awesome-falsehood

Gender is part of human identity and has its own subtleties.

Localized representations of the components of a person's name.

Fingerprints are not unique.

You can't really define a family with strict rules.

Issues at the intersection of names and gender and internationalization.

The article that started it all.

The consequence of wrong calendar accounting.

From Y2K to the overflow of 32-bit seconds from Unix epoch, a list of special date to watch for depending on the system.

Takes on the first article above and provides an explanation of each falsehood, with more context and external resources.

Seminal article on dates and time.

Another takes on time-related falsehoods, with an emphasis on time zones.

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

Quality insurance guidelines to format music, art, and metadata to increase discoverability.

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

Cover it all: video decoding and playback, files, image scaling, color spaces and conversion, displays and subtitles.

Music catalogs data are full of crazy stuff.

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

A curated list of delightful Unicode tidbits, packages and resources.

🆓 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.

Most programmers spend so much time with

Unicode is extensive, here be dragons.

Additional cases to complement the previous article.

Translating a software from English is not as straightforward as it seems to be.

Because

🆓 Currency validity date ranges overlap due to revolts, invasions, new constitutions, and slow planned adoption.

The importance of types in accounting software: missing the decimal point ends up with 100x over-charges.

Economics are not simple or rational.

International Bank Account Numbers are not international.

Covers prices, currencies and inventory.

“Residing in an enclave within another country has often involved difficulties in such areas as passage rights, importing goods, currency, provision of utilities and health services, and host nation cooperation.” None of these attributes follows from a country code.

Takes on places, their names and locations.

Covers coordinates, projection and GIS.

Weather is location-dependent, and so full of edge-cases.

A guide for geospatial practitioners on diagnosing and fixing common issues with coordinate systems.

“There's one special group of kanji that's hard even for Japanese people to read: place names.”

State machines are often misunderstood and under-applied.

Building software is hard. Building software that builds software is harder.

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

CVE ≠ vulnerability (and 36 other confusions).

False conceptions about the identifiers that are used to identify and link research outputs (and a lot of other things).

Misconceptions about event driven systems and message passing.

Assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.

Covers TCP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs and IPv4/v6.

International characters in domain names mean support of homographs and heterographs.

Some parts of the address are optional, mind the decimal and octal notations, and