Top all-time · #934
mjt.me.uk
Personal blog · mjt.me.uk/posts · on HN as michaeltprogrammingweb
mjt.me.uk is a personal blog at mjt.me.uk about programming and web. Since 2013, 70 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for its "Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" list, cited whenever address formats, postcodes or geocoding come up. It also has a graphical explainer on contraction hierarchies.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called the addresses falsehoods list "fantastic" and said people should read it regularly; another commenter said to read it for starters; the contraction hiera
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses55 people · 62 mentions · first linked 2015-01-09
- Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-05-30
- The smallest 256x256 single-color PNG file, and where you've seen it (2015)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-10-25
- Certificate Transparency and the Certificate Authority Death Penalty2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-23
- How cheap digital verniers work (2017)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-04
- Contraction Hierarchies path-finding algorithm, illustrated using Three.js2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-06-15
What Hacker News says?
Figuring out a format for addresses is actually really hard. https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Show HN: A tool that transforms your whole list with just one example”Submitted The smallest 256x256 single-color PNG file, and where you've seen it (2015) as a story · 482 points
HN discussionIf you're on Linux and don't mind an unreliable hack where your video sometimes freezes, I was able to bodge the mobile app preview stream from my Lumix GX80 to appear as a v4l2 camera [1] [1] https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/wifi-streaming-video-lumix-gx80/
Comment linking /posts/wifi-streaming-video-lumix-gx80/
on “Today’s Webcams Are Boring, So I Brought Back a Classic”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses as a story · 206 points
HN discussionhttps://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses as a story · 144 points
HN discussionhttps://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “We need to liberate the Postcode Address File”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses (2013) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionIf I'm building an algorithm for packing bytes into an array, inverting matrices, or some similarly technological issue, why would insights into police profiling or sexual harassment be useful? Because most software that actually gets used on a day-to-day basis doesn't purely work on theoretical constructs, for one: even if your application just needs really basic things like names [1] or addresses [2], it will impl…
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Okay, Feminism, It’s Time We Had a Talk About Empathy (2013)”Submitted How cheap digital verniers work (2017) as a story · 18 points
HN discussionGood place to drop the fantastic "falsehoods developers believe about addresses" [0] And my favourite case of interesting address numbers in the US, menomonee falls, which includes addresses such as "W162N7420 Tamarack Trail" [1] 0: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... 1: https://goo.gl/maps/J8s2yMKConwJMg727
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “The number input is the worst input”Submitted Certificate Transparency and the Certificate Authority Death Penalty as a story · 15 points
HN discussionHaving worked on that a bit (I wrote the schema for planning applications in Scotland) ... that stuff is a mess. Take a read of this for starters: http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-ab... The requirements for the work I did meant that we had to support the UK's NLPG standard for addresses which didn't even work for the house I live in so I knew I was off to a bad start :)
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Google's phone number handling library”Submitted Contraction Hierarchies path-finding algorithm, illustrated using Three.js as a story · 11 points
HN discussionFun to think about, but in the real world, no question neatly divides people, even the gender one. To quote Reddit's u/tailcalled[1], the exo-software/meatspace world is even less standardized than the software world: Falsehoods programmers believe about gender: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm... Falsehoods programmers believe about names: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-p…
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “33 Questions”Submitted The smallest 256x256 single-color PNG file, and where you've seen it as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> most places have a clear and simple address That depends on your definition of "clear and simple" and "address" :) While a lot boils down to use case - are you trying to navigate somewhere, or link a string to an address? - even figuring out what is an address can be hard work. Is an address the entrance to a building? Or a building that accepts postal deliveries? Is the "shell" of a building that contains a bunch…
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Reverse geocoding is hard”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses (2013) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTraditionally it's difficult for browser vendors to revoke a root CA as they want to grandfather in old certificates, so existing sites don't have the rug pulled out from under their feet when their only crime is using a crap CA. Partial solutions include blocking the CA's certs based on the issuance date or insisting they hand over a list of the certs they've issued - but if the CA is going down in flames anyway, t…
Comment linking /posts/certificate-transparency/
on “Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf we really aspire to be an information-driven culture who makes informed decisions about important topics, we really ought to curate lists like these down to actual informed discussions on the items in the list. Printing out a list of "falsehoods" littered with personal opinions and calling them "demonstrable" [1] without a shred of evidence is not going to contribute to general knowledge. There may be some utilit…
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “List of falsehoods programmers believe in”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... ... Final falsehood: Each person has exactly one address . Same goes for phone numbers, citizenships, passports, etc.
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Google is moving EU citizens’ data to US?”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionObligatory: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Tomorrow the Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,666”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en Falsehoods programmers believe about geography http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-ab... Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm... Falsehoods programmers believe about gender http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2012/06/falsehoods-programmers... Falsehoods programmers belie…
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Articles Every Programmer Should Read”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... That documents that not all addresses have postal codes. This is another example of the real world existing in order to give programmers kicks in the head.
Comment linking /posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/
on “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
