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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

#141

Post by FridgeSeal »

kiwijamo wrote: post #72
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…

> Even things like the automated customs gates work fine.

I would like to think (Perhaps naively?) that these systems key off your passport number/ID (which is by construction, not subject to these problems) to deliberately side-step issues like this.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#142

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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?

I'd guess that something somewhere has got its sanitization wrong. They tested it against

    Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--
And see that it now provides

    'Robert DROP TABLE Students'
Problem solved! And then later somebody else comes along, ignorant of the sanitization step, and provides

    NULL
But the code strips special characters and adds quotes, so they've actually inserted:

    'NULL'

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#143

Post by kccqzy »

dan_quixote wrote: post #131
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.

My wife is Korean. The anglicized version of Korean given names always has a space in it. This makes for a few kinds of broken naming schemes - like removing the space or the second half of the given name becomes the middle name, or the second half of the given name just truncated entirely.

In Singapore given names can have more than one space and may not be a substring of the full name. The first prime minister has the full name "Harry Lee Kuan Yew" where Lee is his family name and "Harry Kuan Yew" is his given name. (Later in life he dropped "Harry" from his name.)

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#144

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

beeflet wrote: post #137
y33t wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder how many times you could come to court with bogus cases until they patch the software

I mean, this is the kind of petty I want to be when I retire...

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#145

Post by jachee »

genewitch wrote: post #120
easton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or NMI for nor middle initial, I think I've heard of stuff like NA, too...

And more and more:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#146

Post by wolfi1 »

beeflet wrote: post #137
y33t wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder how many times you could come to court with bogus cases until they patch the software

definitely for eternity

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#147

Post by CivBase »

WantonQuantum wrote: post #92
CivBase wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bash, C strings, URL query strings, and CSVs off the top of my head.

C definitely does not represent null as a string.

No, but it also doesn't let you store null in a string variable.

Well... it does, but that would just be an empty string.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#148

Post by thayne »

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.

I'm doubtful changing his plate would actually fix it. There's a decent chance that either his contact info would still be associated with null, or every record that currently has null would be updated to his new plate, which would probably make it even more of a pain to fight in court.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#149

Post by bwilliams18 »

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…

Postgres has a module called unaccent[0] that removes diacritics for filtering. I expect your browser is doing something similar. While not appropriate when looking for exact matches, when doing user-input based searches, this should probably be the norm, as the user may be unaware of the accents or how to input them correctly on their keyboards.

Dove deep on this years ago when implementing a filter for wines and wine regions.

[0][https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html]

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#150

Post by WalterBright »

Back at Caltech in the 1970s, every student got a free account on the PDP10. The account username consisted of 3 letters, and Caltech would assign them by the first letter of their first name, middle name, and last name.

Enter Tim Rentsh. He didn't have a middle name, so Caltech asked what letter would he prefer, so he said X.

TXR

That became his nickname, and stuck so hard he legally changed his name to Tim X Rentsh.

Eat your heart out, Elon! :-)

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