awesome-falsehood

A brief list of common falsehoods. A great overview and quick introduction into the world of falsehoods

A humbling and fun list on programming and programmers themselves

Meta commentary on how these falsehoods shouldn't be handled

False assumption that might be made in codifying music

Common misconceptions about art

Covers prices, currencies and inventory

Covers currencies, amounts and localization

Falsehoods about IBANs

International Bank Account Numbers are not international

Economics are not simple or rational

The importance of types in accounting software: missing the decimal point ends up with 100x over-charges

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:

Because , a hacker leveraged them to register , but also , and

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

Falsehoods about Bitcoin

A list of mistaken perspectives on Bitcoin

Misconceptions and common pitfalls in contract programming

Seminal article on dates and time

Part. 2 of the article above

Another takes on time-related falsehoods, with an emphasis on time zones

Takes on the first article above and provides an explanation of each falsehood, with more context and external resources

Mind the leap second!

Has some nice points regarding the edge-cases of DST transitions

List covering intercalation and cultural influence, made by a community of iOS and macOS developers

Code and data that represent the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe

Most of the idiosyncrasies in timekeeping can find an explanation in history

Your idea will not work. This article tells you why

Abolishing timezones may sound like a good idea, but there are quite a few complications that make it not quite so

A video about why you should never, ever deal with timezones if you can help it

The consequence of wrong calendar accounting

An giant list of formats from the two standards, how they overlaps, and live examples

String formatting of date is hard

There are edge cases about dates and time (specifically UTC) that you probably haven't thought of

“Just store dates in UTC” is not always the right approach

Depends on your priorities between SI seconds, earth rotation sync, leap seconds avoidance

Infamous Stack Overflow answer about both complicated historical timezones, and how historical dates can be re-interpreted by newer versions of software

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:

A list of things (not only) computer science students tend to erroneously and at times surprisingly believe even though they (probably) should know better

“Lots of things are said, written and believed about postdoctoral researchers that are simply not true.”

On addresses, content and delivery

Provides intricate examples that are unsuspected valid email addresses according the RFC-822

Presentation of edge-case email addresses and why you should not use regex to parse them

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

Takes on places, their names and locations

Covers coordinates, projection and GIS

A guide for geospatial practitioners on diagnosing and fixing common issues with coordinate systems

“There's one special group of kanji that's hard even for Japanese people to read: place names.”

The article that started it all

A revisited version of the article above, this time with detailed explanations

Fingerprints are not unique

You can't really define a family with strict rules

Falsehoods about Gender: & - Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties

Issues at the intersection of names and gender and internationalization

How to store a marriage in a database while addressing most of the falsehoods about gender, naming and relationships

How do people's names differ around the world, and what are the implications for the Web?

Funny take on how implementation of a falsehood might lead to security holes

Real-life example on how implemented falsehood has negative impact on someone's life

A flexible data model for representing human names

Localized representations of the components of a person's name

Translating a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to be

Plain text can't cut it, which makes Unicode even more incredible for its ability to just work well

A subset of the falsehoods from above, illustrated with some examples

A video about things you need to keep in mind when internationalizing your code

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

Unicode is extensive, here be dragons

Dives deeper in Unicode and dispels myths about code points

A collection of falsehoods on case, encodings, string length, and more

Most programmers spend so much time with they forgets about other's scripts quirks

Character encoding is hard, more so when each broken layer of data input adds its own spice

You cannot localize temperature differences as-is

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

Assumptions about job applicants and their job histories aren't necessarily true

Cover it all: video decoding and playback, files, image scaling, color spaces and conversion, displays and subtitles

Music catalogs data are full of crazy stuff

An open-source project and database that seems to have solved the complexity of music catalog management

The industry standard for music metadata, including archiving, sound recording, sales and usage reporting, royalties and license deals

Quality insurance guidelines to format music, art, and metadata to increase discoverability

Covers TCP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs and IPv4/v6

Assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make

Some parts of the address are optional, mind the decimal and octal notations, and either

International characters in domain names mean support of homographs and heterographs

hostname-validate

An attempt to validate hostnames in Python

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 , , , and

Covers streets, postal codes, buildings, cities and countries

It's not only about the address itself, but the relationship between a person and its residence

Ultimate falsehood about postal addresses: you do not need one

Quirks extracted from a list of most residential property sales in England and Wales since 1995

The trick is to rely on postcodes, which in the UK are pretty specific and “often identify one or a few specific buildings, unlike countries where a postcode represents an entire neighbourhood”

Smokey Bear has his own ZIP Code ( ) because he gets so much mail

Costa Rican uses an idiosyncratic system of addresses that relies on landmarks, history and quite a bit of guesswork

Why regular expressions and street addresses do not mix

“I saw many horrors, but I've never seen this particular formatting choice anywhere else.”

Describes both standardized address formats and content

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

On working with systems of measurement and converting between them

Designing election systems has its own tricks

Myth about women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) industries

Falsehoods about Versions

Attributing an identity to a software release might be harder than thought

Building software is hard. Building software that builds software is harder

Invoking undefined behavior can cause to happen, for a much broader definition of "anything" than one might think

While RFC4180 to exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored

Covers package and their managers

An attempt to establish a list of falsehoods about testing

Why search (including analysis, tokenization, highlighting) is deceptively complex

A better sourced article on the difficulty of implementing search engines

Why your pagination algorithm is giving someone (possibly you) a headache

Misconceptions about the predictability and performance of garbage collection

Diversity of file-systems and OSes makes file paths a little harder than we might think of

“On any Unix-derived system, a path is an admirably simple thing: if it starts with a , it's a path. Not so on Windows.”

Misconceptions about caches often lead to false assertions, especially when it comes to concurrency and race conditions

There are a few things about and that are repeated again and again. Still they are false

State machines are often misunderstood and under-applied

This talk could have been named

Part of a post on why file's comparison could be considered harmful

Not falsehoods , but still a great list of good practices to implement autocompletion

“Your language isn't broken, it's doing floating point math. (…) This is why, more often than not, .”

YAML is full of obscure complexity like accidental numbers and non-string keys

There are edge-cases even in tagging systems which are supposed to be barebone

Falsehoods about Quantum Technology

Common misconceptions about quantum technology and computers

Misconceptions about event driven systems and message passing

Falsehoods about Cars

Even something as common as defining a car is full of pitfalls

Airline seat maps are far more complex than just neat rows and columns of seats

Having multiple international and national agencies trying to reconcile history, practicality and logistics makes codes follow arcane rules

Old airline reservation systems considers the suffix as and drops it

Falsehoods about Fonts

Assumptions about typography on the web and in desktop applications

A complete reverse of the falsehoods format, on the topic of case (as in uppercase and lowercase text)

All the things you have not considered implementing for your doors in games

“Web is beautiful. Web is ugly. Web is astonishing. A part of this appeal is HTML, with its historical quirks.”

Pitfalls to be mindful of when creating and documenting APIs

There's a lot of components in an URL, and all have their own logic

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