A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

by andersonmvd • 4 years ago

119 116 4 years ago

github.com

matsemann• 4 years ago

A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.

No, these "awesome" lists are seldom curated. They are just dumps of hundreds or thousands of links.

layer8• 4 years ago

I guess they really meant "slightly categorized because otherwise the list would be too long".

remram5• 4 years ago

Some of them are, or try to be.

This is in no way a list of falsehoods, there is not a single one in the repository. It is a dump of links to other people's articles about falsehoods (or other people's dumps of links to others). I am surprised why they would claim that, maybe they copied another "awesome list" template?

glitchc• 4 years ago

It feels like many of these speak to poorly defined requirements.

throwaway8899002• 4 years ago

Bold of you to assume that requirements are properly defined.

biasedestimate• 4 years ago

falsehood n+1: it is a good idea to compile a long lists of falsehoods, based on information from random websites.

allendoerfer2• 4 years ago

I think the falsehood is:

Bookmarking poorly organized lists will make you avoid all their pitfalls.

Also:

Lists from the Internet are correct.

kdeldycke• 4 years ago

Got this covered at: https://kevin.deldycke.com/2016/12/falsehoods-programmers-be...

y42• 4 years ago

Well, it's a good start and it contains, so it seems, valid sources. So at least its a little entertaining to browse through and learn a little.

ihateolives2• 4 years ago

"Falsehoods programmers believe about geography: Street adresses contain street names. In many remote places in Europe, the hamlet name is considered a sufficient address."

Yup, I used to spend my summers on an island where my address would be: farmstead name, island, country. Zip code was optional. Had to find creative ways to satisfy various web forms.

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Another that list misses is that houses must be reachable by street at all. My girlfriend 20 years ago had an address on a canal (though the back of her house was reachable by unnamed alleyways).

The thing about postal databases bit me many times being the first owner of a new home, too. So many times some software system didn't believe my address was valid because my builder filed the original deed incorrectly. Actually, this was worse because I couldn't even pay property tax for three years until it was fixed, but believe me software service X that told me my address didn't exist, my house is real and every delivery service I have ever tried to use managed to find it.

boredumb2• 4 years ago

In puerto rico up until very recently (with some lagging behind) it is the condominium building name, apt # and a zip code.

ajford3• 4 years ago

Hell, getting things to understand barrios when I lived in PR.... Yes, this address looks like it has two cities on the address. Nope, that's how it's supposed to be.

Or the hassle of trying to figure out whether a website was gonna list PR under State or Country or just not have it at all. I got really good at modifying web forms with Chrome devtools to inject Puerto Rico into the State drop-downs so I could just get shit shipped.

And for a while I didn't have any way to receive mail at the house I was renting, so I had stuff shipped to work, but they only had a rural box addr, so the addr was "Box 1234....". Anything shipping via UPS/FedEx didn't wanna touch it, so we had an alternate address for each of them (since UPS's system couldn't find one address form and FedEx couldn't find the other) and I'd have to find out who the seller was shipping with.

UglyToad• 4 years ago

One that's repeatedly tripping me up while I'm living on in the Caribbean is "all addresses have ZIP codes". They've started adding postal codes here but not many places have them. It's easy enough to enter 00000 but before moving here I wouldn't have known there are places without some form of post code.

ajford3• 4 years ago

Lived in Puerto Rico for a while a few years back, and stuff off the beaten path (and plenty of things in town as well) wouldn't have an "address number", but instead would have a "position" based off kilometer markers.

For a good year, my address was something like "KM 5.4 Carr. 635", which was effectively "Kilometer 5.4 Highway 635". And then the put out new kilometer markers and my address changed by 0.2km in one way according to the power company and the other way according to the water company.

And IIRC, the power company had "yellow house in the back" as part of my address, since there were three houses on this lot. Don't know what would've happened if I painted the house!

