111–120 of 310 posts
My last name is a popular Irish name with an apostrophe in it. I have tons of issues with my name in forms. I'm basically a walking SQL injection detector. But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.
I have two middle names, and it amazes me how many digital systems cannot handle this in 2025. I have yet to find a bank that supports spaces in your middle name, and multiple airlines have decided to just concatenate my middle names together.
It gets me hassled every time a cop looks at it.
This is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it,…
> A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles. I'm not the biggest expert on databases, although I've worked with them a bit, but how does this occur in the first place? Usually, associations are done with primary/foreign keys. What database would allow null in that case?
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> 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…
What is the definition of an "international language" that makes Esperanto the most widely spoken one? Isn't Arabic an international language, for instance?
That still is going to be a quite small number against English, Spanish, French &c. in terms of being a lingua franca.
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> A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses I once heard a story (possibly apocryphal) about a place which used a similar “first initial and truncated surname” convention for usernames, except theirs was first three letters of surname, followed by first initial, followed by some digits. And it all worked great until they hired a guy named…
I knew a Steve Penington who broke a user id scheme.
This is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it,…
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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 Sm…
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.)
Also not all database systems would think the non-circumflex version is equivalent to the circumflex version. Does anyone have thoughts or ideas about how or why they should be treated equivalently?
I also recognize this can get kind of political. There was a push in California recently to let people have accented letters in their name. Apparently it is legally not allowed. And yet some people claim their California birth certificate does contain accented letters.
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I mean.. there are tons of people without last names in the world. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
And first names, which causes some government agencies to put FNU in that field for "first name unknown". My mom told me about a time they had someone with that situation at work, and people would call the person FNU until they were corrected.