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

People with names that break computers

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 288 posts

Re: People with names that break computers

#181

Post by darpa_escapee »

subway wrote: post #64

A few years ago I ordered a custom license plate 'NULL'. What should have been a 2-3 week process lasted 8 months, with the order being canceled multiple times, and at one point a blank plate being shipped to the county clerk's office. More recently I've gotten out of a parking ticket in a certain municipality when a frustrated meter maid told me they saw my plates were valid, but the handheld device used to issue ti…

Null and various other strings are banned for use in license plates in many states. Think plates that might confuse humans (0/O and 1/l in words, NA, NONE, NO PLATE/TAG etc etc) and make it difficult to accurately read/write out a plate.

Re: People with names that break computers

#182

Post by philovivero »

kstrauser wrote: post #149
joshstrange wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal Name = Name on your birth certificate, pure and simple. Something isn't so just because you say it is. I can say my SSN is 123-45-6789 but that doesn't make it so.

> Legal Name = Name on your birth certificate, pure and simple. As a counterexample, my wife's current name is not on her birth certificate. > Something isn't so just because you say it is. Indeed. So we find ourselves in a teachable moment: you are wrong, but in a way that many other well-meaning people have been. I presume you find this subject interesting, so consider checking out http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/…

Thanks for being so calm and informative on this subject.

It is funny to see people trying to tell you you're wrong, when it's evident this is a subject you'd naturally become quite expert at.

Re: People with names that break computers

#183

Post by solipsism »

imron wrote: post #151
formula1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is great, I want to checkout the author now! The demon seems less of an actual evil being and more as a person who gets excited about awesome stories, uses ying yang guide the vine of destiny. Maybe half expecting a smile only to see horror. I know this is now the best place for poetry, but this story was very fun to read

You want to check out the author? .... Isaac Asimov ... Yeah, you should probably do that.

I checked out a bibliography. Seems like lots of derivative stuff playing on the same old memes you see everywhere.

Re: People with names that break computers

#184

Post by twic »

thisone wrote: post #178
twic wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK forms which ask for a city and a county present the same problem for residents of London. US forms which ask for a city and a state present a similar problem for residents of New York. You're part of a select club!

Not sure I understand. The city of London is in the county of Greater London. New York City is in the state of New York. But Singapore is a city-state.

Do you really not understand, or are you being oblique?

In any case, there is no county of Greater London. Greater London is an 'administrative area' - have a read of the London Government Act 1963, which created it, and abolished the county of London which had existed before. That's why we have a Greater London Authority (and before that a Greater London Council), rather than the London County Council we had when London was a county. Of course, everyone treats it as a county because it would be maddening not to, but that's a bit like how everyone treats Washington DC as a state of the US (oh, we should add Washington DC to that list).

Legally, there is no 'London' which is a proper subset of Greater London (other than the City of London, which is a red herring in this case). So putting "London, London" is directly analogous to putting "Singapore, Singapore".

The New York case is different, but it still involves writing the name of your city twice. If anything, it's even sillier, because the whole state is named after one city.

EDIT: clarify about the GLA, GLC, and LCC (i hope)

Re: People with names that break computers

#185

Post by wila »

dirkdk wrote: post #66

I have had a decent number of forms that would not allow me to enter my last name because it contains a space: De Kok. Apparently over the centuries americans coming from Europe would drop spaces. For instance Vanderbilt is a Dutch name, that stems from the original Van der Bilt (means from the Bilt, which is a Dutch city) So now American programmers assume a space in a last name (or a dash for that matter) never hap…

Yeah I have a last name like the "Van Der Bilt" example and sometimes people refer to me as Mr. "Van".

Other times, like for booking an airplane ticket it is standard practice to drop the space. Can't book the tickets without that.

Re: People with names that break computers

#186

Post by jlgaddis »

ghaff wrote: post #37
isxek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names. I think it depends. Sometimes it's helpful to give them names that are just long enough to make their identities unique, so when they apply for police clearances, for example, they are not mistaken for similarly-named people with criminal records, or even nasty reputations.

I suspect the worst case is when you have a name that is neither common nor unique that you share with someone who is notorious in some manner. I used to know someone who lived in the same city and shared a name with someone who was in the news for some unsavory activity related to a local sports team. He literally had death threat voicemails left on his phone.

Several years ago, my then-current girlfriend and I spent a couple days a week at a casino about an hour and a half away.

One day, both my girlfriend and my mother started receiving weird messages from people, saying they hoped I would be okay, that they were "praying" for me (ugh), etc.

The mystery was solved later that day when I received a Google alert for my name and discovered a news article where someone with the same name had been at a different casino, won a large sum of money, and was later beaten and left for dead (fortunately, he survived and recovered).

Re: People with names that break computers

#188

Post by PhasmaFelis »

solipsism wrote: post #183
imron wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to check out the author? .... Isaac Asimov ... Yeah, you should probably do that.

I checked out a bibliography. Seems like lots of derivative stuff playing on the same old memes you see everywhere.

Most of those memes are memes because Asimov invented them.

You sound like I guy I once heard complain that The Lord of the Rings was just a collection of D&D cliches.

Re: People with names that break computers

#189

Post by twic »

joshstrange wrote: post #138
twic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad also goes by his middle name - he has a first name that is incredibly common in his nation of origin, so it's almost useless as a way of referring to him. You're the first person i've ever heard suggest that he's wrong to do that, and you are mistaken to do so.

I'm not saying he is wrong to do so but that he has to deal with the consequences of doing so. Your legal name is what is on your birth certificate/green card/etc not what you say it is. You can make it whatever you want it to be by legally changing your name but until you do so your legal name is your legal name no matter what you want to say it is.

His legal name is not in question. The point is that the names people go by - that is, their names, that being what names are - are not always the same as their legal names.

Re: People with names that break computers

#190

Post by sargas »

Edge cases like the ones mentioned on this article will keep happening more often with the increased access to the internet worldwide.

Either programs deal with these cases more intelligently or some family names will stop existing, virtually speaking.

I have lost count of how many different versions of my last name I have since I moved to the United States. My health insurance, car insurance, apartment contract, driver's license, passport (this one has the correct name) are all spelled differently because some systems here don't accept white spaces on last names, so they add dashes. They length constraint is a short number, so they concatenate my 3 last names into a humongous word. Etc.

I always find it funny, except when I need to, say, take an official certificate test and the name I put on the registration doesn't match to one on the IDs I bring, therefore I can't get admitted into the testing center.

Of course I learned how to work with the system by now.

Post reply on HN