LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles
If you only do this you are going to fail. This is why Aristotle got physics so badly wrong, right? Reasoning has to be a cyclical process of compressing complex realities into sets of simple principles and only then are you licensed to decompress those principles into making statements about reality.
Addressing common misconceptions is worthwhile, and lists are a good way to do it. You can find similar lists in the academic literature for many different subjects, e.g., here's an article about common misconceptions in thermodynamics. I've also mentioned math books listing counterexamples before. Many counterexamples address common misconceptions.
I like to create Anki cards for common misconceptions, to make sure I don't makes these mistakes myself. One issue with this is whether correcting specific cases causes my brain to recognize a more general case....
So while many of these false beliefs are worth noting, it's worth thinking why programmers make these mistakes in practice. While it might be the case that names can include numbers, it's probably also going to be the case that the majority of numbers get into names via user error. Depending on the purpose of your database, it might be more valuable to avoid user error, than avoid a minority of users being excluded.
The reason I mention this is a lot of things in life are a study in trade offs. Quantum mechanics isn't very good at describing how big things work, and classical mechanics isn't very good at describing how small things work.
Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up).
A lot of programmers believe they can parse HTML with regular expressions.
From Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names:
anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them.
There should be a list of false things people coming from common law jurisdictions believe about how choice of identity works on the rest of the globe.
Sometimes a user puts something in a "name" field that they do not actually intend to be used to identify themselves.
They may be trying to get that string displayed to other users in a highlighted fashion. If someone puts "Wal-Mart Sucks" in the name field on a blog comment, it isn't because they seriously want to be identified by the surname of Sucks. They're just saying that Wal-Mart sucks, in a dramatic way.
They may be trying to break the system in one way or another. If someone puts their name as "Robert'; drop table students; --" then depending on the social and technical context they might be giving themselves a clever alias; or they might be trying to attack the database.
I think it's worth noting that, yes, if you want your database of names/addresses/times/etc. to be fully robust, you need to essentially represent these items as unconstrained strings of arbitrary length (including zero).
However, in practice, most likely you're not building a fully robust database. For example, you are not solving the problem of, "how can I fully represent all of the marvelous variety of human names and addresses ?", but rather, "how can I maximize the changes that the packages my company is shipping to customers will actual...
Also, there is a place where the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
(Gur fha evfrf orpnhfr bs gur Rnegu'f ebgngvba, ohg rira va gur nofrapr bs gur Rnegu'f ebgngvba vg jbhyq evfr naq frg bapr n lrne orpnhfr bs ubj gur Rnegu'f nkvf cbvagf. Vs lbh ner pybfr rabhtu gb gur Abegu Cbyr, gur ebgngvba unf artyvtvoyr pbagevohgvba gb gur fha'f evfvat naq frggvat naq gur fha evfrf naq frgf cerggl zhpu bayl orpnhfr bs gur nkvf. Tb gb gur Abegu Cbyr, frr jurer gur fha evfrf, naq tb njnl sebz gur cbyr n fubeg qvfgnapr va n qverpgvba fhpu gung guvf cbvag vf gb gur jrfg.)
A problem of believing something wrong could also be a problem of classification or problem of language. There is so much lost in translation and as far as a programmer is concerned they deal with a very formal language. So they are not as good at informal languages and nuances.
I'm not a programmer, so my view may be a little bit skewed.. but this seems like a list of things that may or may not be correct (and I'd like to put things in a continuum, or percentages, or some other more practically observable other than a list) but it doesn't really get any further than that. How substantial many of the claims are?
I honestly doubt "programmers" get all these wrong. I'm not going to link to a post (I've seen some people replying with a post as if it's a substitute for actually saying what's wrong) or even say that "prog...
Could you turn the tracking links into direct ones?
I could ask the same question about the man who claims to be Jesus.
You could ask it, but I think a correct answer would look quite different in the two cases.
I should preface this by saying that I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, and will welcome corrections from those who are. So, anyway, my understanding is that if someone thinks he's Jesus then either (1) he expects to have some super-Jesus-powers like performing miracles or offering teaching so supremely wise that following it will greatly improve anyone's life[1], and/or (2) his thinking in this area is so seriously disordered that it's a bit of a stretch to say that he actually "thinks" he's Jesus as opposed to merely saying it but not really understanding what that would mean.
[1] For the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that the actual Jesus (assuming there was one) had those superpowers; only that those superpowers are part of what is meant by "Jesus" in the context of someone claiming to be him. In case 1, his beliefs are falsifiable and will generally be falsified. In case 2, they are unfalsifiable but this isn't much of a steelman; the point is just that he's not thinking coherently.
What about the other case? Well, here my understanding is that (1) the people in question do not have falsifiable-and-will-be-falsified beliefs; they do not, e.g., think that their anatomy is different from what it actually is. And (2) their thinking in this area may differ from (e.g.) yours but it is not incoherent and they don't in any way resemble people undergoing schizophrenic episodes.
So, first of all: Do you disagree with me about this? If so, (a) on what points and (b) how do you suggest we go about determining which of us is nearer the truth?
Now, so far what I've said about transgender people has been purely negative -- I've said "no, they don't think X and don't have problem Y". Perhaps you disagree not about that but about what you (rightly or not, we'll see) expect me to say about what they do think. So let's proceed.
The model of gender they're working with goes something like this:
Do you think something in that is delusional, on a par with thinking you're both Jesus and John Lennon? It doesn't look that way to me. (As it happens, I think this is a better account of gender than any that makes gender a matter of anatomy or genetics or biochemistry, but at present I'm not concerned with defending that claim; the only relevant point is that it isn't crazy.)
In terms of this model, it's clear enough (I think) what someone means when despite having a Y chromosome they say "I am a woman". They mean: "I am much more comfortable thinking of myself as female than as male; I wish to occupy a female role in society, to use a traditionally female name, etc.". This would make little sense if "female" meant "possessed of a uterus" or "having two X chromosomes", but (see above) that isn't what it means in this context.
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Finally: Let us suppose that all of the above is, in some way I'm failing to see, totally wrongheaded, and that in fact there is a Right Way to determine someone's gender, and that Right Way is a matter of looking at their chromosomes or something, and that we therefore really are talking about "men claiming to be women". There remains what seems to me a pretty clear distinction between someone in that position and someone claiming to be Jesus-the-son-of-God. Namely: in almost all contexts treating someone as a woman despite their male-typical anatomy and chromosomes is easy and harmless, and empirically it makes these people much less likely to kill themselves. (And no one has yet found anything else that does.) Whereas treating someone as the Son of God probably means, e.g., worshipping them, which is a much less reasonable thing to ask others to do.
I repeat that my primary disagreement with you on this point is about whether transgender people are really much like people who think they are Jesus; the point of the previous paragraph is just that even if I'm completely wrong about that, it doesn't follow that we should adopt the position I think you are suggesting we should.
What it actually is is a matter of social role-filling and self-perception.
This is even more true about being a messiah or a famous rock star.
Do you think something in that is delusional, on a par with thinking you're both Jesus and John Lennon?
Yes, your asserting a definition that fails to cut reality at the joints (or at least is worse at it then the traditional definition) and then insisting that everyone else adopt it.
...In terms of this model, it's clear enough (I think) what someone means when despite having a Y chromosome they say "I am a
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.