Edit: Ha! Looks like a few things have changed in Google Maps and a number of things now have addresses showing up with their km marker numbers, which didn't use to be the case. For example, the Caribbean Cinemas location in Arecibo, Puerto Rico [0] has the address "Carr. #2, Km. 81.0 Barrio Hato Abajo, Arecibo, PR 00612"

[0] https://caribbeancinemas.com/theater/arecibo/

qwerty4561272• 4 years ago

valid email address exactly has one @ character

A normal email address exactly has one @ character. There is an infinite number of possible weird things everyone has little though non-zero chance to encounter on every corner of their life.

therefore your implementation should allow this

I wouldn't be sure it should. Implementing support for this has direct and indirect, explicit and implicit costs one will have to consider and decide if that's worth it.

In fact, whatever a human can believe about the world, it won't equal what actually is. So we just take decisions about how precise our models have to be to be practical.

You can never finish a program if you insist it has to be perfect and unbreakable. The only reasonable objective is to make sure it does the job 99.9 % of real-life times.

NateEag3• 4 years ago

All that said, there are a number of really good email validators out there in the wild.

One of the oldest can be found at http://isemail.info/about, (along with a test suite to write your own implementation and some sage advice about the basic approaches it's reasonable to take when validating email addresses).

Yes, dependencies aren't completely free conceptually, even when they're distributed free of charge, but why write a crappy validator of your own when there are really good ones available?

qwerty4561272• 4 years ago

Because I really don't want to accept a string with more (or less) than one @ symbol for an e-mail address. Such an address can be valid theoretically but chances are it is incorrect. If somebody submits such a string for their email, 99 in 100 cases it's a typo and the remaining 1 is a person testing you. Not even one real person in a million will use an e-mail address which doesn't have exactly one @ symbol in it.

remram5• 4 years ago

Is there a reason to validate an email address? Even if it is valid, you can't use it for anything until you check that the right person owns it and is able to read mail you send there.

I personally accept any string that is between 3 bytes and 1 kilobyte, if they click the link in it then it's good.

Shorel• 4 years ago

I have never seen an email address with more than one @.

Can you provide us with an example?

krageon2• 4 years ago

shorel@example.com@otherperson.net

hutzlibu• 4 years ago

"The only reasonable objective is to make sure it does the job 99.9 % of real-life times."

If you would be writing software for airplanes, or cars, that would mean lots of crashes per day, with millions x 99.9% being still a lot. If it is financial software, people might loose millions regulary.

But if you make a casual game ... who cares (except the person who lost his highscore achievements).

Obviously there are different standards.

krageon2• 4 years ago

A normal email address exactly has one @ character

I've been using <otherperson@email.to@myemaildomain> to respond to people for ages, and this is a completely normal and supported email flow. Who are you to tell other people what is normal? It is not some possible weird thing that other people can use emails that follow the spec and aren't even all that out there.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 4 years ago

Better title would be, "list of common simplifying assumptions programmers and designers make."

Avoiding all these assumptions will introduce unacceptable complexity for many projects. In many of the listed cases, making the assumption will require a tiny fraction of your addressable market to use a workaround, which they are likely already used to using with other products.

So there is a cost-benefit study to be done here. You have finite engineering time. Which of these assumptions can you avoid with little net increase in complexity? Which ones are actually simplifying? Which ones will cause critical problems for your users? And which ones are too expensive to fix given the return on investment?

I think the content of lists like this are decently useful, but the tone is condescending and unwarranted. I don't "believe" that everyone has a first middle and last name. I do believe that people with fifteen names are capable of leaving out some of the ones in the middle, and it makes my job a lot easier to require them to do so.

allendoerfer2• 4 years ago

By modelling culture, we as programmers are also defining it.

Everytime you assume something about a standard, you are making it a tiny bit more true. Before boarding the enterprise together, we will have agreed on a more concise version of what a name/address/email/time is.

not2b• 4 years ago

People who have the wrong kinds of names pay a heavy price for this kind of thing. You gave an absurd example (15 names), but much more common cases tend to break. For example, my wife's legal name has a hyphen in it. It is astounding how many web sites cannot cope with this. Or worse, accept the correct name in one place and not in another, or accept the entry and then report a name mismatch later when they "sanitize the input".

ihateolives2• 4 years ago

I do believe that people with fifteen names are capable of leaving out some of the ones in the middle, and it makes my job a lot easier to require them to do so.

