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Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I've been trying to bang into the heads of the students that I TA that "there is no test data - only fake data." Test data always seems, to me, to mean meaningless junk. Names like addresses to Dicksville, IL do nothing but accidentally get leaked to someone they shouldn't, and they can't be validated, which creates a whole nest of testing problems.

Fake data, like John Doe, San Francisco, CA, doesn't share these problems.

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I read a story a couple years ago about a couple who had there home raided over 50 times over a 4-5 year period by NYPD. Turns out there address was used as test data in the system, and it was leaking into the police's forms/database. So, if using fake data, make sure it can't be mistaken with an actual address/phone number/dna sequence.

There are already defined sets of telephone numbers that can be used for fake data http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_telephone_number

Also of course example.com. Not sure if there are non routeable physical addresses.

The TV show Breaking Bad uses phone numbers like 1 (575) 147-8092. Since the local part of a phone number can never start with a 0 or a 1, it avoids the "555 problem" of obviously fake phone numbers catching the viewer's attention, while still being non-dialable.

I'm shocked this isn't done more often. Even better though is when the show owns the phone number and can use it to communicate with fans in-the-know.

> Not sure if there are non routeable physical addresses.

Santa Claus, North Pole, Snow Street 1

Sherlock Holmes, London, 221B Baker Street (is a small museum afaik)

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is not located at 221b Baker Street.

That address does not exist, but any mail addressed to it is redirected to the Museum, which is technically 239 Baker Street (since it sits between 237 and 241).

They do have a special dispensation from the City of Westminster to display their address as 221b Baker Street though.

It's actually the address of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, so not wholly inaccurate.

I'm a fan of "Bilbo Baggins, 1 Bagshot Row, Bag End", personally.

Oh, not small then? :)

very small, but worth a visit.

We had an auction website project in college as freshmen, and the person teaching the class who was playing the role of client made this very clear. One of the groups was demoing their app and some bad language and comments made it onto the screen. Their review/feedback/demo ended right there... Painful for them, but taught me and the rest of the class a lesson

During a demo for a group bittorrent client project in college, the person running the demo chose to use the link on the piratebay with the most seeders (because we had some bugs that made it not work reliably with non-seeders). The file? A windows keygen program. Fortunately, the prof didn't notice what we were downloading.

The Fake Name Generator is useful for these kinds of things:

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/index.php

They even have an API to automatically fetch a bunch of data.

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