21–30 of 44 posts
Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem? What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?
Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem? What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?
I hope you are not downvoted. In economics, people talk about the problem of 'sorting and labeling' and how that is an unconscious reaction (which does unfortunately lead to bias) but it helps immensely in the overall productivity of an entire system. When people expect you to design special systems which increases the overall entropy, I wonder if they realize that you too incur a cost for creating that system. I say…
I have a friend who's a refugee from Afghanistan. Apparently they don't use surnames there (or at least his tribe doesn't). When he applied for a visa my city council shifted his first name to his last name and he had to come up with a first name on the spot. His name is officially Peter Abdullah now.
Some of our software didn't like that, so we checked her passport, and sure enough, her full name was merely her first name.
Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem? What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?
In the world the number of people whose names do not consist of ASCII characters only wastly outnumber those whose do.
I would functionally disagree with 40 - by the time someone is in a position to be referenced by a computer, they'll have some way of being referred to, even if it's just a number. It's hard to imagine a truly nameless slave that is kept off the grid, yet still has a computerised individual reference somewhere...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The easiest solution is to have their address on file, and send them an actual letter to confirm the cancellation.
And if there are multiple tenants (e.g. roommates), who will it be addressed to? Just wondering if the issue is as simple as leaving the entire name field as a nullable string.
If you need to make you address pretty much free form anyway, it makes practically no difference to ask people to put their address including name. If you ask for a name, the problem is that the name they may want you to use in other contexts is not necessarily the same name that people they live with will recognise them by.
E.g. consider a trans person that want you to know them as one gender, but isn't out to their family.
The safest in general is to not ask for "just" a name, but ask "what should we call you in context X?" but in many cases you can forgo the name by not synthesising data items (such as an address) from multiple parts, but letting users provide the whole thing as one entity (you can still pre-populate based on most common patterns), which as a bonus saves you from other stupid mistakes.
Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem? What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?
I hope you are not downvoted. In economics, people talk about the problem of 'sorting and labeling' and how that is an unconscious reaction (which does unfortunately lead to bias) but it helps immensely in the overall productivity of an entire system. When people expect you to design special systems which increases the overall entropy, I wonder if they realize that you too incur a cost for creating that system. I say…
Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem? What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?
That is the wrong way to handle this. You don't have to support everything in the list. If your product is only for people in America you can expect them to have a name written in latin letters. You can ask them for a surname and a given name, and they will be able to fill it in, but may be slightly annoyed. You should allow apostrophes and accented letters, but it's really not hard these days with UTF-8. ASCII is too limited.
As you support more countries you will need to support more kinds of names.
Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem? What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?
Similar lists: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... Falsehoods programmers believe about time: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...
35. The rate that time passes at one point in the universe is the same relative to any other point in the universe.
I once talked to some co-workers of mine who doubted that relativity is real.