I was bitten with this issue some time ago.
The Stripe library has constants for which type of VAT number is supplied. One of those constants is 'NO_VAT'...
Needless to say, this caused me some grey hairs
The Norway Problem
21–30 of 339 posts
Re: The Norway Problem
#22> “While the website went down and we were losing money we chased down a number of loose ends until finally finding the root cause.” And that's why you have a staging environment. Or you debug in production, whatever you prefer.
I'd go further and say this is why you write tests . Creating tests that cover a lot (or all) possible inputs is sometimes not that hard and really pays off if you manage to catch a very common error like the Norway thing. Even better if you catch something that would have been a nightmare to fix in production. I say this because two days ago I wrote a test that used all country codes as input. It took 15 minutes to…
>I say this because two days ago I wrote a test that used all country codes as input. It took 15 minutes to write that test. During the whole testing session I found at least 5 mistakes of which 3 would have been quite dramatic.
And how many minutes to test all city/state/region/street/person names ?
It can also happen that you test s will become outdated, like when url standard changed and more characters codes were allowed.
Re: The Norway Problem
#23Recent related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26365365
Re: The Norway Problem
#24YAML had a worse example, once.
For the ease of entering time units YAML 1.1 parsed any set of two digits, separated by colons, as a number in sexagesimal (base 60). So 1:11:00 would parse to the integer 4260, as in 1 hour and 11 minutes equals 4260 seconds.
Now try plugging MAC addresses into that parser.
The most annoying part is that the MAC addresses would only be mis-parsed if there were no hex digits in the string. Like the bug in this post, it could only be reproduced with specific values.
Generally, if you're doing implicit typing, you need to keep the number of cases as low as possible, and preferably error out in case of ambiguity.
Re: The Norway Problem
#25This is part of more general problem, they had to rename a gene to stop excel auto-completing it into a date.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Edit: Apparently Excel has its own Norway Problem ... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...
Re: The Norway Problem
#26Re: The Norway Problem
#27Re: The Norway Problem
#28What I am most baffled by with Yaml is the fact that it’s a superset of JSON.
Whenever an input accepts YAML you can actually pass in JSON there and it’ll be valid
It really surprised me when I found out and I use JSON Whenever possible since then since it’s much stricter
Re: The Norway Problem
#29YAML seems like a really neat idea, but over time, I have I have come to regard it as being too complicated for me to use for configuration. My personal favorite is TOML, but I would even prefer plain JSON over YAML The last thing I want at 2 AM when trying to look figure out if an outage is due to a configuration change is having to think if each line of my configuration is doing the thing I want. YAML prizes making…
They all have their downsides. JSON: - no comments, unless you fake them with fake properties, unless your configuration has a schema that doesn't allow extra fake properties - no trailing commas; makes editing more annoying - no raw strings YAML: - the automatic type coercion - the many ways to encode strings ( https://yaml-multiline.info/ ) - the roulette wheel of whether this particular parser is anal about two-sp…
This makes me sad. It's 2021 and we still haven't figure out how to serialize configuration in a format that is easy-to-edit and predictable.
Re: The Norway Problem
#30YAML had a worse example, once. For the ease of entering time units YAML 1.1 parsed any set of two digits, separated by colons, as a number in sexagesimal (base 60). So 1:11:00 would parse to the integer 4260, as in 1 hour and 11 minutes equals 4260 seconds. Now try plugging MAC addresses into that parser. The most annoying part is that the MAC addresses would only be mis-parsed if there were no hex digits in the str…
slightly related, on my microwave 99 > 100, even 61 > 100