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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

... or there's a software engineer somewhere who simply assumed that three letter navaid identifiers were globally unique, and baked that assumption into the code.

I guess we now need a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation Data" site :)

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Did aviation software for 7 years. This is 100% the first assumption about waypoint / navaid when new devs come in.

And this is why you always use surrogate keys and not natural keys. No matter how much you convince yourself that your natural key is unique and will never change, if a human created the value then a human can change the value or create duplicates, and eventually will.

But that wouldn't help you here. The flight plan will come in with the code and you'll still have to resolve that to your keys.

Sure, but that means you are putting in the infrastructure to resolve it, instead of assuming there will never be a need to.

Or even more straightforward, just don’t believe anyone 100% knows what they are doing until they exhaustively list every assumption they are making.

Which also means never assume the exhaustive list is 100%.

Bingo, without some means of credible verification, then assume it’s incomplete.

I wouldn't be able to produce such a list, even for areas where I totally do know everything that would be on the list.

Even more straightforward, just don’t believe anyone 100% knows what they are doing.

or falsehoods programmers believe about global identifiers

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