awesome-falsehood
github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood ↗😱 Falsehoods Programmers Believe in
Use this list with your AI agent
Add the Context Awesome MCP server to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client, then ask:
"Show me human identity resources from awesome-falsehood"
Installation instructions →What's inside
Human Identity
- #1
Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties.
- Apple iOS
Localized representations of the components of a person's name.
- 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.
- Falsehoods about Names
The article that started it all.
Dates and Time
- $26,000 Overcollection by Labor Department
The consequence of wrong calendar accounting.
- 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.
- 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
Seminal article on dates and time.
- Falsehoods about Time and Time Zones
Another takes on time-related falsehoods, with an emphasis on time zones.
- Falsehoods about Time Zones
Has some nice points regarding the edge-cases of DST transitions.
Multimedia
- Apple Music Style Guide
Quality insurance guidelines to format music, art, and metadata to increase discoverability.
- DDEX
The industry standard for music metadata, including archiving, sound recording, sales and usage reporting, royalties and license deals.
- Falsehoods about Video
Cover it all: video decoding and playback, files, image scaling, color spaces and conversion, displays and subtitles.
- 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.
Internationalization
- Awesome Unicode
A curated list of delightful Unicode tidbits, packages and resources.
- 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.
- Breaking Our Assumptions
Most programmers spend so much time with
- Dark corners of Unicode
Unicode is extensive, here be dragons.
- Falsehoods about Language
Translating a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to be.
- Falsehoods about Language
Additional cases to complement the previous article.
Business
- Characters and in company names lead to XSS attacks
Because
- CLDR currency definitions
🆓 Currency validity date ranges overlap due to revolts, invasions, new constitutions, and slow planned adoption.
- 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.
- Falsehoods about Economics
Economics are not simple or rational.
- Falsehoods about IBANs
International Bank Account Numbers are not international.
- Falsehoods about Online Shopping
Covers prices, currencies and inventory.
Software Engineering
- Facts about State Machines
State machines are often misunderstood and under-applied.
- 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 CVE
CVE ≠ vulnerability (and 36 other confusions).
- Falsehoods about Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
False conceptions about the identifiers that are used to identify and link research outputs (and a lot of other things).
- Falsehoods about Event-Driven Systems
Misconceptions about event driven systems and message passing.
Networks
- Fallacies of Distributed Computing
Assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
- Falsehoods about Networks
Covers TCP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs and IPv4/v6.
- IDN is crazy
International characters in domain names mean support of homographs and heterographs.
- 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
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.
- Letter Delivered Despite No Name, No Address
Ultimate falsehood about postal addresses: you do not need one.
- Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV
“I saw many horrors, but I've never seen this particular formatting choice anywhere else.”
- Regex and Postal Addresses
Why regular expressions and street addresses do not mix.
- The Bear with Its Own ZIP Code
Smokey Bear has his own ZIP Code (
Showing a sample of 135 resources. View the full list on GitHub →