my response to this entire topic:
https://imgur.com/gallery/uKBX6
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
161–170 of 209 posts
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#162I 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…
No, as much as I hate Facebook: fuck phone numbers. The idea of using phone number as a personal identification tool is so bad, I'm struggling to believe this is not some kind of conspiracy designed for the solely purpose of mocking the user. It is bad enough that phone numbers exist at all in the eyes of the end user by the year 2019, 15 years after Skype with user-friendly logins appeared and when about a half of t…
What do you suggest? Give everyone their own domain name? Phone numbers are more portable than third-party emails or logins to proprietary services like Skype. They can be moved from provider-to-provider.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
> none of those countries share a border Precisely. That should give the reader pause to think that there's something wrong. You're missing that the author mixed up Monaco with Montenegro (Kosovo's neighbour) because they sound similar. That's the perennial Austria/Australia confusion writ small.
Do you have a source for that?
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#164"Falsehoods programmers believe about..."
* Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
* REST APIs: http://slinkp.com/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-apis....
* Fonts/typefaces: https://github.com/RoelN/Font-Falsehoods
Collection of falsehoods: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#165> An individual has a phone number > Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try and provide a fallback to accommodate these users. Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram are spectacular design failures on this point because they assume that every person has a phone number…
>Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram are spectacular design failures on this point because they assume that every person has a phone number and also that every person has their own private (non-shared) and unique phone number. No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them. >Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that…
> No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them.
That’s a very first world observation, and even there, this would be quite shaky if actual numbers were known.
Also, I didn’t say or intend to mean that these companies made excluding people a goal. Their decisions, on the contrary, have resulted in that.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#166I 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…
Now, my account becomes a zombie, can't be used, can't be deleted, and has lots of personal information. All thanks to the falsehoods Facebook programmers believed about phone numbers, and its non-existent "customer [0]" service.
I think it's naive to think that this wasn't decided at the product level. This exact scenario was discussed, along with many others like it, and this is how they decided to handle it. "So they'll have a profile up with their personal information, maybe some embarrassing stuff they posted in college, and now they're adult and looking for a job and it'll be up forever looking like they intentionally left it that way?" "Yes." "Okay." "It's fine." "I mean...." "Do you have a solution that doesn't cost money?" "No, but...." "So you want to propose we spend money fixing this?" "...." "Okay, so we're agreed that this is fine. Moving on."
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#167"Falsehoods programmers believe about..." * Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... * REST APIs: http://slinkp.com/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-apis.... * Fonts/typefaces: https://github.com/RoelN/Font-Falsehoods Collection of falsehoods: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Timezooooooones
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#168A few years ago I discovered that if you have a phone number and an email address in a contact in your iPhone, iMessage looks for other accounts using the email address FIRST -- even though its ostensibly replacing SMS, which of course is phone number based.
I found this out because someone accidentally put my email address in a contact (see: https://xkcd.com/1279/) and then texted me to call out sick. After multiple attempts to explain that I was not actually her boss, she accused me of stealing the phone number.
That was a fun day.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#169"Phone numbers are numbers" - I've come this multiple times integrating phone numbers into a product. Currently I just store phone numbers in E.164 format as a string with max length of 25 just to be safe and index them. This really takes up no additional space and can easily handle extensions. I can't tell you how many times I've run into people storing phone numbers without normalization eg: "(555) 444 - 3333" etc.…
>Currently I just store phone numbers in E.164 format as a string
As someone who created many texting apps (HeyWire, Salesforce's LiveMessage Product) this is how all numbers are treated internally...except short codes, which aren't phone numbers.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#170IF 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. ¨´
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