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

The government ate my name

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 212 posts

Re: The government ate my name

#191

Post by Rendello »

c0balt wrote: post #2

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII. The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names. http://archive.today/5h4v2

I saw online that people moving to Japan can sometimes take months to get a bank account because the systems aren't there designed to handle middle names. If you want to maximize your child's ability to move around, I guess go with an ASCII first name-last name, which works almost everywhere. Except Iceland!

Re: The government ate my name

#192

Post by bombcar »

tliltocatl wrote: post #168
bombcar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also something uniquely modern that we consider a person to have “one true and real name” - something completely unheard of until quite recently.

> one true and real name Egyptian mythology would like a word with you. Specially the part where Isis created a snake to bite Ra so that she could learn his true name. But yea, adapting names to foreign languages was a normal thing until recently.

Fair enough, the societies and cultures that had one true real name were very adamant about letting no one know it, ever

Re: The government ate my name

#193

Post by bombcar »

noduerme wrote: post #70
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is John Juan when he's in Mexico? For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His name was probably originally יֵשׁוּעַ, and should therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek linguistic conventions as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and from there transliterated into Jesus.

So is Joshua Jesus when he's in Mexico?

Hey, Zeus!

Re: The government ate my name

#194

Post by aftbit »

cortesoft wrote: post #119
aftbit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard that others have had problems with picking up children from school and with visiting their partners in the hospital. The one and only time my wife has had an issue was at a car rental company (at SFO of all places), where they insisted that she couldn't be a co-driver because we must not be married, and only married couples or employees could be co-drivers (without an additional fee). I was eventually ab…

That’s crazy with the car rental, I wonder if that was just a rogue employee. As for picking up kids, every place I take my kids to (school, camps, daycare, etc) require you to specifically list who is allowed to pick up their kid, no matter what their last name is. Even if you have the same last name, they aren’t going to hand the kid over unless you are on the list. It would be crazy to let anyone pick up any kid w…

The employee was a young female, which made it even a bit more ironic IMO. I don't know exactly why she believed their policy was that my wife had to have the same last name as me, but she was very apologetic when the manager corrected her.

Re: The government ate my name

#195

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #146

The American presumption of having a single middle initial has always seemed weird to me. In NL, you can have as many names as you want, and some have a lot. Others have just a first and last name. I happen to have that single middle initial, but my wife and kids have two. Also, my wife's first name is not actually any of her legal names. Same with my dad and his brother and sister. "Calling name" is a common field o…

[deleted]

Re: The government ate my name

#196

Post by lIl-IIIl »

int_19h wrote: post #106
nradov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a related issue, some Slavic language countries require foreign documents to be transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet, which doesn't contain exact equivalents for certain English alphabet letters. They usually end up using the closest phonetic equivalent but this often causes bureaucratic hassles.

This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine. (Th…

Interesting, I thought Russian did that for the same reasons as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki system does, which also uses "si" instead of "shi" for シ.

Re: The government ate my name

#197

Post by int_19h »

lIl-IIIl wrote: post #196
int_19h wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine. (Th…

Interesting, I thought Russian did that for the same reasons as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki system does, which also uses "si" instead of "shi" for シ.

AFAIK Nihon-shiki is designed to reflect the Japanese kanas and their traditional regular arrangement as close as possible - note that it also uses e.g. "tu" for ツ.

OTOH Polivanov seemingly tried to reflect actual pronunciation, thus ツ is "цу" (tsu), ふ is "фу" (fu), を is "о", は is "ва" (va) when it's a particle, the syllabic nasal is "m" in environments where it is so pronounced etc.

The only real mystery about Polivanov system from this perspective is why ち is "ти" (ti) and not "чи" (chi).

Re: The government ate my name

#198

Post by db48x »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #44
db48x wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can only use what shows up on the keyboard. Internally the software is a vast mix of systems that in practice can probably handle unicode just fine by now. It's just that the people can't type any of those characters.

Option plus u on US English keyboard on macOS gives you the umlaut, and then hit u again and you have ü. But I wouldn’t bother memorising that and every other possible way that the other person has to press the keys depending on their keyboard layout and operating system. I’d just tell people to put u instead.

You can’t expect a bureaucrat to know about that kind of thing! If it’s not printed on a key right in front of their nose then no government employee is going to be able to type it in.

But that’s not really the point. No matter how many keyboard shortcuts the clerk at the DMV memorizes there is always going to be some text that they just cannot reproduce accurately. Whether it’s an accented character from the exotic land of Spain or some real Zalgo, something is going to get lost. No individual human can correctly deal with all possible textual forms.

Re: The government ate my name

#199

Post by geek_lean »

Nio1024 wrote: post #112

Interesting read — and honestly, this isn’t unique to the U.S. or Mexico. Bureaucratic inefficiency and siloed systems seem to be universal in government operations. What’s missing isn’t just “digitization,” but true digital transformation — interoperable systems, shared data standards, and accountability built into the process.With AI advancing so fast, I wonder if we’ll see tools or frameworks that can actually hel…

The real insight here isn't about interoperability—it's that we've been treating identity as a data integrity problem when it's actually a semantic mapping problem. Giovanni's "F" isn't a bug, it's a feature of systems designed around Anglo naming conventions trying to force-fit multicultural reality into rigid schemas.

Even perfect APIs won't solve this. Names carry cultural context that gets lost in translation between bureaucratic systems. We need identity architectures that embrace semantic ambiguity rather than eliminate it.

What would a name system look like if it was designed for a multicultural world from the ground up?

Re: The government ate my name

#200

Post by belgiandudette »

ricudis wrote: post #158
cortesoft wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We travelled internationally as a family when I was a kid. No one ever mentioned our names being different. Again, a huge percentage of the population has divorced parents, plus all the kids born out of wedlock. That is like half the population that already don’t have the same last name as at least one of their parents. Everyone who deals with the population is going to encounter this situation every day. They aren’t…

Did you ever travel internationally along with only one of your parents? I know of many cases around the world where authorities will definitely cause you some trouble if you try to do that, even more if somehow "expected" naming conventions don't match up. At least that's how it's been in the last 2 decades.

I travel multiple times a year internationally with my toddler. She has a different last name than me. No issues whatsoever. Yes, i bring a birth cert and a letter from her mother that we can travel, but no one has ever asked for these.
Post reply on HN