At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I'm having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking "in the circles I move in" to mean "in LW, and only LW". I wasn't; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying "in the circles I move in, X is true" then I don't see how that's a useful explanation unless you're saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying "in the circles I move in, X is true" then I don't see how that's a useful explanation
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let's say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at -1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it's at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a functi...
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.