Sure, if you handle it gracefully and give them ample space to squeeze their names onto one field and your system not making fuss about it. People that tend to have fiften names also tend to come from areas that may use accented characters, have suffixes and thus spaces in their names and have other weird combinations:

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Manuela Maria Lopez Sanchez de Chacon, Juan Carlos Vargas Blanco (given name is Juan Carlos, not Juan), Carla Rodriguez y Calderón (both Rodriguez and Calderón are last names)

In my anecdotal experience from having lots of friends with non-ascii letters in their names there are surprisingly many websites and software that will fail to take into account some or all of those things. And then there are cultures where surname is not necessarily a thing. If you're adamant that users "can leave out" or butcher (because you don't accept Ü or Ł) their names because it's convenient to you then you're creating hard to predict problems for the user. Quite common is to accept all characters but then silently converting them for "convenience" before storing and then use those names next time instead of what the user entered, so that poor Łukasz would have to know to use Lukasz next time without nobody telling him.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 4 years ago

Carla Rodriguez y Calderón (both Rodriguez and Calderón are last names)

I was not aware of this form until I moved to New Mexico several years ago. I had a hyphenated name earlier in life, and have come to think of this as a (roughly) Spanish equivalent of that.

If you can't/don't handle Ortiz y Pino in New Mexico, several fairly powerful people are going to be pretty pissed off! And that's still within the borders of the USA.

xdennis• 4 years ago

The original one about names was about exposing people to different culture's perspective (like how Icelanders have last names based on their father's first name), but this expands into nonsensical territory like "people can change genders multiple times a day"[1]. It just feels like being a rebel for rebellion's sake.

[1] https://medium.com/gender-2-0/falsehoods-programmers-believe...

rhn_mk1• 4 years ago

Who is a programmer to prevent others from being rebels because they enjoy it? There's freedom and creativity in nonsense, and that might be worth preserving, especially when not crucial to fulfilling the task at hand (which gender rarely is).

feoren4• 4 years ago

The reason I like "people can change genders multiple times per day" is not because it suggests your implementation of gender should support that, but rather that you should not try to implement gender at all. One of the main messages from these is to stop mindlessly asking for "Last Name" or "Gender" when your system has no need for that information to do its job. Get your system to do its main job, and if there is still a free variable (e.g. what gender do we use for verbs when talking about you in German?) then ask only that, specifically. The people who change genders multiple times per day are doing it because they see their different genders as applying to different situations, and you should be clear about what situations you're asking about.

"Eddie Izzard, why do you wear women's clothes?"

Eddie Izzard: "I don't. These are my clothes. I bought them."

throwaway6753092• 4 years ago

Some systems do require some form of gender identification, specifically any type of system dealing with naturally generated text in languages where conjugation and other semantic elements can change based on the speaker.

SomeCallMeTim• 4 years ago

It has a name. "Gender fluid."

And just because you don't understand it doesn't mean that it isn't some peoples' life experience.

Reference: I know a child who is not at all rebellious or attention-seeking but who expresses this as their inner experience.

Dismissing that experience is rude.

throwaway6753092• 4 years ago

I've always said you can identify as whatever you want, just don't expect me to try to constantly keep up with it.

ballenf• 4 years ago

Here's one I haven't seen on a list:

When you onboard to a new company, they will automatically give you access to whatever systems you need to do your job.

It will be automatic or easy to get access to all the systems you need to do your job.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

When you onboard to a new company, they will automatically give you access to whatever systems you need to do your job.

Related: When you're hired to be a computer programmer, the company will have a computer for you on your first day of work.

This happened to me twice. The first time at a low-rent startup where people were expected to bring their own machines. (Company folded months later amid an unrelated government investigation.) The second time was when the previous programmer did something unpleasant to the computer on his way out, and the company's procurement process for getting replacement gear required lots of approvals because dev machines are higher-spec and more expensive than an ordinary office computer.

throwaway8899002• 4 years ago

I would go one step further with the first one, because I was completely forgotten about for the first two weeks of my first job:

You will be onboarded to your new company.

michaelcampbell2• 4 years ago

Also related:

When you onboard to a new company, there will be a list of the systems you'll need to do your job.

