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 one - it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem.
All I wanted is to delete it, but I can't. 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've heard Google has similar issues [1], if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human...
Storytime: I bounce between Japan and Korea for work. I was in Seoul for about a year and a half and naturally had a Korean phone number. I used this number to sign up for Line (a popular chat service in the two countries), and I also linked my email address to the account. So when it was time to move back to Japan, I naturally canceled my Korean phone service.
Fast forward 6 months, and my Line account suddenly disappears. I contact customer service, and it seems someone else had registered for Line with my previous phone number -- which was of course release when I canceled my service with the telecom in Korea. I was informed that it's Line's policy to only allow one account per phone number, and thus they deleted my old account when the other person registered. There was no way to recover it. I even reached out to one of my engineering friends that worked for Line, at the time.
Some of my friends, I only knew and communicated with through Line, and I have no way to find or contact them again.
So yeah, fxxk using phone numbers as identification.
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 the planet uses the phone almost solely for the purpose of having a pocket-size internet access device anyway. But making phone numbers a passport of sorts (a proprietary, insecure, easy to lose passport, over which you have basically no control) is the worst, the most stupid/evil idea ever. And there's no way around it, it is used by (supposedly "secure") whatsapp, telegram, google, facebook, every fucking pizza delivery service and, well, basically everything else. And I hate every single person responsible for helping that happen.
Seriously, I would do everything I can to destroy fucking phone numbers, but I have no idea how can we stop this madness.
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."
We're in an age where it's scary to lose access to an e-mail addresses or phone number are at the top of that list.
I don't mean to change it, I mean to lose access to it. If you change it, find a way to hold onto access to the last one.
I learned this lesson relatively easily. I had a vanity domain that also received my e-mail and I eventually replaced it with a different one. I ran the new domain and e-mail for a few years before allowing the domain registration on the old one to expire. I hadn't received (non-spam) e-mail on it in a couple years, seemed safe enough.
Turns out I've had a few websites over the year since that I wanted to login to and I needed to recover my password, either because I forgot or the site had forced a reset due to a breach. I hadn't updated my e-mail on a few of those sites.
I don't think I'll let go of a main e-mail address or phone number again.
> I've heard Google has similar issues, if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human...
I have had great support via phone, chat, and email with google a number of times over the past 3 years, and I live on an island foreign to Google in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My experience has been that if you're using a paid Google product, the support is excellent.
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?
> 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.
* "A mobile phone knows its phone number." The phone cannot know its own phone number without making a call or sending a text message. Some SIM cards carry an "own phone number" record but it is not authoritative and sometimes inaccurate.
* "A SIM card is permanently assigned to a phone number." SIM cards to phone number relationship can be many:many and change over time.
* "<Social app X> requires phone number to sign up, so we should too." Users actually react very differently when a messaging app asks for their phone number (useful to find contacts) vs a calculator app or a game or an app where they want to be anonymous.
Flying Spaghetti Monster I hate that this is real:
> Only mobile phones can receive text messages
> Some service providers support sending and receiving text messages to fixed-line numbers. There are also online services like Skype that can send and receive text messages.
"Oh but not-mobile-number phone numbers are always fraudulent so we don't accept them!" Great, I love getting caught in spam traps because I have a mobile phone...but it is a VoIP-backed system so the numbers show up as VoIP. (BTW, Verizon's "My Numbers" feature also show up as VoIP numbers, not mobile.)
Even more annoying: "Oh, but a bunch of people we know who are also technology professionals happen to use Google Voice / Google Fi so we'll just whitelist them." Grrr. So now I have to care what my "mobile" provider uses for its underlying network or just use Google.
And the last one: My credit union just sent out a terms of service update saying I "cannot use Google Voice, VoIP, or similar numbers with Zelle." OK, but I already have a number like that registered, what now? "Your Zelle access is suspended until you give us your mobile number." But that is my mobile number. "Too bad."
It's worth noting that a CLEC (or other provider) can, in fact, denote a non-mobile number (or block of numbers) as "mobile" so that it can do things like receive text verifications from short codes (like your bank, or gmail, uses).
