I couldn't debug the code because of my name • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

10000truths wrote: post #150

mjevans wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The right thing" for filesystem entries is transparently copy, do not evaluate. A file path is a mem-copied, length value sized block of identifier you don't ever mangle. If you must mangle it, touch only the necessary areas as directed. (E.G. join with os.pathsep and do not normalize anything). Want to offer Unicode validation? Sure having that as an OPTION is fine. Forcing it means I can't rely on that tool to han…

One thing I've noticed is that ext, xfs, btrfs and zfs all explicitly store a length field alongside the filename. There's nothing inherent in the disk layout of these filesystems preventing them from supporting filenames with embedded slash and nul characters - those limitations are imposed by the kernel's VFS implementation. It would be nice to have a special version of open, exec etc. where one could specify a fil…

ODBC (ISO 9075-3) got it right 30 years ago: all strings are accompanied by the length argument, which also accepts the sentinel value NTS, when you mean a null-terminated string.

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

#252

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

vertis wrote: post #216

SergeAx wrote: post #201

When I first installed Windows 7 like ten years ago, I entered my Russian name in Cyrillic. When I saw that the system created a directory with exactly that name under `C:\Users\` I immediately scanned the internet for a way to rename it and done just that. I don't want to know how much mess like that in a story I thus had successfully escaped. NB: the method is still the same, it's a second (not accepted) answer her…

This is sad though. You shouldn't have to change who you are for a computer program.

Is "vertis" who you are? There's more to a human, than a name.

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

#253

Post by gjvnq » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 7:55 AM UTC

10000truths wrote: post #150

mjevans wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The right thing" for filesystem entries is transparently copy, do not evaluate. A file path is a mem-copied, length value sized block of identifier you don't ever mangle. If you must mangle it, touch only the necessary areas as directed. (E.G. join with os.pathsep and do not normalize anything). Want to offer Unicode validation? Sure having that as an OPTION is fine. Forcing it means I can't rely on that tool to han…

One thing I've noticed is that ext, xfs, btrfs and zfs all explicitly store a length field alongside the filename. There's nothing inherent in the disk layout of these filesystems preventing them from supporting filenames with embedded slash and nul characters - those limitations are imposed by the kernel's VFS implementation. It would be nice to have a special version of open, exec etc. where one could specify a fil…

I once thought about using JSON arrays for filepaths so all possible strings would be valid filenames.

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

#254

Post by sushsjsuauahab » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

web007 wrote: post #219

lmm wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not good enough, thanks to Han unification - if you do that you'll mangle Japanese names.

TIL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la... It looks like there's no general solution possible with Han unification. If you have any two of ZH and JA and KO and VI in a page, you will fail to display one of them correctly for certain characters unless (as in that wiki page) you add a LANG attribute for each element they are contained within. Personally, I would use the browser's language or u…

I pray that a more complicated solution is not needed, but when I was living abroad I would always encounter issues with sites where they thought "since the IP is from x, or since the browser is requesting lang y, then we should think that this American passport holder is a Spanish citizen and thus we can make assumptions about him."

The ultimate source of this issue is that we are taking names and official IDs too seriously, but I doubt that problem will go away for "serious business". Funnily enough though, it already has for things like restaurant table reservations where all info provided is quite literally just a string for a human to do something with. No need to validate if the user's phone country code matches the country in which they are reserving a table...

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

#255

Post by sushsjsuauahab » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #223

kingcharles wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here's a relevant recent EU court case of a person arguing with their bank that their name should be represented properly including the accented 'é', as the GDPR asserts a right to have mistakes of personal data corrected. The bank argued that it's impossible due to a legacy system using EBCDIC encoding and would be expensive to change. The appeals court affirmed that the customer has the right to get mistakes in the…

This is an insanely nightmarish precedent. We need to take computer systems less seriously. In a human-interface world, these issues are avoided thanks to simple human intuition.

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

#256

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #223

kingcharles wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here's a relevant recent EU court case of a person arguing with their bank that their name should be represented properly including the accented 'é', as the GDPR asserts a right to have mistakes of personal data corrected. The bank argued that it's impossible due to a legacy system using EBCDIC encoding and would be expensive to change. The appeals court affirmed that the customer has the right to get mistakes in the…

I once did it, encoded UTF-8 text in a legacy text because the system interface didn't support unicode, and decoded on the other end. Used • prefix as a marker of encoded string... now that I think about it, it could be just old good BOM. MIME standard also has extensive experience in packing arbitrary data in 7-bit clean text.

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

#257

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:21 AM UTC

tyteen4a03 wrote: post #170

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

Simply install the game into %ProgramData%

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

#258

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

pezezin wrote: post #186

perl4ever wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Polish relative of mine used to just gave an arbitrary substitute name (e.g. "Dave Smith") for restaurant reservations, because even if they could write his last name, they wouldn't be able to pronounce it. My sibling has a name that has an accent, and just enters it with the plain letter most of the time. The name was once rare and "ethnic", but became popular a generation later so people know how to pronounce it…

I understand your troubles, I'm from Spain so I have two family names and my given name has an accent. Now that I'm living in Japan, it's an endless source of fun. Regarding Chinese names and uncommon characters, Japan has the same problem. It's specially problematic for place names, with some kanji used to write the name of a single place in the whole country! I used to write in a place with such an obscure kanji th…

Railroad signs transcribe place names in hiragana. I imagine a place name should be recognizable in hiragana form.

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

#259

Post by BiteCode_dev » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:49 AM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #120

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's true, most toolchains are stuck in the past, and don't deal with non-ascii characters or even spaces very well. In fact, I just learned that spaces in .deskop files values could cause trouble after a long debugging. But it's a shame. In Europe, we do have a lot of non-ascii characters everywhere. Ubuntu puts a "Vidéo" and a "Téléchargements" directory in my $HOME because I'm french. If I were to u…

"The right thing" for filesystem entries is transparently copy, do not evaluate. A file path is a mem-copied, length value sized block of identifier you don't ever mangle. If you must mangle it, touch only the necessary areas as directed. (E.G. join with os.pathsep and do not normalize anything). Want to offer Unicode validation? Sure having that as an OPTION is fine. Forcing it means I can't rely on that tool to han…

That the beauty of it with python:

- if you want to treat paths like unicode strings, you can. Which is great for simple scripts where you don't want to deal with complexity. And 99% of the time, it's enough with modern OSes.

- if you want to threat path as bags of raw bytes, you can. Which is necessary to transparently copy and do not evaluate, as you said, for covering edge cases.

- if you need to actually deal with those as strings but don't want to loose data for edge cases, so a mix of the 2 above, you can use surrogate escapes

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

#260

Post by GoblinSlayer » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:51 AM UTC

web007 wrote: post #172

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…

I believe that library / service is called UTF-8. These days everything should be stored as bare UTF-8 data (or utf8mb4 if you're MySQL) and presented without anything else. Don't parse it, don't slice-and-dice it, don't prepend or append titles or honorifics or suffixes, don't make assumptions about length or content beyond "must be > 0 as a whole" and DEFINITELY don't use it as an identifier. Treat it as a non-uniq…

American honorifics get me every time. What's the point in teaching a computer to use honorifics? It's a heap of semiconductors that stirs a heap of bits. And on top of that you teach it yourself.