Once you know what tools you need, you'll have training, and documentation on them. This is especially true for internally written tools.

a_shovel5• 4 years ago

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult.

You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely.

It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. If you tell a group of people that their identity isn't supported by your system, some people will accept that and work around it, some people will be mad at you, and you'll just have to accept that the latter have a good point. You have to stop developing it at some point, so all you can do is try to cover as many people as possible.

That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases if you design a system that breaks on things like names with "é", or "ñ", or punctuation; or if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns.

BitwiseFool2• 4 years ago

In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters in their name. As for the boolean determining pronouns thing, I can easily see someone thinking that was a clever implementation before people adopted the idea that there are more than two to be cognizant of. I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable. Going forward, we do want to support the things you mentioned.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

Definitely old software that's obviously not getting updated can be forgiven. There's still 16-bit DOS software used in production that harkens from the time when ASCII was all that could be supported. I get it, it sucks when a legacy airline system written in the '70 removes the accent characters from your name but them's the breaks. But if you're designing new software nowadays and your requirements don't include the "new cultural consciousness," you're probably making a big mistake. I've seen software built within the last 5 years fail QA due to not displaying emoji.

a_shovel5• 4 years ago

Yeah, it's probably wrong to assume much about a lack of support for Chinese-character names on an English-language website, so I removed that. (But if you don't have a good reason not to, you should support it.)

Accents and punctuation are different. There are a lot of English-speaking people whose names don't fit in ASCII. A system that doesn't support them is at the "95% for no effort" stage, if even that.

lostcolony2• 4 years ago

Bias isn't the same as being bigoted. If when you find out you missed it you go "Oh, crap, you're right! We should fix that" you had a bias. If when you find out you missed it you start to defend why it's fine to not include it (not to admit you should, but maybe you don't have time/it isn't worth the cost), that's the point it's bigoted.

It's the difference between making a mistake, and getting defensive that it wasn't a mistake. Per old systems, they all fall under bias; it's only with how do the existing support personnel deal with it that you start looking at bigotry, a "I'm sorry, I know, it's just an old system and we don't have the money to update it" is totally understandable and I would argue okay. Digging in that it's not the system that is at fault but the individual wanting a different pronoun, or the person refusing to pick an anglicized name and start using it everywhere, is bigoted.

stormbrew4• 4 years ago

I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable.

In general, as a singular gender neutral third person pronoun for a person of unknown, unclear, or unspecified gender, they/them is approximately as old as modern english itself, having been clearly used by one of the earliest practitioners of the language, Shakespeare.

What's modern is the idea that it's somehow incorrect to have a pronoun that is both plural and singular, which is funny because 'you' is both singular and plural and people use it every day without incident or confusion.

Use for a person of known but not-binary gender is newer than that, but probably older than you think, and neopronouns are actually probably also quite a bit older than you think too.

RobertRoberts4• 4 years ago

...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...

I think that is an unfair accusation.

I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 4 years ago

The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.

silvestrov2• 4 years ago

Sounds like you have never tried sorting or searching.

Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word.

Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing.

Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.

implements• 4 years ago

Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.

stormbrew4• 4 years ago

Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that.

Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant

Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Half the time a medical form asks you that it's literally just so that cis men won't get mad at you for asking if they're pregnant on a later step.

I won't be at all surprised if I get some kind of kneejerk reaction to this statement suggesting that it might be important in an emergency or something, but for the most part that's not really the case, and even where it is, if it's that important (ie. allergy level), it's not sufficient to avoid harm because you will have situations where neither "sex" or "gender" as commonly formulated on these forms will tell you what you really need to know (hormone balance, organ configuration, medical history). Any one of those could be out of alignment with whichever social construct of sexed traits you pick.

kbelder• 4 years ago

In the marketing world, it's vastly predictive of behavior, similar to income level or political party. Men and women tend to have highly significant differences in shopping and purchasing behavior.

So, whether they 'need' gender or not, many places 'want' gender.

quadrifoliate• 4 years ago

That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns.

It is probably revealing of your personal biases that you cannot imagine systems in languages other than English that need to do some of this since multiple parts of the language, including verbs, are necessarily gendered, with a neutral gender usually only reserved for inanimate things. Reference: I happen to speak one such language.

