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 your last name is Null, nothing works
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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#62My 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.)
To be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#63Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#64My 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.)
To be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities. I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hop…
> 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 assume that languages should only be supported according to their number of speakers, you leave no room for useful languages, bridge languages, auxiliary languages, or growing languages. Even if Esperanto had only 100 speakers, it'd be worthwhile to support, if it's easy to learn, and easy for non-speakers to understand.
It's not a "severe burden" to consider non-ASCII letters as letters. Unicode is pretty straightforward to work with, and if you want to support more than just English, it's a necessity. There's no need to have a "priority list" of letters you consider more or less important than others. That attitude comes across as very Anglocentric.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#65I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…
A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses. They did have a fallback--usually with second letter of given name. But, of course, a lot of people just automatically emailed the convention with the result that certain email "twins" got misdirected mail. A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daug…
> A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses
I once heard a story (possibly apocryphal) about a place which used a similar “first initial and truncated surname” convention for usernames, except theirs was first three letters of surname, followed by first initial, followed by some digits. And it all worked great until they hired a guy named Tom Cunningham
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#66Related. Others?
Names:
Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922038 - Feb 2025 (35 comments)
We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939162 - Oct 2024 (6 comments)
We have an employee whose surname is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115623 - Dec 2022 (17 comments)
How to pass “Null” (a real surname) to a SOAP web service? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492461 - Nov 2019 (10 comments)
My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046223 - Aug 2017 (135 comments)
Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315 - Sept 2016 (208 comments)
If your name is 'Null,' you may have problems doing anything online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11375282 - March 2016 (1 comment)
Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811 - Nov 2015 (24 comments)
An actual guy named “Null” messes up people's databases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390569 - April 2015 (4 comments)
We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738743 - Nov 2013 (35 comments)
We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631 - Aug 2013 (236 comments)
An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our employee lookup app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224 - April 2012 (148 comments)
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License plates:
A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31082288 - April 2022 (11 comments)
The 'NULL' License Plate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609924 - Dec 2021 (6 comments)
Guy got the license plate “NULL” and it was a total disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913507 - July 2020 (9 comments)
NULL license plate not such a bright idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676904 - Aug 2019 (467 comments)
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Islands:
The Many Lives of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073777 - July 2024 (21 comments)
Null Island Tourist Shirt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38713055 - Dec 2023 (44 comments)
Null Island is one of the most visited places on Earth, and it doesn’t exist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651871 - April 2023 (87 comments)
Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 - April 2022 (37 comments)
Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments)
If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments)
The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments)
The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments)
A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a few condescending answers here. You will find this more common in weakly typed languages like PHP and VB and maaaaaybe JavaScript, where null == “null” will probably evaluate to true.
js doesn't have this particular problem, but it does have both `null` and `undefined`, which will have varying semantically different usages depending on local conventions. For example, some will prefer to use `null` to mean that a value is _intentionally_ missing (for example, the db explicitly returned a null value), while `undefined` does not have any such connotation. These exist for frontend engineers to navigat…
I treat usage of `==` in JavaScript as undefined behavior.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#68For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed,…
Little Bobby ""
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
There must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?
I mean.. there are tons of people without last names in the world. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
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.
Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works
#70This 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, he joked to himself.
In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.