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When your last name is Null, nothing works
31–40 of 310 posts
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#32For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed,…
There must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?
I mean.. there are tons of people without last names in the world. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#33For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed,…
There must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?
The hospital staff filled out most of the birth certificate, but left the name field blank when they gave my grandmother the paperwork to take home. She either didn't notice or didn't care (both possibilities are realistic) that the name field was blank and submitted it anyway. The state accepted it.
My mother started filling out her own paperwork around elementary school because my grandmother created so many problems that school staff would simply give up.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#34I think we should all embrace a future where legal names are just straight up binary streams.
I can finally realize my true potential and be recognized as Mr. “:100 emoji:(Unicode zero-width joiner):fire emoji:(null character)(base64 encoding of a QR code that links to a website with a photo of my face),(vcard data, recursively referencing this last name somehow)”
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#35I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…
It's weird that none of the systems automatically fell back to disambiguating with a number or something similar if the 'proper' one already existed. I'm wondering if you were a year or two apart instead, would the system simply silently fail to create a new username for the younger sibling when they joined?
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#36I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…
At my school you were provisioned as . e.g. Joe Bloggs starting in 2000 is 00joeblo
Cue problems when two "Simon Smith" join in the same year. They were given 00simsmi and 00smisim I think.
I am pretty sure they spent 7 years at school forwarding each other email as various teachers assumed the default would work.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can make a good case to spend time sanitising requests to avoid catastrophic failure, but the "null" problem is one that quickly becomes a lot of work and risk to fix after the fact, for no obvious benefit except what's seen as the pedantry of some nerd, so it gets ranked all the way at the back of the list... until someone named Null comes along, and probably still even then.
I disagree. If your system is failing to correctly type check strings during SQL interpolation, you should probably kill it with fire.
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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#38[deleted]
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#39The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.
Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.
I’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#40I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…
It's weird that none of the systems automatically fell back to disambiguating with a number or something similar if the 'proper' one already existed. I'm wondering if you were a year or two apart instead, would the system simply silently fail to create a new username for the younger sibling when they joined?
If they were a year or two apart the DOB would have disambiguated it.