This is expensive and time-consuming, however, and almost no CLEC (or other such provider) will do it - you have to petition and register your number(s) with every single mobile provider and get them to accept that these are not sources of spam, etc.
I have this problem because my main, personal number is actually a twilio number (as I built my own personal telco within twilio) and this means I cannot receive validation messages from shortcodes (like a bank). I spoke to some twilio engineers at Signal and they confirmed that it would indeed be possible to register twilio numbers as "mobile" but too expensive ...
> 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 and also that every person has their own private (non-shared) and unique phone number. Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that it’s sufficiently adequate to thwart spammers.
The whole “must enter a phone number” phenomenon is a big mess, introduces privacy issues and excludes many people. None of the companies mentioned above would agree that excluding people is a goal for them, but they’ve made it so.
What pisses me off to no end is the local (very popular) app Vipps for sending other people cash, e.g. to split a bill or buy something at a garage sale or whatever. Not only does it use phone numbers to identify the people you send money to, but it explicitly disallows two people with different phone numbers to have a shared bank account. Husband and wife with common debit account? Sorry, unsupported. WTF? What happens if someone switches bank (and thus account number) or phone number? Who knows, maybe you sent money to a stranger. This app is made by the banks.
> In Argentina, to dial a mobile number domestically, the digits "15" need to be inserted after the area code but before the local number, and the "9" after the country code (54) needs to be removed. This transforms +54 9 2982 123456 into 02982 15 123456.
I used to work in telco, so I've seen some pretty wacky format formatting schemes, but this takes the cake. Who thought this was a good idea!?
Not even 20 years ago, before any number could be ported to mobiles, landlines in some (all?) Baby Bell regions had their prefix determined by geography. In other words, you could know what "zone" a given phone number was in by its prefix.
Take Silicon Valley. A (650) 960-xxxx number meant Mountain View. (408) 733-xxxx meant Sunnyvale. Etc.
Zones roughly respected cities, but boundary conditions abounded. If you lived near the Mountain View / Sunnyvale border, you could be in area code 415 (later 650) or 408.
San Jose had 3 zones. Cupertino was part of SJ1. Fremont / Newark were lumped and spanned 2 zones. Milpitas was part of SJ2. etc.
You were only guaranteed a local (non-toll) calling area of something like 8 miles, but Pac Bell would give you all of the zone overlap: if any part of your zone was within that 8 (?) miles of any part of your destination zone, it was a local (free) call. This meant your actual local range could extend 20+ miles.
I set up PC-based call broadcast systems (the vendor product I used was "BigmOth" for some membership organizations such that I could send a recorded message to whatever numbers in a given member roster. By placing two parallel systems in, say, Sunnyvale and SJ3, I could cover everywhere from Menlo Park to Los Gatos to Coyote to Fremont Newark zone 1 with no variable phone costs.
So, I set up a table in my database to join prefixes to zones, and my program went through the contacts and routed each destination number to the appropriate calling phone book (I rewrote the phone books after every batch of database updates). I had one system in my house, and a colleague had one in his in SJ3. I'd just uploaded his share of the phonebooks and the message recording binary to his ftp site, leaving him maybe 10 minutes of work for each cycle's setup.
Thus, I could blast 2-minute messages to members over a 200+ square mile area for free.
It was really slick. 10 years later, it was irrelevant, as everywhere became a free call.
"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., not understanding that's hard to compare against, where E.164 = "+15554443333" is much more consistent and also works with services like twilio etc.
I assume why they store them as entered is because it's hard to convert them between formats. In North America you format the number that way, but other countries do it differently. Maybe the phone number is a local number (without area code) or maybe it has an extension?
If you are just storing the phone number to display to a user at a later time, it is a lot simpler just to save it as text field with no validation.
>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.
Programmers don't actually believe in such falsehoods, nor do they just decide to be lazy about implementation. In fact if anything programmers are generally more aware of such things. A better name for these lists would be "falsehoods businesses insist on despite their engineers warnings".
