Awesome Falsehood – Massive Collection of Resources

Falsehood articles are a form of commentary on a particular subject, and are appreciated by the developer community at large for their effectiveness and terseness. They’re a convenient written form to approach an unfamiliar domain by dispelling myths, point out common pitfalls, show inconsistencies and subtleties.

In a sense, Falsehood articles are a suite of wordy unit-tests covering extensive edge-cases provided by real-world usage.

Contents

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

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.

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.
• Falsehoods about Cars – Even something as common as defining a car is full of pitfalls.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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 time keeping 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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

• 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.

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 practitionners oin 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.
• My name causes an issue with any booking! – Old airline reservation systems considers the MR suffix as Mister and drops it.
• 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.
• 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 Sets – A good introduction to unicode, its historical context and origins, followed by an overview of its inner working.
• Awesome Unicode – A curated list of delightful Unicode tidbits, packages and resources.
• Dark corners of Unicode – Unicode is extensive, here be dragons.
• Let’s Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points – Dives deeper in Unicode and dispels myths about code points.
• Breaking Our Latin-1 Assumptions – Most programmers spend so much time with Latin-1 they forgets about other’s scripts quirks.
• Ode to a shipping label – Character encoding is hard, more so when each broken layer of data input adds its own spice.
• i18n Testing Data – Compilation of real-word international and diverse name data for unit testing and QA.
• Big List of Naughty Strings – A huge corpus of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data. A must have set of practical edge-cases to test your software against.

Management

• Falsehoods about Job Applicants – Assumptions about job applicants and their job histories aren’t necessarily true.

Multimedia

• Falsehoods about Video – Cover it all: video decoding and playback, files, image scaling, color spaces and conversion, displays and subtitles.

Networks

• Falsehoods about Networks – Covers TCP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs and IPv4/v6.
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing – Assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
• There’s more than one way to write an IP address – Some parts of the address are optional, mind the decimal and octal notations, and don’t forget IPv6 either.
• hostname-validate – An attempt to validate hostnames in Python.

Phone Numbers

• Falsehoods about Phone Numbers – Covers phone numbers, their representation and meaning.
• libphonenumber – Google’s common Java, C++ and JavaScript library for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers. Also available for C#, Objective-C, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Postal Addresses

• Falsehoods about Addresses – Covers streets, postal codes, buildings, cities and countries.
• Falsehoods about Residence – It’s not only about the address itself, but the relationship between a person and its residence.
• Letter Delivered Despite No Name, No Address – Ultimate falsehood about postal addresses: you do not need one.
• The Bear with Its Own ZIP Code – Smokey Bear has his own ZIP Code (20252) because he gets so much mail.
• Regex and Postal Addresses – Why regular expressions and street addresses do not mix.
• Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV – “I saw many horrors, but I’ve never seen this particular formatting choice anywhere else.”
• libaddressinput – Google’s common C++ and Java library for parsing, formatting, and validating international postal addresses.
• addressing – A PHP 5.4+ addressing library, powered by Google’s dataset.
• postal-address – Python module to parse, normalize and render postal addresses.
• address – Go library to validate and format addresses using Google’s dataset.

Science

• Falsehoods about Systems of Measurement – On working with systems of measurement and converting between them.

Society

• Falsehoods about Political Appointments – Designing election systems has its own tricks.
• Falsehoods about Women In Tech – Myth about women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) industries.

Software Engineering

• Falsehoods about Versions – Attributing an identity to a software release might be harder than thought.
• Falsehoods about Build Systems – Building software is hard. Building software that builds software is harder.
• Falsehoods about REST APIs – Pitfalls to be mindful of when creating and documenting APIs.
• Falsehoods about CSVs – While RFC4180 to exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
• Falsehoods about Package Managers – Covers package and their managers.
• Falsehoods about Testing – An attempt to establish a list of falsehoods about testing.
• Falsehoods about Search – Why search (including analysis, tokenization, highlighting) is deceptively complex.
• Falsehoods about Bitcoin – A list of mistaken perspectives on Bitcoin.
• Falsehoods about Pagination – Why your pagination algorithm is giving someone (possibly you) a headache.
• Myths about File Paths – Diversity of file-systems and OSes makes file paths a little harder than we might think of.
• Myths about CPU Caches – Misconceptions about caches often lead to false assertions, especially when it comes to concurrency and race conditions.
• Myths about /dev/urandom – There are a few things about /dev/urandom and /dev/random that are repeated again and again. Still they are false.
• Hi! My name is… – This talk could have been named “falsehoods about usernames (and other identifiers)”.
• Popular misconceptions about mtime – Part of a post on why file’s mtime comparison could be considered harmful.
• Rules for Autocomplete – Not falsehoods per-se, but still a great list of good practices to implement autocompletion.
• Floating Point Math – “Your language isn’t broken, it’s doing floating point math. (…) This is why, more often than not, 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3.”
• The Hidden Complexity of Downloading Favicons, Told in 15+ Edge Cases – Downloading that little icon you see in you browser tabs should be a simple exercise. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than you think. Be vigilant that you are not shaving a Yak.
• Norway is not False – Norway’s ISO country code is also valid YAML for False.

Typography

• Falsehoods about Fonts – Assumptions about typography on the web and in desktop applications.
• Truths programmers should know about case – A complete reverse of the falsehoods format, on the topic of case (as in uppercase and lowercase text).