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

81–90 of 288 posts

Re: People with names that break computers

#81

Post by 794CD01 »

ryandrake wrote: post #71
apozem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking…

> These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? My guess would be on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands? It's 2016. There are very few good reasons left to assume text == ASCII anymore…

Having one good reason is enough, and the "it's easier" reason won't be going away anytime soon.

Re: People with names that break computers

#82

Post by mabbo »

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…

A friend in university had the last name "des Trois Maisons", or "Of the three houses" (if I'm remembering it correctly). I can only imagine the number of computer systems that just die on that. Not one space, but two!

Come to think of it, I bet he reads this comments. Hi [name withheld]!

Seriously, what a great last name.

Re: People with names that break computers

#83

Post by johnward »

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…

When it backfires: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/16/10425167-mans-van...

Re: People with names that break computers

#84

Post by lostlogin »

Marazan wrote: post #40
teej wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.

A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.

Covering almost everyone isn't the problem, it's getting everyone in that is hard. There is a good link in that story about name assumptions. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b....

A free text field doesn't catch everything in that list.

Re: People with names that break computers

#85

Post by uremog »

For anyone wondering about the Hawaiian name:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/31/258673819/...

Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, pronounced as: KAY'-ee-hah-nah-EE'-coo-COW'-ah-KAH'-hee-HOO'-lee-heh-eh-KAH'-how-NAH-eh-leh

Rough meaning: 'When there is chaos and confusion, you are one that will stand up and get people to focus in one direction and come out of the chaos.' It also references the origins of her and her husband's family."

Re: People with names that break computers

#86

Post by lostlogin »

jhall1468 wrote: post #58
zimpenfish wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websites that insist on forcing me to enter a first and last name always get abuse in the latter. What I call myself on websites is my business, not yours.

If at any point in the process they need to bill you for something, they have to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what the credit card companies require. So there are use cases. Personally, I don't see why any company is asking for a name if they aren't billing you for something or they aren't a social network.

I've had a Google, but can't find Zuckerbergs answer to this. Any idea?

Re: People with names that break computers

#87

Post by 5555624 »

phillc73 wrote: post #75
sevensor wrote: post #39

I received a Dutch surname as a second middle name. I can never use it -- the "Van" alone is enough to break things. But even without "Van", having two middle names usually does not compute. I've seen people who lack middle names entirely have the opposite problem and insert the middle initial "X" just to satisfy the system.

My wife and son have no middle name. An ex-girlfriend also had no middle name. I would have thought it's pretty common.

I commonly see "NMI" for "No Middle Initial."

Re: People with names that break computers

#88

Post by lostlogin »

snacksthecat wrote: post #25
mariodiana wrote: post #13

I realize that the issue of names is complicated when you consider different practices the world over, but is there not some kind of RFC or other specification that people are supposed to follow? How can that be in 2016? The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a month or two out of training I was given the tas…

My cousins have given up and changed their name from O'Keefe to OKeefe to avoid the single quote headache that seems to plague a lot of systems.

By deed poll or just by filling in the form differently? The idea of having to fill in the "have you ever been known by another name" section on forms just looks like a world of pain.

Re: People with names that break computers

#89

Post by Grishnakh »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
cdumler wrote: post #19

People do no have names that break computers. Programmers believe they have certain structures when they don't then his or her code fails. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

There should be an entire college course dedicated to all the various "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Xxxx" lists. I've seen so much horribly bad code that's supposed do handle times, dates, names, addresses, etc. The spec says "Store the user's name in the database" and the programmer simply allocates a string for First Name and a string for Last Name and calls it a day. What's needed is good unit tests and a…

For the database at least, I don't see why you need unit tests or any testing at all. Assuming that you're going to require at least two names (no single-name names allowed), then a string for First Name and a string for Last Name should be sufficient. If this is a decent database, where the string can have any Unicode character, including a space, and you don't set a limit on the string length (modern databases don't need this), then how can there possibly be a problem? If your database can't handle arbitrary-length Unicode strings, you have much, much bigger problems than weird people names. (And if you want to handle single-name names too, you can either just have a single "name" field, or you can allow null values for the first name.)

Now, the application logic is another matter and probably should be tested. But this really shouldn't be a hard problem, and it's downright shameful that so many programmers have bungled this so badly. There really isn't that much to it: you need to have two strings (and one can be null as I said above), they need to support Unicode so you can handle accented characters or characters from non-Latin character sets (Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc.), you need to handle spaces in names, and you need to not have arbitrary length restrictions (this could be a problem in web forms, but even here you should be able to make it scroll inside the box). The only valid limitation I can see is not allowing names with backslashes (in PostgreSQL, nulls are represented in SQL dumps with "\N").

Post reply on HN