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Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

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Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#71

Post by thaumasiotes »

tokai wrote: post #41

I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo-internet is hell if you're from Asia.

I pretty much never input my name as it appears on my credit card. I have yet to have anyone (in person or online) complain about this, despite instructions saying to do so.

(Specifically, my middle initial appears on my credit card, but I never fill it in when buying stuff online.)

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#72

Post by ravenstine »

philwelch wrote: post #37
drewg123 wrote: post #35

When I was in elementary school, the Vice Principal's name was Mr. Butts. That was uproariously funny to my young self. Now I kind of feel bad for the guy, being the brunt of an endless stream potty humor from "clever" pre-teens..

If your surname is Butts and you chose a career path in elementary education, you know what you're signing up for.

True although that doesn't mean they're getting what they deserve. If you want to be an educator, or have any normal occupation, you shouldn't be forced to change your identity.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#73

Post by xyzzyz »

rectangletangle wrote: post #69
protomyth wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked with a guy with a really long set of names. Found out much later that what I thought was his first name (which he went by) was actually the initials of his names before the family name.

That's a pretty common way for people to modify their names into a more practical form (I'm sure typing all that out is a pain). This is why you shouldn't ever assume properties of people's names, and should instead write UIs which confirm the name's properties with the user. Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB. NAME_LENGTH_CHARS, NAME_TEXT 91 'Mary Abigail KawenaʻUlaokalaniahiʻIakaikapoli…

Did you really just pull out random people names from your database and posted them online?

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#74

Post by slyall »

userbinator wrote: post #68
saudioger wrote: post #30

Also: two letter surnames You wouldn't think a lot of sites check for a minimum name length, but they do.

Those sites must not have a lot of exposure to Asians --- where transliterated 2-letter surnames are very common.

I use some software that requires 6 characters to be inputted before it'll search for a name. At least that includes the comma and space.

A pain since I have a lot of people with short Asian surnames (and a "first" name which isn't always the one they go by).

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#75

Post by [deleted] »

rectangletangle wrote: post #69
protomyth wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked with a guy with a really long set of names. Found out much later that what I thought was his first name (which he went by) was actually the initials of his names before the family name.

That's a pretty common way for people to modify their names into a more practical form (I'm sure typing all that out is a pain). This is why you shouldn't ever assume properties of people's names, and should instead write UIs which confirm the name's properties with the user. Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB. NAME_LENGTH_CHARS, NAME_TEXT 91 'Mary Abigail KawenaʻUlaokalaniahiʻIakaikapoli…

[deleted]

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#76

Post by gmiller123456 »

crooked-v wrote: post #15
earenndil wrote: post #10

> Take the case of Jennifer Null, for instance, whose name was frequently rejected in input fields because the program treated her last name as a form of code, rather than text For all those who say javascript the language is fine: ^^

The value `null` and the value `"null"` are not the same thing in Javascript, and `null == 'null'` is `false`.

If you have already coerced the variable to be a string, then you can end up with with a null value becoming the string "null". E.g. the below statement evaluates to true:

new String(null)=="null"

And it used to be a lot easier to make that mistake like something with:

""+a

Which different browsers handled differently.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#77

Post by rectangletangle »

xyzzyz wrote: post #73
rectangletangle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty common way for people to modify their names into a more practical form (I'm sure typing all that out is a pain). This is why you shouldn't ever assume properties of people's names, and should instead write UIs which confirm the name's properties with the user. Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB. NAME_LENGTH_CHARS, NAME_TEXT 91 'Mary Abigail KawenaʻUlaokalaniahiʻIakaikapoli…

Did you really just pull out random people names from your database and posted them online?

No these are all names of public figures pulled from Wikipedia, not names submitted by individuals, because of the obvious privacy violations. Each name has a corresponding Wikipedia article. I should have clarified initially though.

For instance:

  #1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kawena_Pukui
  #2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirani_Bandaranayake
  #3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alick_Aluwihare

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#78

Post by rsync »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #71
tokai wrote: post #41

I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo-internet is hell if you're from Asia.

I pretty much never input my name as it appears on my credit card. I have yet to have anyone (in person or online) complain about this, despite instructions saying to do so. (Specifically, my middle initial appears on my credit card, but I never fill it in when buying stuff online.)

"I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card"

This is only true with AMEX as they are the only major processor that checks the inputed name.

Visa and Mastercard do not check on the name at all - you can use any strings you like.

All of the online shopping and ordering I do (including Amazon, etc.) is with a made up First/Last. I have done this for almost 15 years with various Visa cards with no problems.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#79

Post by maxerickson »

davidw wrote: post #60
driverdan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because jokes are generally frowned upon.

Unoriginal or not funny ones; if they're unique and not some lame meme, they'll often get upvoted

The mods discourage humor because it tends to metastasize into tedious offtopic threads, which I guess is true enough.

Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.

Re: Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts'

#80

Post by Alex3917 »

rectangletangle wrote: post #55
preinheimer wrote: post #2

I'm pretty sure Caterina Fake[1] has talked about problems with signing up for everything from Facebook to buying plane tickets. These names need to be on those "things programmers believe about names that are false" lists closer to the top[2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake [2] - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names, specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field. Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious, because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My research did conclude that nearly all names are belo…

> treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field

The problem is that you still need to deal with unicode attacks, sql attacks, js attacks, css attacks, regex attacks, etc. There's nothing 'arbitrary' about sanitizing any user-inputted text field, and it's especially difficult to do so a culturally sensitive way.

It's a good problem you're solving though. It's a great job interview question to have people write some code and talk through, since to get someone's first name given their full name it takes maybe 20 minutes to write something that works 99% of the time, but then to write something that works 99.99% of the time it takes maybe 20 years.

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