Problems like this are just hard due to generations of built-up cultural context and the associated effects. We can and should do better, but there is no need to get overly enthusiastic about accusing people of biases while we are at it.

feoren4• 4 years ago

There's a world of difference between "Which of these two options defines your gender identity and sex organs?" and "Which grammatical gender form should we use for words when we talk about you?". The former is a deeply personal question with unclear benefit; the latter is a specific question about how you want the site to do a specific thing it needs to do. (Does it really need to do that? Why exactly are you asking about gender?)

a_shovel5• 4 years ago

Everyone has biases, that's just a fact. Something can only be unbiased in comparison to something else that has the same biases. Having biases doesn't make you evil.

Yeah, I only considered English language sites, not other languages that don't support gender-neutrality as easily. I think I should add something about them, though. I don't see how any language could possibly require gender to be implemented as a boolean. If you've got an English-language site you're translating to another language, and you've implemented a selector for "he", "she", and "they" pronouns without direct reference to gender in the English version, you could just re-use the same implementation in your language with different options.

(Also, I can guarantee that there's someone who speaks your language that prefers to be referred to in the neutral/inanimate form. Doesn't matter which language. It's fine not to support that on the site, just wanted to point it out.)

_448• 4 years ago

It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender.

In the case of name, I read an article sometime back that mentioned the problem of getting people's fullname right. Not everyone has a "first name" and a "last name" distinction. So it is better to just have one field of "fullname" and let people enter it as per their locale and tradition instead of having "first name" and "last name" fields. I think gender also falls in the same category.

feoren4• 4 years ago

This is the first "falsehoods programmers believe about X" article I read and what I think kicked off the trend. In fact this GitHub page references the same as "the article that started it all".

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

planetsprite• 4 years ago

...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases.

People make mistakes. I think you're opening a can of worms if you try to conflate a lack of robustness in user experience accessibility with some underlying anti-inclusivity bias.

eyelidlessness• 4 years ago

It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. If you tell a group of people that their identity isn't supported by your system, some people will accept that and work around it, some people will be mad at you, and you'll just have to accept that the latter have a good point. You have to stop developing it at some point, so all you can do is try to cover as many people as possible.

That’s a pretty big if, which itself reveals a bias. While it’s certainly not going to cover every single identity, the following will likely cover vastly more than added effort:

1. Do you need to ask for the data at all?

2. If 1, do you need to require the data?

3. If 1, unless you have to comply with arbitrary external requirements (eg law), use a free form text field.

4. Test that the text field and accompanying information is accessible to assistive tools. This usually comes for free if you use built in tools.

5. If not 2, affirmatively indicate that entering anything is optional.

6. Ask for feedback on how you can do it better, again making this obviously optional. If the feedback is meaningful (i.e. “I cannot use this”, rather than “I would prefer this be less inclusive”), accommodate it.

a_shovel5• 4 years ago

Looking back at this, yeah, I agree with the criticism that the last line is overly harsh. I try to be lenient to people with unconscious bias, and this doesn't help with that.

Hussell2• 4 years ago

Is there an easy way to display a diff which shows all the new links since the last time this was on HN? (Sept. 8th, 2020)

Partial list:

Falsehoods about Airline Seat Maps https://duffel.com/blog/falsehoods-about-seat-maps

Falsehoods about Biometrics https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/falsehoods-programmers-beli...

Falsehoods about Plain Text https://jeremyhussell.blogspot.com/2017/11/falsehoods-progra...

Hussell2• 4 years ago

For those who haven't seen this before, the ones you should look at first are:

Falsehoods about Names https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Falsehoods about Time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

Falsehoods about Addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

drivers99• 4 years ago

I checked a few random lists and their "falsehoods" weren't very informative when it's just a list without any explanation. Maybe they're just supposed to be amusing or contrarian.

(Following my own advice...) For example: https://chiselapp.com/user/ttmrichter/repository/gng/doc/tru...

10× programmers exist.