I mean, every programmer I know considers stuff like this to be very interesting trivia to learn and apply. But even if you know this stuff, putting the knowledge to use often involves a series of battles against your PMs and managers and maybe even customers, who either don't know it, have their own vision, or just follow what everyone else does.
(Getting a product to work correctly is as much an exercise of diplomacy and ego management as it is a matter of technical skills.)
There's popular app in Bangalore that you can use to rent bicycles. I can't use it because my phone number (which has a relatively newly released starting digit series) doesn't pass their signup validation.
So much this. Iran's phone number formats have changed at least 4 times in the past 20 years, and I am sure many more times if you go back a couple more decades.
Hah! I used to do a lot of telco work. This led me to basically assume nothing about phone numbers.
What got me, was that people working at the telco used to give us requirements that clearly indicated that the telco people entertained a lot of falsehoods about phone numbers too!
"Users will only store phone numbers in your product's phone number fields"
Not entirely sure what this point is trying to achieve. Do you read a birthday field expecting a phone number 99% of the time? Should you read a phone number field expecting an email address? And at what point in that process did you decide that not having data validation on both ends was a good idea?
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.
¨´
The last time I was in northern New Jersey, Warwick Valley Telephone Company still supported five digit dialing across area codes!
People could dial 4nnnn to be connected to 973-764-nnnn (a New Jersey area code). They could also dial 6nnnn to be connected to 845-986-nnnn (a New York area code). There were about 15 different short codes across two area codes.
There are a lot of these little regional telephone quirks across America, and I think every one of them is awesome.
Between 2004 and 2007, Zurich (Switzerland) also switched dialing prefixes such that multiple phone numbers in fact referred to the same extension [0].
Kleinwalsertag. Austrian territory, but only reachable (by road) through germany. Was connected to german phone network, which changed once telco stuff got smart enough. Effect: For some time a german and an austrian phone number reached the same phone.
[+] [-] segfaultbuserr|7 years ago|reply
But I no longer own that number.
And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only one - it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem.
All I wanted is to delete it, but I can't. 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've heard Google has similar issues [1], if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human...
Repeat after me: fxxk Facebook.
[0] because I'm the product, not the customer?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804,
and read this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887548
[+] [-] distantaidenn|7 years ago|reply
Fast forward 6 months, and my Line account suddenly disappears. I contact customer service, and it seems someone else had registered for Line with my previous phone number -- which was of course release when I canceled my service with the telecom in Korea. I was informed that it's Line's policy to only allow one account per phone number, and thus they deleted my old account when the other person registered. There was no way to recover it. I even reached out to one of my engineering friends that worked for Line, at the time.
Some of my friends, I only knew and communicated with through Line, and I have no way to find or contact them again.
So yeah, fxxk using phone numbers as identification.
[+] [-] krick|7 years ago|reply
Seriously, I would do everything I can to destroy fucking phone numbers, but I have no idea how can we stop this madness.
[+] [-] dkarl|7 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] B-Con|7 years ago|reply
I don't mean to change it, I mean to lose access to it. If you change it, find a way to hold onto access to the last one.
I learned this lesson relatively easily. I had a vanity domain that also received my e-mail and I eventually replaced it with a different one. I ran the new domain and e-mail for a few years before allowing the domain registration on the old one to expire. I hadn't received (non-spam) e-mail on it in a couple years, seemed safe enough.
Turns out I've had a few websites over the year since that I wanted to login to and I needed to recover my password, either because I forgot or the site had forced a reset due to a breach. I hadn't updated my e-mail on a few of those sites.
I don't think I'll let go of a main e-mail address or phone number again.
[+] [-] miketery|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdown|7 years ago|reply
I have had great support via phone, chat, and email with google a number of times over the past 3 years, and I live on an island foreign to Google in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My experience has been that if you're using a paid Google product, the support is excellent.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if phone companies couldn't [partially] solve this; probably any system would be too open to abuse?
