidance.
• Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result? - Infamous Stack Overflow answer about both complicated historical timezones, and how historical dates can be re-interpreted by newer versions of software.
• Critical and Significant Dates - From Y2K to the overflow of 32-bit seconds from Unix epoch, a list of special date to watch for depending on the system.
• “I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.” - Is the note left on his terminal by a quitting engineer in the 70s, after too much effort toiling away on sub-second timing concerns. Source: The Soul of a New Machine.

Education

• Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating - A list of things (not only) computer science students tend to erroneously and at times surprisingly believe even though they (probably) should know better.
• Postdoc myths - “Lots of things are said, written and believed about postdoctoral researchers that are simply not true.”

Emails

• Falsehoods about Email - On addresses, content and delivery.
• I Knew How to Validate an Email Address Until I Read the RFC - Provides intricate examples that are unsuspected valid email addresses according the RFC-822.
• So you think you can validate email addresses (FOSDEM 2018) - Presentation of edge-case email addresses and why you should not use regex to parse them.
• Your E-Mail Validation Logic is Wrong - A summary of the various, surprising things that are allowed in an email address.
• libvldmail - A library that implements RFC-based checks for e-mail addresses.

Geography

• Falsehoods about Geography - Takes on places, their names and locations.
• Falsehoods about Maps - Covers coordinates, projection and GIS.
• I Hate Coordinate Systems - A guide for geospatial practitioners on diagnosing and fixing common issues with coordinate systems.
• Top 5 most insane kanji place names in Japan - “There's one special group of kanji that's hard even for Japanese people to read: place names.”

Human Identity

• Falsehoods about Names - The article that started it all.
• Falsehoods about Names – With Examples - A revisited version of the article above, this time with detailed explanations.
• Falsehoods about Biometrics - Fingerprints are not unique.
• Falsehoods about Families - You can't really define a family with strict rules.
• Falsehoods about Gender: #1 & #2 - Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties.
• Falsehoods about Me - Issues at the intersection of names and gender and internationalization.
• Gay Marriage: The Database Engineering Perspective - How to store a marriage in a database while addressing most of the falsehoods about gender, naming and relationships.
• Personal Names Around the World - How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications for the Web?
• XKCD #327: Exploits of a Mom - Funny take on how implementation of a falsehood might lead to security holes.
• Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - Real-life example on how implemented falsehood has negative impact on someone's life.
• HL7 v3 RIM - A flexible data model for representing human names.
• Apple iOS NSPersonNameComponentsFormatter - Localized representations of the components of a person's name.

Internationalization

On character encoding, string formatting, unicode and internationalization.

• Falsehoods about Language - Translating a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to be.
• Falsehoods about Plain Text - Plain text can't cut it, which makes Unicode even more incredible for its ability to just work well.
• Falsehoods about text - A subset of the falsehoods from above, illustrated with some examples.
• Internationalis(z)ing Code - A video about things you need to keep in mind when internationalizing your code.
• [Minimum to Know About Unicode and Character