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

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

#281

Post by account42 » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #235

Sometimes even "regular" ASCII surnames cause problems. When written in the Latin alphabet, my surname is one letter. I've had an amazing amount of problems with this not just due to technical limitations (like various forms marking the entry as invalid), but--much more aggravatingly--human limitations. One particularly infuriating anecdote: at a past job many years ago, the email structure was lastname@company.com.…

> One particularly infuriating anecdote: at a past job many years ago, the email structure was lastname@company.com. I dutifully sent the IT person in charge of creating emails my desired email. The IT person wrote back an amazingly condescending email that as per the policy, emails had to be last names, not individual letters. I then had to go find a bunch of random websites which explained single-letter names and forwarded them to the IT person. They then obliged, but did not apologize for insulting me. That is not right that I had to put up with that.

Except single letter last names are less common than people not following policy and/or abbriviating the name. It could simply be an honest mistake and the email is just their standard response since they have other things to get to. Did you try simply pointing out that that the letter was in fact your last name instead of getting passive-agressive?

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

#282

Post by Svoka » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

Did you know that Android still won't build on Windows if you have Cyrillic letter in user name?

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

#283

Post by trinovantes » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #211

trinovantes wrote: post #180

In CS, most algorithms assume an ASCII character set. I wonder if there's any string-related algorithms that completely break (functionally or complexity wise) when given UTF-16 or UTF-8 character sets

> In CS, most algorithms assume an ASCII character set. They most certainly do not. E.g., a Turing machine assumes an alphabet Γ which is a set of some characters and is defined no further, as any exact definition is meaningless to the theory. (I.e., the algorithm is generic over any alphabet.) The alphabet need not even be text; e.g., for a Turing machine, the set of all octets suffices. Even for something like Leve…

I guess they won't break correctness but I do remember many algorithms (e.g. tries) assume you have constant random access to characters which AFAIK is not possible in UTF-8

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

#284

Post by 1-more » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #72

ainar-g wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially if those products are developed by a company from Russia, where Cyrillic is used. For me, a Russian myself, this situation is honestly ridiculous.

Do you write "if" statements in Cyrillic when you write in ?

There are a few computer languages that have non-english keywords though! And among them it looks like there was a version of Algol with Russian keywords, as well as a bunch of others in the list. Scanning it it would seem that Logo and BASIC get translated a lot, which makes sense for teaching young learners who haven't learned English yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

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

#285

Post by account42 » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

chris_overseas wrote: post #37

numpad0 wrote: post #17

Oh, it’s not a common knowledge that you should not UTF-8 in Windows username? That had been the case since 95 days. Only recently it had supposedly improved after Microsoft Account login become semi mandatory.

I don't think this bug is anything to do with Windows, rather it is due to the way the paths are handled in the IDE's codebase. Presumably the same problem exists when using these IDEs in conjunction with a path containing non-ascii characters in the Linux or macOS world.

> Presumably the same problem exists when using these IDEs in conjunction with a path containing non-ascii characters in the Linux or macOS world.

Why would you presume that when the problem seems to be that one tool uses the systems native 8-bit encoding while another tool expects UTF-8 - under sane systems these are the same.

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

#286

Post by retrac » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #220

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

I find the very idea of putting an exclamation mark on one's username and not expecting eventual problems to be quite curious.

! is actually used as a regular letter with a phonetic value to write quite a few languages in Africa, usually representing a click sound. It's even in the name of some of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_languages

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

#287

Post by mkotowski » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

ByteJockey wrote: post #215

gerdesj wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find this sort of stuff fascinating and also faintly frustrating but of course my mother tongue is (in)famous for being a bit loose at first sight. According to one of my employees (Polish) Ł sounds roughly like w as in win or water but not as in what. A quick read of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81 doesn't help too much. Does enforcing Ł instead of say w cause your written language to fail in some wa…

I think I just learned that some dialects/accents don't pronounce the w in water and the w in what the same way. What's the difference?

The «wh» in words like when, why, what can be pronounced as a voiceless labial–velar fricative (IPA sign: ʍ).

For more detailed explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9...

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

#288

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 4:58 PM 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…

It's not an ideal fix, but Unicode has had "variation selectors" for a few versions now which can force specific CJK variations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_%28Unicode...

Variation selectors are getting a good workout/testing technically in emoji at least (a lot of emoji are "just" "old" Unicode codepoints with a ZWJ and the variation selector known as the emoji variation selector to tell systems to always show it in "emoji styles"). I can't speak for how well it works in practice for CJK languages as I don't know them (more reason I appreciate emoji for letting me test compatibility with hard parts of UTF-8 in ways that I can read and most users want), but I do appreciate that there's at least the idea for/part of a fix in "recent" Unicode.

I'm also imagining it is not a fun thing to implement in practice, as Unicode at this point maintains a massive database just for it: https://www.unicode.org/ivd/

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

#289

Post by devrand » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

doubled112 wrote: post #81

devrand wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last name has an apostrophe in it which Apple apparently loves to embed directly into their JavaScript unescaped. For a long time neither I nor Apple could look up AppleCare status on my stuff as they were all linked to my Apple ID. The portal would thus require me to login, but then would just show a partially rendered page as my last name was causing an JS syntax error.

You'd think the apostrophe would be common enough they'd know it could happen, but no. I love to enter it and see what each vendor and website's backend does with it. The Staples Canada website, for example, returns it as ' (HTML escaped) A couple times I've logged in, it seems to escape a new character. I'm currently up to &amp;#39;

Haha yeah I'm fairly used to seeing HTML escaping in my name.

The weirdest case I've had with that is the Six Flags mobile app. To add a season pass you need to provide your card number and last name. For the life of me I couldn't get it to validate, but I saw they showed the HTML escaped version in their e-mails to me. Turns out I had to type out "'" into their input box for my last name as that's apparently what they put in their database.

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

#290

Post by jan_Inkepa » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #280

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been bitten on a few small releases by forgetting that C# localises number->string conversion by default (which makes sense. But if you forget, and you're writing floats to csv files and the decimal points become decimal commas....).

I disagree that having localization for number formatting based on a system setting by default makes sense. Formatted numbers are needed for both human and machine consumption and only one of those can deal with unexpected formatting.

Maybe the galaxy-brain design principle is: if you're designing an API, make sure that where possible bugs occur in an area where programmers care about fixing them (data I/O) rather than somewhere that they neglect (user interface localisation). Voila: better software!