kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Dates and Time

The Long, Painful History of Time - Most of the idiosyncrasies in timekeeping can find an explanation in history.

How to choose between UT1, TAI and UTC - Depends on your priorities between SI seconds, earth rotation sync, leap seconds avoidance.

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.

Software Engineering

Rules for Autocomplete - Not falsehoods per se, but still a great list of good practices to implement autocompletion.

Multimedia

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

Apple Music Style Guide - Quality insurance guidelines to format music, art, and metadata to increase discoverability.

Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music - Music catalogs data are full of crazy stuff.

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

Dates and Time

Falsehoods about Unix Time - Mind the leap second!

$26,000 Overcollection by Labor Department - The consequence of wrong calendar accounting.

Human Identity

Falsehoods about Gender: #1 & #2 - Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties.

XKCD #327: Exploits of a Mom - Funny take on how implementation of a falsehood might lead to security holes.

My name causes an issue with any booking! - Old airline reservation systems considers the MR suffix as Mister and drops it.

Phone Numbers

libphonenumber - Google's common Java, C++ and JavaScript library for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers. Also available for C#stars525, Objective-Cstars2.3k, Pythonstars3k, Rubystars546 and PHPstars4.1k.

Software Engineering

Hi! My name is… - This talk could have been named "falsehoods about usernames (and other identifiers)".

Business

CLDR currency definitions - Currency validity date ranges overlap due to revolts, invasions, new constitutions, and slow planned adoption.

Business

Falsehoods about Airline Seat Maps - Airline seat maps are far more complex than just neat rows and columns of seats.

Internationalization

Falsehoods about Plain Text - Plain text can't cut it and why it's surprising Unicode works as well as it does.

Dates and Time

RFC-3339 vs ISO-8601 - An giant list of formats from the two standards, how they overlaps, and live examples.

Software Engineering

What every software engineer should know about search - A better sourced article on the difficulty of implementing search engines.

Software Engineering

Falsehoods about Package Managers - Covers package and their managers.

Software Engineering

Falsehoods about REST APIs - Pitfalls to be mindful of when creating and documenting APIs.

Video Games

The Door Problem - All the things you have not considered implementing for your doors in games.

Emails

Your E-Mail Validation Logic is Wrong - A summary of the various, surprising things that are allowed in an email address.

Software Engineering

Falsehoods about garbage collection - Misconceptions about the predictability and performance of garbage collection.

Geography

I Hate Coordinate Systems - A guide for geospatial practitioners on diagnosing and fixing common issues with coordinate systems.

Networks

URLs: It's complicated… - There's a lot of components in an URL, and all have their own logic.

Meta

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.

Falsehoods about Carsstars6 - Even something as common as defining a car is full of pitfalls.

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

Geography

Falsehoods about Geography - Takes on places, their names and locations.

Falsehoods about Maps - Covers coordinates, projection and GIS.

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 Me - Issues at the intersection of names and gender and internationalization.

Internationalization

Falsehoods about Language - Translating a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to be.

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.

Phone Numbers

Falsehoods about Phone Numbers - Covers phone numbers, their representation and meaning.

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.

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

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.

Typography

Falsehoods about Fontsstars85 - Assumptions about typography on the web and in desktop applications.

Meta

Falsehoods Programmers Believe - A brief list of common falsehoods. A great overview and quick introduction into the world of falsehoods.

Business

tax - A PHP 5.4+ tax management library.

Dates and Time

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human Identity

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?

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

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 Unicodestars775 - 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 Datastars61 - Compilation of real-word international and diverse name data for unit testing and QA.

Big List of Naughty Stringsstars42.4k - 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.

Networks

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.

Postal Addresses

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.

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.

Software Engineering

Popular misconceptions about mtime - Part of a post on why file's mtime comparison could be considered harmful.

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."

Typography

Truths programmers should know about case - A complete reverse of the falsehoods format, on the topic of case (as in uppercase and lowercase text).

Geography

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.”

Postal Addresses

Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV - “I saw many horrors, but I've never seen this particular formatting choice anywhere else.”

Business

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.

Business

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.

Software Engineering

Norway is not False - Norway's ISO country code is also valid YAML for False.

Software Engineering

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.

Education

Postdoc myths - Lots of things are said, written and believed about postdoctoral researchers that are simply not true..