Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 209 posts

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#141

Post by Tepix »

duskwuff wrote: post #31
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These might be valid but nobody uses them and nobody will complain if you do not support them.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. It's a valid point. There is a gap between "technically valid email addresses" and "email addresses that reasonable people use".

Why is this downvoted? Because it violates Postel's law, one of the cornerstones of the technology running the internet:

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others"

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#142

Post by ams6110 »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #16

I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…

An old eBay account of mine is in the same zombie state because it's wanting to use an old phone number that I no longer control to "verify" me.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#143

Post by ams6110 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #121
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #16

I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…

If the number has been reassigned you could ring the person, explain the situation and get them to forward you the code. (Also a way to crack other people's accounts!). I wonder if phone companies couldn't [partially] solve this; probably any system would be too open to abuse?

That happened to me once. I declined to provide the code. Might have been legit but seemed too big a risk of getting my phone number tied to something scammy or even criminal.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#144

Post by JustSomeNobody »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #16

I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…

> it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem.

I have come to realize that if you do not deal with a real person when signing up for some service, you will never get to deal with a real person when you need one. Customer service doesn't exist at FB, Google, etc. because they aren't customer oriented companies. They were not created to service you, they were created to use you.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#145

Post by ams6110 »

JdeBP wrote: post #105

I would, from personal experience, construct a quite different list. Some of mine would be: * Every other country's telephone numbering is like one's own. * Every other country's telephone numbering is like that of EU countries, or like the NANP. * The last 10 digits are the subscriber number. * Geographic numbers are actually geographic. * 123456789 is a perfectly fine number to use for test calls. * STD is exactly…

> * The callee can always clear calls

In the 1980s at school, the phone system in the dorms was a private system (you could connect to the public system by dialing 9 first). In this system, a call was not terminated until the originating side disconnected. So a common prank was to call someone, then not hang up. Now their phone was unusable.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#147

Post by dsr_ »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #133

IF the description of the falsehood includes the line "Obviously, this isn't necessarily true." I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that programmers don't really believe it - at any rate I would like documentation of programmers believing that people have only one phone number. ¨´

"falsehoods programmers believe about X" is shorthand for "assumptions about X that some programmers have not examined prior to deployment in production code".

Any system that has an input with a single "telephone number" field that is both required and cannot accept multiple entries fits this pattern.

Think of it as a list of antipatterns to be avoided. Some of them were deployed intentionally, and others pop up because a programmer took the spec they were handed and implemented it without thinking about it -- or they did think about it and their attempt to fix it was overruled.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#149

Post by smcl »

bmn__ wrote: post #146

> phones in […] Kosovo may be reached by dialing the country calling code for Serbia (+381), Slovenia (+386), or Monaco (+377) That can't be right. When will Americans learn basic 4th school year geography?

Geography and dialling codes aren’t necessarily aligned. So none of those countries share a border - it doesn’t mean there was never a weird issue with international dialling codes at some point (and, after I did a bit of searching, it seems that there was)

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#150

Post by afiori »

mcny wrote: post #136
Tor3 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first of the two bad thing about Line is that connection to a phone number. Wife got a new iPad, and, because of the other bad thing - that Line only works on a single device - it had to be 'moved' to the new iPad. Which needs a confirmation by phone message. And that phone was in Japan, unlike my wife, and wouldn't have worked for text messages even if she had brought it (phone plan didn't allow international ca…

All these problems would be solved if they allowed us to use Google voice number. It is a number that's attached to my email and one that I won't discard (assuming I would lose it due to in activity). But no. Even Uber doesn't allow me to use a Google voice number.

you can get a Google Voice number only if you are in the US, at least when I tried to get one last year it was impossible from Italy.
Post reply on HN