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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

#161

Post by rabiescow »

maxchristman wrote: post #112

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.

How you dont consider such scenarios setting up your database is mind boggling to me. I do this for a living, albeit, marketing databases, but how you don't realize that people from all over the world live here too and you have to account for everyone is just astonishing to me...

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#162

Post by irrational »

y33t wrote: post #117
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #70

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,…

IIRC the court told him the only way that he'd be able to stop getting other people's tickets in the mail would be to get a new plate. Otherwise he'd have to keep coming back to court to get them thrown out.

You would think that at a certain point he would never have to pay a personal traffic citation again since they would probably believe him that it wasn't him.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#163

Post by kmoser »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #34

I 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)”

That discriminates against people whose names cannot be written in Unicode. You need to include the ability to accept various image formats, as well as audio for names that don't have a written form.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#164

Post by conradev »

Reminds me of the time I figured out how to put an emoji into my name at work

I eventually got an email from an engineer asking if I could remove it. They apparently had been working for a few days to try to add unicode support to their internal database and it wasn't going so well.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#165

Post by mrunkel »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #19
robertlagrant wrote: post #3

Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?

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.

I can confirm that PHP doesn't have this problem.

if ("null" == null) { echo "true"; } else { echo "false"; }

prints "false"

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#168

Post by kome »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #75
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?

that would be so nice

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#169

Post by kmoser »

Detrytus wrote: post #124
fph wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your full name is John Charles Paul Jacob Smith, then by definition the middle name is "Paul" right?

So with even number of names there would be no middle name at all? :)

Mr. T once joked that his first name was "Mr", his middle name was the period, and his last name was "T": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#170

Post by Marsymars »

layman51 wrote: post #119
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.)

When I do a Ctrl+F search for “Gonatano” one of the search results is the actual name as typed with the circumflex. I think that is kind of a handy feature of the browser I’m using but at the same time it is sort of weird since it technically is not the same name without the circumflex, right? Also not all database systems would think the non-circumflex version is equivalent to the circumflex version. Does anyone hav…

This is absolutely the desired default behaviour for ctrl+F in a browser. e.g. I frequently read French, and don't normally want to have to put in accents in my search term when I'm searching text for a word containing an accent.

Firefox has a "Match Diacritics" checkbox right next to the "Match Case" box when you ctrl+F so you can configure as desired.

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