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

I couldn't debug the code because of my name

mikolaj-kaminski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 300 posts

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#161

Post by kingcharles »

dymk wrote: post #119
nullspace wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best course of action would be to change my name As someone who has been told this, for other reasons, I empathize. My reaction has always been - "Your system can't even handle names, you need to fix it". Edit: I wish there was a library / service that helped you handle all sorts of edge cases in names, so that you don' t have to worry about it. Just use a user-id, and set / get a name from a lib / service that…

Has that reaction ever resulted in the other party fixing their system in a timely manner?

In my experience, never. You are considered the bug, not their system.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#162

Post by qwerty456127 »

ludamad wrote: post #20
xwdv wrote: post #6

What’s wrong with just writing it as Mikolaj? It’s not like it’s a kanji or something.

For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, German, almost all latin-based Slavic alphabets and pretty much everywhere. I bet almost every Mikołaj drops the slash happily (some probably even change the whole name to Nicholas which is the English counterpart) if they get a passport of an anglophone country.

Nevertheless I find it absurd it's 2021 and they still have to. It's almost 30 years since the introduction of Unicode in Windows NT and NTFS, probably also close to that in Java. Pretty much every serious programming language or database supports Unicode by default today.

I believe it's a bug in some app in the toolchain as Windows file system API is perfectly capable of handling non-ASCII symbols. I always cared to avoid using non-ASCII symbols and spaces in my paths (incl. always installing almost everything to a custom directory outside "Program Files") but c'mon, how many decades do we need to develop handling these reliably?

I would also consider Windows' inability to optionally change the actual home directory name and distinguish between the user's full (display) name and their "username" (which are 2 distinct properties in Linux) "feature-bugs".

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#163

Post by qwerty456127 »

garaetjjte wrote: post #61
MadeThisToReply wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".

Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...

Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#164

Post by dylan604 »

kingcharles wrote: post #161
dymk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has that reaction ever resulted in the other party fixing their system in a timely manner?

In my experience, never. You are considered the bug, not their system.

I'd consider it more of an edgecase than a bug.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#165

Post by ctdonath »

tetha wrote: post #79
m_kos wrote: post #65

Isn't it bizarre that we have self-driving cars, the ISS, and phones with 50 megapixel cameras but still struggle with character encoding?

Character encoding is in a special class of problems. Like time handling. If you pick up a halfway non-ancient framework in a somewhat common language with a somewhat non-terrible persistence like postgres, you just don't have problems. Just don't care, and it just works. But it's super easy to derail that fragile correctness with something like MySQLs utf8-ish handling, or some OS's path handling, or 'efficiency', o…

That it's a special class of problems doesn't mean it shouldn't be solved by now. Time handling should be solved too; amazing that an iOS app can't get current correct GMT.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#166

Post by qwerty456127 »

greenshackle2 wrote: post #107
garaetjjte wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...

I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse: Łódź

This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet.

Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#167

Post by stzsch »

aidenn0 wrote: post #152
munk-a wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintained a system where we had unbounded password length... but only respected the first six characters of the password. (we did fix that).

Unix passwords worked that way for 8 characters for many years due to the crypt algorithm used.

IIRC VNC passwords are still like this.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#168

Post by midev »

gumby wrote: post #91
umvi wrote: post #9

Using non-ascii characters in file paths, toolchain config files, and other non-display contexts is just asking for trouble, even if it is your name...

This is blaming the victim

No it's not. It's not even remotely victim blaming. At no point did anyone even remotely hint it was their fault.

People have taken this to a ridiculous level. Giving practical advice about how to avoid problems is not blaming the victim. Telling my child to look both ways before crossing the street is not blaming him if he gets hit. It's not wanting to see him get hurt when the person actually at fault fucks up. Telling someone to avoid non-ASCII characters because a program can't handle it is not blaming them....

Your comment was unhelpful. Great! Not their fault! What now? It's also part of a larger trend that will lead to people being hurt.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#169

Post by zarzavat »

dylan604 wrote: post #164
kingcharles wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, never. You are considered the bug, not their system.

I'd consider it more of an edgecase than a bug.

Using only ascii letters is the edge case. Most of the world either uses Latin with diacritics or a different writing system.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#170

Post by tyteen4a03 »

Fun fact: If you have the exclamation mark (!) in your Windows username, Java will think it's the jar separator and `getResourceAsStream` will refuse to work. This broke many people's Minecraft installation over the years.

The bug in question [0] was reported in 2001 and remains unsolved 20 years later.

[0] https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4523159

Post reply on HN