[+] [-] estsauver|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AnaniasAnanas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfaat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkarakk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomglynch|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] geuszb|7 years ago|reply
* "A mobile phone knows its phone number." The phone cannot know its own phone number without making a call or sending a text message. Some SIM cards carry an "own phone number" record but it is not authoritative and sometimes inaccurate.
* "A SIM card is permanently assigned to a phone number." SIM cards to phone number relationship can be many:many and change over time.
* "<Social app X> requires phone number to sign up, so we should too." Users actually react very differently when a messaging app asks for their phone number (useful to find contacts) vs a calculator app or a game or an app where they want to be anonymous.
[+] [-] techsupporter|7 years ago|reply
> Only mobile phones can receive text messages
> Some service providers support sending and receiving text messages to fixed-line numbers. There are also online services like Skype that can send and receive text messages.
"Oh but not-mobile-number phone numbers are always fraudulent so we don't accept them!" Great, I love getting caught in spam traps because I have a mobile phone...but it is a VoIP-backed system so the numbers show up as VoIP. (BTW, Verizon's "My Numbers" feature also show up as VoIP numbers, not mobile.)
Even more annoying: "Oh, but a bunch of people we know who are also technology professionals happen to use Google Voice / Google Fi so we'll just whitelist them." Grrr. So now I have to care what my "mobile" provider uses for its underlying network or just use Google.
And the last one: My credit union just sent out a terms of service update saying I "cannot use Google Voice, VoIP, or similar numbers with Zelle." OK, but I already have a number like that registered, what now? "Your Zelle access is suspended until you give us your mobile number." But that is my mobile number. "Too bad."
[+] [-] rsync|7 years ago|reply
This is expensive and time-consuming, however, and almost no CLEC (or other such provider) will do it - you have to petition and register your number(s) with every single mobile provider and get them to accept that these are not sources of spam, etc.
I have this problem because my main, personal number is actually a twilio number (as I built my own personal telco within twilio) and this means I cannot receive validation messages from shortcodes (like a bank). I spoke to some twilio engineers at Signal and they confirmed that it would indeed be possible to register twilio numbers as "mobile" but too expensive ...
[+] [-] JdeBP|7 years ago|reply
* 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 like NPA-NXX.
* The leading 1- in NANP long distance form is the country code.
* There are only national and international forms nowadays.
* Users do not use E.164 themselves.
* Emergency numbers are easy to filter out, as it's only one number.
There are also falsehoods that people believe about telephones, which I would start with:
* When you hear the ringing tone, the other end is already ringing.
* Your ringing tone comes from the other end.
* Every network sends in-band call progress tones.
* It's perfectly fine to use fax over a G.729 'phone.
* DTMF is in-band and universally supported.
* DTMF is out of band and synchronous to media.
* There is only one way that callees reject calls, and it never involves being connected.
* TPC does not need to know the correct physical location of your non-mobile 'phone.
* TPC tracks mobile 'phones through "a GPS chip".
* Calls can only be traced whilst the caller is on the line.
* Caller-ID is unspoofable and works across networks and across countries.
* The callee can always clear calls.
* Only the caller can clear a call.
[+] [-] newscracker|7 years ago|reply
> 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 and also that every person has their own private (non-shared) and unique phone number. Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that it’s sufficiently adequate to thwart spammers.
The whole “must enter a phone number” phenomenon is a big mess, introduces privacy issues and excludes many people. None of the companies mentioned above would agree that excluding people is a goal for them, but they’ve made it so.
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpatokal|7 years ago|reply
I used to work in telco, so I've seen some pretty wacky format formatting schemes, but this takes the cake. Who thought this was a good idea!?
[+] [-] sonofgod|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danesparza|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrScump|7 years ago|reply
Not even 20 years ago, before any number could be ported to mobiles, landlines in some (all?) Baby Bell regions had their prefix determined by geography. In other words, you could know what "zone" a given phone number was in by its prefix.
Take Silicon Valley. A (650) 960-xxxx number meant Mountain View. (408) 733-xxxx meant Sunnyvale. Etc.
Zones roughly respected cities, but boundary conditions abounded. If you lived near the Mountain View / Sunnyvale border, you could be in area code 415 (later 650) or 408.
