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So a lesson from when I was young and stupid: If you make fake data, it's often advantageous to make it obviously fake data. If, in a fit of boredom, you decid

by patio11 13y ago

So a lesson from when I was young and stupid: If you make fake data, it's often advantageous to make it obviously fake data. If, in a fit of boredom, you decide to do something clever and e.g. generate plausible names and birthdates for fake students by using government lists for the most common names and surnames for people born that year, and you e.g. hypothetically leave 6 pages of no-actual-human-involved fake data sitting on an office printer, you might hypothetically end up in a very awkward conversation with the local person in charge of regulated data breaches.

masklinn 13y ago
> So a lesson from when I was young and stupid: If you make fake data, it's often advantageous to make it obviously fake data. A second one: if you make fake data, it's aways advantageous to make it edge-case fake data. Your generator should break more or less every falsehood programmers believe about names[0] [0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- mkenyon 13y ago
  Masklinn, I have to point out that patio11 wrote the article to which you linked!
w3pm 13y ago
Fair enough, but it's also advantageous to make it non-obviously fake. Consider the recent stories about services faking traffic/users in order to gain real traffic/users (ebay, reddit, dating sites, etc).
- lazerwalker 13y ago
  You have a very fair point, but it's tangential to the one patio11 is making; creating testing data for development purposes (that's never going to be seen by users, short of an accident) and creating faked data for marketing/growth/etc purposes (which is solely for the purpose of presenting to users) are unrelated.
  - w3pm 13y ago
    I guess I'm not following how they are unrelated. To really stress a system and find bugs, shouldn't you be putting it under realistic usage and load? In my mind using test data that closely matches real data is desirable for development purposes. I suppose I'm now actually disagreeing with the OP's statement -- that example was a specific circumstance where perhaps more care should've been taken, but for the general case I think it's actually desirable to use realistic data. Plus I just think it'd be cool if you could use the same service/API for both use cases.

by patio11 13y ago

masklinn 13y ago

> So a lesson from when I was young and stupid: If you make fake data, it's often advantageous to make it obviously fake data. A second one: if you make fake data, it's aways advantageous to make it edge-case fake data. Your generator should break more or less every falsehood programmers believe about names[0] [0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

mkenyon 13y ago
Masklinn, I have to point out that patio11 wrote the article to which you linked!

w3pm 13y ago

Fair enough, but it's also advantageous to make it non-obviously fake. Consider the recent stories about services faking traffic/users in order to gain real traffic/users (ebay, reddit, dating sites, etc).

lazerwalker 13y ago
You have a very fair point, but it's tangential to the one patio11 is making; creating testing data for development purposes (that's never going to be seen by users, short of an accident) and creating faked data for marketing/growth/etc purposes (which is solely for the purpose of presenting to users) are unrelated.
- w3pm 13y ago
  I guess I'm not following how they are unrelated. To really stress a system and find bugs, shouldn't you be putting it under realistic usage and load? In my mind using test data that closely matches real data is desirable for development purposes. I suppose I'm now actually disagreeing with the OP's statement -- that example was a specific circumstance where perhaps more care should've been taken, but for the general case I think it's actually desirable to use realistic data. Plus I just think it'd be cool if you could use the same service/API for both use cases.