(i.e. saying they don't exist) Maybe a writing prompt for a blog post, but there's nothing else there about it.

allears• 4 years ago

Most of these lists (at least the ones I scanned through) are simply assertions, with no explanations, examples, or links. This is less than useful, and makes me doubt their veracity.

michaelcampbell2• 4 years ago

Most of them read more like things you might imagine someone to have thought, once.

hintymad• 4 years ago

This is a fantastic read.

"Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley".

Just curious, does this kind of gravitational time dilation bear any consequence in our systems, given that we are building systems with the assumption that system clocks are not always accurate and there is no global time?

SuperCuber• 4 years ago

Satellites have to account for their clocks moving at a slightly different rate - it is significant at that scale.

nofunsir• 4 years ago

Boss: Why is it taking so long to implement this feature? Programmer: Well, you see Boss, I found this really cool list of falsehoods that only dumb, less-holy programmers believe on a random Github. It's really cool because it lists every edg...Boss? Where are you going?

jqpabc123• 4 years ago

#1 Falsehood Programmers Believe

- Programming skill is all you need to build great software.

About the only case where I would say this might be true is when your users are other programmers. If the plan is to target a non-technical market, good design and in-depth understanding of the problem space are just as important if not more so.

My favorite example of this is the world's most popular accounting software. Good design and marketing --- mediocre programming.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

The one about CS students is very poignant https://www.netmeister.org/blog/cs-falsehoods.html

kazinator• 4 years ago

The main falsehood is that the programmer must adopt, as requirements, all edge cases of every imaginable instance and interpretation of a problem domain.

Even if the programmer wanted to do that, his boss, and boss's boss would disagree.

It is a falsehood, of course, that "I don't have to handle cases outside of the specification we committed to". Though not always, and not for all cases.

Say that my reuqirements are to write a music engraving program for western notation. Of course, I take it for granted that (that type of) music can be written down; my program is not an expression of my personal belief that all music can be written down, or that it has a composer.

bko4• 4 years ago

I would love an annotated falsehoods. For instance, one of the falsehoods programmers believe about programming:

Most processors in active use are 32-bit or larger.

16-bit or larger?

8-bit or larger?

OH COME ON!

feoren4• 4 years ago

Don't leave us hanging! What is the <8-bit processor in common-enough use to not fit into (1 - Most)?

bko4• 4 years ago

That's my question! We need a falsehoods explained page

remram5• 4 years ago

It is interesting to think that there are smaller than 8-bit processors around, but I think the author might have forgotten that they started the section with "most processors are..."

gregfjohnson• 4 years ago

I really enjoyed this - several LOL's. I loved the sequence of falsehoods about compilers:

- The compiler won’t have bugs.

- The compiler won’t have show-stopping bugs.

- The compiler’s bugs will be fixed quickly.

- The compiler’s bugs can be fixed.

But I think they should have added:

- My code does not work because of bugs in the compiler..

remram5• 4 years ago

It's a little further:

Because the bugs are in their code, not mine.

daphneokeefe• 4 years ago

How timely on St. Patrick's Day. How about people's names that contain an apostrophe? I married O'Keefe. It is just so aggravating.

kmod• 4 years ago

This kind of thing scares me about the current state of AI. Language models are trained to produce text that looks like the training data, but if the training data has falsehoods they will happily repeat those falsehoods.

I just put the example into GPT3: Prompt: Can an email address contain more than one @ sign? Answer: No, an email address can only contain one @ sign.

I'm on my phone so it's a bit laborious to test more

jedberg• 4 years ago

I would say the main takeaway from these lists is: Use a library where the library author has a much bigger vested interest in the edge cases than you do.

Don't implement date and time calculations yourself, just use the library, even for things like "add a day".

Don't parse addresses yourself, use a library. Don't validate email yourself, use a library. Don't validate input yourself, use a library.

Unless the runtime or memory space is absolutely critical to your application, using a library won't make things noticeably worse.

Optimal_Persona• 4 years ago

Not on the 'email' list, but I'll add "A .org domain extension should be the sole criteria for whether a customer can be classified as a nonprofit".

I tried to create a nonprofit account at Box.com a few years ago with a .net address. It took almost 3 weeks of back-and-forth with customer support and multiple interactions with higher-ups in their legal dept. to resolve. No one there had ever considered the possibility.

A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

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