The september 1752 example sounds like something you'll find on a trivia show. It's not really such a good example. It's the exception rather than the rule. When I read this I feel like I'm back in elementary school being the detail obsessed nerd.
I can't say anything about the minute example but seeing the trend is to take some obscure occurrence, pointing fingers and saying "how can you not know that?" and looking like a special snowflake to every regular person.
In practical terms, what are the merits of all those examples? Going back to the lists, some of them are probably bad design[1], like one example that a backup is a string of numbers 053901011991.html so let's not focus on them.
[1] What constitutes "bad design" may vary; some people could probably easily filter through many files like that using ls. Some people prefer minimalism, others don't feel compelled to use their processing power so sparingly, and would rather get the job done more quickly. (It seems like this has some time implications. If you have cleaner code, you can work with it more easily in the future, if you just want a task done and forget about it) So if I were to describe "bad design" in a way that holds some water, I would say that it hurts productivity.
The whole point of the list is that there are exceptions to rules that most people consider to be true in all cases.
If you program systems than you get bugs because of corner cases that you don't anticipate. You need domain knowledge to know all the corner cases.
Leap seconds manage to crash real world computer systems because their designers didn't handle them properly.
You don't want any software that has a calendar to crash simply because a user asks the system to show september 1752.
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.