Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 264 posts

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#31

Post by microcolonel »

m4lvin wrote: post #26
ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A�" for anyone called "Alice Ørland" or similar. It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.

Specifically for that example, Zoom is written and maintained in China, so I would expect the developers made special code for segmenting chinese names but not non-English latin ones.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#32

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

etripe wrote: post #20
_-___________-_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually translated into English by De Zwart himself. I believe that proper capitalisation of Dutch names with 'de' is to keep the 'd' lowercase if stating the full name (Hans de Zwart), but to capitalise the 'd' if stating just the last name (De Zwart), which the article seems to do consistently (except when quoting Facebook's mangling of the name).

In this context, Dutch refers to the country The Netherlands, not the language. Based on my non-linguist opinion, I would say you're correct. Dutch people tend to not capitalise their Ds in surnames. When only mentioning the surname, it is treated as a mini-sentence, hence the capitalisaiton. In northern Belgium (AKA Flanders), Dutch speakers tend to capitalise their Ds in surnames, so you would see "De Zwart" regard…

In Spain we don't have so many surnames prefixed with particles, but we do have some (e.g. "Del Río") and the capitalization also works as you describe for Dutch.

It makes sense: when you say Juan del Río it's obvious that it's a surname, but if you just said "del Río" without context, the "del" could be confused with the common word.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#34

Post by rusticpenn »

ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

I got this problem with several payment processors as the allowed name and name on my credit/debit cards never match. After a few years, I changed(modified) my name.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#35

Post by rusticpenn »

fantod wrote: post #28
ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.

Why do you need a library. Name is an open input field. As long as the inputs are sanitized, you should just accept whatever is typed there.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#36

Post by enriquto »

fantod wrote: post #28
ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.

Do you really need a library for that? Why can't you leave the name as it was entered by the user, without making further assumptions?

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#37

Post by scott31 »

ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

People already started having emojis in their name, having hyphen is just a minor annoyance, and I'm willing to bet it being dropped does not change anything for you

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#38

Post by _-___________-_ »

capableweb wrote: post #30
m4lvin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A�" for anyone called "Alice Ørland" or similar. It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.

Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North American company with most (if not all) of it's product/engineering development happening in China. Just reading public information, it seems they have no development teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only natural that some character sets ends up better supported than others.

It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that nothing else needs more than one byte.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#39

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

louwrentius wrote: post #33

I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.

And where do you work?

I can probably (almost certainly) find serious ethical lapses in your company, if it's large and/or has been around for a long time.

Shaming people based on their perceived associations is just wrong, no matter what those associations.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#40

Post by input_sh »

ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

One example I remember from high school is a person whose first name is Admin. Granted, it's an uncommon name, but he's unable to use his real name in many, many online services (Facebook being one of them of course).
Post reply on HN