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?
So do you support letting trans-"women" play on women's sports teams and use women's bathrooms?
I think sports teams and sporting organizations should make their own decisions. I don't know what's actually best overall; I think transgender people are rare enough that it wouldn't make a big difference in practice to most . My guess is that the best policy for smaller informal sports teams and organizations is to let 'em in, that the best policy at the highest levels where a lot is at stake is to say women's teams/competitions are only for people who are anatomically female by some criterion or other, and in between I'm less sure but lean towards a let-'em-in policy in the absence of compelling evidence that it would do actual harm.
I think that if someone is generally presenting as female we should let them use women's bathrooms if they want to. The obvious objections to this seem to be (1) ewww (which I suggest is not an argument) and (2) that this introduces a danger to women from predatory men dressing up as women in order to sneak into their bathrooms. I find #2 unconvincing because when I try to imagine scenarios where there's an actual difference in the harm done I can't think of one that's actually plausible, and because whatever bathroom policy we adopt there are going to be trans people and they are going to need to use bathrooms, and there are obvious risks of harm from trans women trying to use men's bathrooms too.
Of course, for purposes of those Bayesian deductions trans-people are much closer to their biological than their claimed gender.
I don't think that's clear at all. As I've said before in this discussion, what counts as "closer" depends greatly on context, and for many purposes someone who looks more or less female, presents as female, and considers themself female is "closer" to stereotypical-female than to stereotypical-male whatever is in their chromosomes or their pants.
That he's in the similarity cluster labelled "women"
Someone in this situation is some way from the centre of either the "women" or the "men" cluster, regardless. It seems to me that in fact there is no such thing as the similarity cluster labelled "women" because (have I mentioned this already?) there are any number of similarity clusters corresponding to different notions of similarity, and different notions of similarity are called for in different contexts.
If you pick some particular notion of similarity based on (say) gross anatomy, sex chromosomes, hormone levels, and ability to beget and/or bear children, then indeed our hypothetical person is in the "men" rather than the "women" cluster. But do you really think there's a delusion there? If you ask, say, Bruce->Caitlyn Jenner "What chromosomes do you have?", the answer might be "It's none of your business" or "Who cares?" but it won't be "XX, of course, because I'm a woman".
It seems to me that the actual difference between you and, say, Jenner is a disagreement about what notion of similarity to use. How is that a delusion on a par with thinking you're Jesus?
I think transgender people are rare enough that it wouldn't make a big difference in practice to most .
If the mere act of expressing that you want a different gender than the one you have changes your gender for societal purposes you are going to have a lot more "transgender" people when there are benefits to be gained.
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.