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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'

#101

Post by philwelch »

protomyth wrote: post #70
sethev wrote: post #4

Obligatory link to Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I wish that was a list like that could be added to because I would add: 41. Full adjectives and adverbs can appear in names. Some folks didn't get fancy and add prefixes and suffixes like the Europeans. You might even encounter a family name that is a whole phrase.

Puritan names actually followed this pattern, with names like “If-Christ-had- not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst- been-damned”.

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

#103

Post by spicymaki »

I must admit this article brought forth my inner 5 year old. This reminds me of James Mickens’ USENIX keynote about the hazards of security and AI. We are deploying poorly reasoned and poorly tested technologies that are harming individuals. When will we take a step back and think about the consequences of the technology we are developing?

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

#104

Post by imh »

userbinator wrote: post #67
crooked-v wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.historyrundown.com/top-5-people-with-the-longest-... There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters, and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words are rare.

#2 and #3 on that list were clearly done as publicity stunts/"testing the limits" Bobby Tables-style than anything occurring naturally.

What does "naturally" even mean here? Everyone these days seems to be giving their kids unique names. Some people name their kid Obi-wan Kenobi. That's not really any different than these people, is it?

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

#105

Post by imh »

School-Cotton wrote: post #99
rectangletangle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even arbitrary text doesn't cut it -- not all names can be represented in Unicode.

Sounds interesting. Any examples?

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

#106

Post by jimbobimbo »

I used to work on the project, where we had a filter like this on people's names, to prevent abuse.

We quickly learned that showing message like "Name cannot contain profanity" is a bad idea, because we'd show this due to names that happen to be "questionable in some contexts". People get pissed off real quick, if you tell them they have "profanity" in their name.

We changed it to something like "you're using a word we don't allow" (avoiding mentioning of "profanity" altogether), PLUS, we added a way for users to quickly contact support, if they're in this pickle.

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

#107

Post by jacobush »

maxerickson wrote: post #79
davidw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the only way to be sure!

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

#109

Post by Alex3917 »

setr wrote: post #100
rectangletangle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with this strategy is it isn't idiomatic to refer to someone by their full name in many contexts. However given its simplicity, and cultural neutrality, a single full name field should be the default choice IMO.

Full name: Nickname: and then refer to them by their nickname, which can be whatever they like to be called, in whatever land they come from and no programmer has to care about human naming conventions ever again

Every extra field on your signup form massively reduces conversion. Otherwise everyone would just do this.

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

#110

Post by ThrustVectoring »

peterwwillis wrote: post #20

As George Carlin pointed out[1], it's the context of the use of language that determines whether it's good or bad. So machine learning just sucks at determining context. Trying to get people to stop being offended by the utterance of arbitrary sounds probably will never happen, but at least we can make computers less stupid. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8 (trigger warning: comedy)

Context can change, which can make things super awkward. Example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/9a0wuc/my_name_is_...

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