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When your last name is Null, nothing works

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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#71

Post by detourdog »

DC-3 wrote: post #16

I 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…

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#72

Post by kiwijamo »

zenethian wrote: post #22

The 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.

Indeed. My passport correctly includes the hyphen in my surname. Air New Zealand doesn't support spaces or hyphens so my surname is written out as both words concatenated (i.e. Onetwo). Qantas doesn't support hyphens but does support spaces so my surname is written out as two words (i.e. One Two).

Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled a flight and ticketed me on Air New Zealand instead) traveling internationally work just fine. Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo').

Online/moible forms can be an issue tho. Spark, the biggest mobile phone carrier in New Zealand, doesn't support hyphens in account names, just to name one silly example.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#73

Post by Asooka »

gxonatano wrote: post #61

My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)

You also can't put in Cyrillic or CJK characters. It's a user name, not a human name, you should be fine just using the 26 ASCII letters for it. Basically anything that is a computer-centric string should be only ASCII and nothing else, because supporting all of human writing is a never-ending task.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#74

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #53
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a few condescending answers here. You will find this more common in weakly typed languages like PHP and VB and maaaaaybe JavaScript, where null == “null” will probably evaluate to true.

js doesn't have this particular problem, but it does have both `null` and `undefined`, which will have varying semantically different usages depending on local conventions. For example, some will prefer to use `null` to mean that a value is _intentionally_ missing (for example, the db explicitly returned a null value), while `undefined` does not have any such connotation. These exist for frontend engineers to navigat…

I kinda want to change my middle name to "undefined" now.

I wonder if I could legally define my middle name as starting with a lowercase letter.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#75

Post by Rebelgecko »

gxonatano wrote: post #61

My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)

Are you a native speaker of Esperanto?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#76

Post by bagpuss »

dang wrote: post #66

Related. Others? Names: Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922038 - Feb 2025 (35 comments) We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939162 - Oct 2024 (6 comments) We have an employee whose surname is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115623 - Dec 2022 (17 comments) How to pass…

there's also Adam Croot, who liked to register the handle "undefined" where possible

Bring me the head of Adam Croot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1501799

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#77

Post by kstrauser »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #24
zenethian wrote: post #22

The 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 can beat this. My wife's maiden name was in the form "Jane Angela Smith". When we got married, she changed it to "Jane Smith Jones", first name Jane, middle name Smith, last name Jones. Someone at the Social Security Administration entered it into their database as first name "Jane", no middle name, last name "Smith Jones".

Now, for fun, no one noticed this for about 25 years. Her Social Security card says "Jane Smith Jones". Her driver's license says "Jones, Jane Smith". Her US passport says "Jones, Jane Smith". But another part of the federal government says "Smith Jones, Jane". We only found this out when she tried to renew her driver's license recently and the clerk was like, "hey, this isn't matching up right...". A month later, the TSA clerk at the airport stopped her to ask why her passport didn't match her federal records.

So now we're paying $400 to legally change her name from "Jane Smith Jones" to "Jane Smith Jones". That's what the notice they make you pay to run in the newspaper says, anyway.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#78

Post by impossiblefork »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #24
zenethian wrote: post #22

The 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.

or people whose middle name is their first name.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#79

Post by cafard »

Almost 30 years ago, the nutritionist Gary Null published books, had a show on Pacifica and so on. His basic message, I think, was that we should eat a diet that was less heavy on meats and processed foods. This is probably not wrong, but I thought him a bad influence on the household menus. I did object to his Pacifica show--he or somebody he had on mentioned "the Twinkie defense" not as a farce but as a plausible judgment; and he had some AIDS quack on, whose advice could only have been dangerous to the HIV-positive.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#80

Post by [deleted] »

gxonatano wrote: post #64
noahjk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities. I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hop…

> as far as I can tell, not very widely used Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good. But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you as…

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