San Jose had 3 zones. Cupertino was part of SJ1. Fremont / Newark were lumped and spanned 2 zones. Milpitas was part of SJ2. etc.
You were only guaranteed a local (non-toll) calling area of something like 8 miles, but Pac Bell would give you all of the zone overlap: if any part of your zone was within that 8 (?) miles of any part of your destination zone, it was a local (free) call. This meant your actual local range could extend 20+ miles.
I set up PC-based call broadcast systems (the vendor product I used was "BigmOth" for some membership organizations such that I could send a recorded message to whatever numbers in a given member roster. By placing two parallel systems in, say, Sunnyvale and SJ3, I could cover everywhere from Menlo Park to Los Gatos to Coyote to Fremont Newark zone 1 with no variable phone costs.
So, I set up a table in my database to join prefixes to zones, and my program went through the contacts and routed each destination number to the appropriate calling phone book (I rewrote the phone books after every batch of database updates). I had one system in my house, and a colleague had one in his in SJ3. I'd just uploaded his share of the phonebooks and the message recording binary to his ftp site, leaving him maybe 10 minutes of work for each cycle's setup.
Thus, I could blast 2-minute messages to members over a 200+ square mile area for free.
It was really slick. 10 years later, it was irrelevant, as everywhere became a free call.
[+] [-] valgaze|7 years ago|reply
* 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
[+] [-] jhare|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skunkworker|7 years ago|reply
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., not understanding that's hard to compare against, where E.164 = "+15554443333" is much more consistent and also works with services like twilio etc.
[+] [-] fyfy18|7 years ago|reply
If you are just storing the phone number to display to a user at a later time, it is a lot simpler just to save it as text field with no validation.
[+] [-] fatnoah|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sly010|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
I mean, every programmer I know considers stuff like this to be very interesting trivia to learn and apply. But even if you know this stuff, putting the knowledge to use often involves a series of battles against your PMs and managers and maybe even customers, who either don't know it, have their own vision, or just follow what everyone else does.
(Getting a product to work correctly is as much an exercise of diplomacy and ego management as it is a matter of technical skills.)
[+] [-] macintux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] realusername|7 years ago|reply
Vietnam just removed a few months ago one digit of all the mobile phones making all the previous number recorded for the country invalid.
[+] [-] Alterlife|7 years ago|reply
There's popular app in Bangalore that you can use to rent bicycles. I can't use it because my phone number (which has a relatively newly released starting digit series) doesn't pass their signup validation.
So frustrating.
It's frustrating indeed.
[+] [-] smnrchrds|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|7 years ago|reply
Belgium uses 9 digits (leading 0 included) for landlines and 10 digits (leading 0 included) for cell phones.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rukuu001|7 years ago|reply
What got me, was that people working at the telco used to give us requirements that clearly indicated that the telco people entertained a lot of falsehoods about phone numbers too!
[+] [-] lxmcneill|7 years ago|reply
Not entirely sure what this point is trying to achieve. Do you read a birthday field expecting a phone number 99% of the time? Should you read a phone number field expecting an email address? And at what point in that process did you decide that not having data validation on both ends was a good idea?
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdrothrock|7 years ago|reply
It's a general list of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About . . ." lists. Names also come up fairly often on HN.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomglynch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
The last time I was in northern New Jersey, Warwick Valley Telephone Company still supported five digit dialing across area codes!
People could dial 4nnnn to be connected to 973-764-nnnn (a New Jersey area code). They could also dial 6nnnn to be connected to 845-986-nnnn (a New York area code). There were about 15 different short codes across two area codes.
There are a lot of these little regional telephone quirks across America, and I think every one of them is awesome.
[+] [-] ThePadawan|7 years ago|reply
[0] Wikipedia unfortunately has the description only in German: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehemalige_Telefonvorwahl_(Schw...
[+] [-] apk17|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] org3432|7 years ago|reply
Phone numbers are of the same length within a country. In Austria phone numbers vary in length, and the trailing numbers can also can be used be PBXs.