Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When your last name is Null, nothing works

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 310 posts

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#101

Post by dragonwriter »

sepositus wrote: post #97
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,…

> 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?

If there are multiple systems involved, one of them produces a null and the other takes that as a key to create a record, but somewhere in between it gets stringified, then the string null might be accepted by a system using string keys.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#102

Post by ipaddr »

sepositus wrote: post #97
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,…

> 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?

They all do. But these are seperate databases that get translated to text at some point and then converted to Null

CREATE TABLE orders ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, customer_id INT NULL, FOREIGN KEY (customer_id) REFERENCES customers(id) );

vs

CREATE TABLE orders ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, customer_id INT NOT NULL, FOREIGN KEY (customer_id) REFERENCES customers(id) );

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#103

Post by cvwright »

I had a relative named Null, who worked in tech in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Apparently it caused him so many issues that he finally gave up and changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from.

I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#104

Post by rco8786 »

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.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#105

Post by geoelectric »

cvwright wrote: post #103

I had a relative named Null, who worked in tech in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Apparently it caused him so many issues that he finally gave up and changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from. I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.

Especially if he wanted kids, since I don’t think Java would’ve supported propagation.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#106

Post by walthamstow »

fph wrote: post #89
gxonatano wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

For that matter, isn't English?

It's an official language in many countries, such as South Africa, India, and Ireland, each of which has other official languages.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#107

Post by dehrmann »

One place I worked, customers (usually merchants) sent product data through an API my team managed. I was working on a data validation project and ran across an item that was getting rejected. One of the fields customers can set is tags. The item was a t-shirt with a joke about null pointer exceptions, so someone set tags to include ["null", "pointer", "exception"]. Our parser coerced it to null, then returned an error because that array can't contain nulls.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#108

Post by swores »

femto wrote: post #87
Vilian wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory https://xkcd.com/327/

It gets to the point where you don't have to click the link. You just think "Oh, #327 again." Maybe xkcd needs its own url scheme, something like: xkcd://327 Edit: Written 8 years ago: https://github.com/biappi/XKCDUrlScheme

A lot of hassle to save two characters compared to a simple xkcd.com/327 :P

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#109

Post by kstrauser »

impossiblefork wrote: post #78
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.

or people whose middle name is their first name.

Hey, that's also relevant to me! I've checked my local laws, and where I live, your legal name is the one you consistently present yourself as. If you're Joe Frank Smith, and you go by Frank everywhere, that's your legal name.

I've gotten so tired of having this argument. Inevitably some clerk will insist on calling me by my first name, "you know, your legal name". No. My middle name is my legal name. It's what my mom, sisters, wife, friends, teachers, coworkers, doctors, and everyone else call me. My first name is an aka at best, except the only people who insist on using it are ones wrong about the law, so I'm not even really "known as" it.

I once closed a bank account 10 minutes after opening it because they insisted that my debit card be printed as "Joe Smith", not "Frank Smith". I told them I'd absolutely refuse to touch it because that's not my name. I find it interesting that it's mostly local orgs who are a pain in the neck about being wrong about this. You'd think a small local bank would know local law better than a huge multi-national, but the giant bank I opened a business account with was totally fine putting Frank Smith on my accounts. Go figure.

(Somewhat related: That's made me super sympathetic to trans people who want to be known as something other than what's written on their birth certificate. Yeah, I get it. It's nails on a chalkboard when someone calls me Joe, so if you don't want people calling you Tammy anymore, I'm on your side.)

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#110

Post by samplatt »

sepositus wrote: post #97
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,…

> 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?

There are so SO many databases out in the wild that were built by people with little regard for building them correctly - or they simply not programmers/DBA's in the first place, but their boss told them to just make it happen.
Post reply on HN