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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples

159 points by andrelaszlo 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
speedplane 8y ago
This article points out lots of false or at least weak assumptions that programmers make about names. But it doesn't really address the root of the problem: why programmers make these assumptions in the first place. There are two main reasons: 1. UI/vanity: it's nice to see your name in your app/email somewhere, and to display your name, the software often must make assumptions about your name. 2. Disambiguation: Software often has to determine if "Jon Livingston" is the same as "Jonathan M. Livingston". That is by it's nature pretty error prone, but over a finite and well understood dataset, can be made to be relatively accurate. At it's worst, this article says that the two pieces of functionality above are impossible. At it's best, it says that they are possible, but there are a number of things you need to consider. I'm an optimist, but I'd like to see more that points to the latter.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  If you want to refer to a user by a "friendly" name, the registration form should have a "I prefer to be addressed as" field instead of ass-uming anything.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    Okay, so now your signup form has "first name", "last name" , plus "preferred name". Seems pretty minor, doesn't it, yet adding that next question drops signups say 4%. Is it really worth asking the question if you're going to scare away 4% of your customers? Or do you try to make due with what you have?
- jcelerier 8y ago
  > Software often has to determine if "Jon Livingston" is the same as "Jonathan M. Livingston" wat ? what kind of software does that ? that's dumb as hell. You have one name and that's the one on your id card.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    This article might be of interest to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548
  - pjc50 8y ago
    a) I don't have an ID card b) I rarely use my middle name or initial, except on "official" documents c) People abbreviate their names a lot d) Sometimes it's helpful to match people with the same name at the same address as being the same person .. and sometimes it's adversarial.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Ad d: an acquaintance of mine named his son after himself. We don't do suffixes here, so no "II." or "Junior" - they're both Mr. Foo Bar, at Baz Drive, Quuxtown. The age differs, of course, but rarely does anyone collect it, much less use it for disambiguation. As you say, it's a mixed bag - either you get to impersonate the other, or the police gets all confused when looking for a rowdy adolescent and finding a middle-aged man, or you just can't get booked ("we already have you here" "no you don't, that's my son" "that's impossible, there can't be two of you, computer says so!").
    - speedplane 8y ago
      "Correcting" names is more than just a data-scientist-cleanup procedure, it's a political one too. Some states now require names on voter registrations to exactly match the names on IDs. I run a law firm analytics company across a few continents, I wishit was easy as saying "stop working with that team", "start working with thos team".. For our handul of big accounts, the want more than just our "service" at this bra, they want our love. So now the little bug that failed to match Michael Sander with Michael Sanders, Esg., leads to under or overcounting in a general election, and we've seen that an extra 200 votes in any county could swing it Democrat. Regardless of how racist you guilt trip your self into, if you go out with Migos, and they promise you a fun time, it's probably in your interest to go with them and do what you want.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Also see the curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
danso 8y ago
This was an interesting list, but I’d be more interested in reading examples of how these assumptions are manifested as erroneous design decisions. For example, many of the flawed assumptions are a variation of “Names don’t change/vary, ever”. I think most U.S. programmers are very aware of this — especially the many who have some variation of a name like “Mike/Michael”, “Dan/Daniel”, “Kate/Katlyn/Katherine”. But it took me a bit to figure out where a programmer would most likely forget that fact, in a way that’s a disservice to users — making a database system that assumes the first name/surname fields should never be updated.
- pjc50 8y ago
  There's a lot of systems which seem to assume that name changes are of fraudulent intent, rather than being fairly routine when women get married. Let alone the long list of other reasons to change one's name.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Men change their name on marriage too, not that often in my culture, but it happens. Children also change their name when their parents marry, and sometimes change it back (my father did that).
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Updated? That's a design error right there. "Nope, can't give you the records of Jane Doe from 2005, you are in our system as Jane Smith. You had a different name then? Doesn't compute!" In other words, the old name needs to be kept, the new one is not a fix from an erroneous state: it used to be correct then, the new one is correct now, and you still need to match on both. Why? Because changes never propagate instantly, if they propagate at all: I still get mail addressed to my mother (who hasn't lived here for decades), addressed to her previous name (another decade on top of that), into my mailbox, even though no trace of any of those names remains. As far as the post office goes, "XY Street 123, box 45" is still the residence of Mrs Foo. (That's actually a counterexample, yeah)
  - 8y ago
masonic 8y ago
The original McKenzie list was posted to HN many times from 2010 on. Original, 170+ points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472
kebman 8y ago
I always wanted an exhaustive list of name falsehoods. The worst part is probably that I read it with interest... I have no life!
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Exhaustive? Ha, this doesn't even scratch the surface! How about "There is a set of strings that never refers to a real person, so treat 'Christopher Null' as test data." https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ (Also, talk about timing: "'Abcde' is not a real name, either" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46393501 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46393501 )
  - steve_gh 8y ago
    Let alone "Little Bobby Tables" :-)
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Some years ago, a certain Mr. O'Neil had something to do on a site of ours, which made certain assumptions. He couldn't get through to our contact form - in the e-mail, he was...outspoken.
  - richrichardsson 8y ago
    Also Jennifer Null. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-brea...
  - wolfgang42 8y ago
    I recall reading a story somewhere about a company whose very first customer was one Henry Test. Apparently well-meaning new employees would occasionally try to delete his account, thinking that it was left over from when they were first setting up the billing system.
koliber 8y ago
I like reading these lists and find them very interesting. At the same time, I would caution anyone from building software that blindly tries to accommodate every point in these lists. Every software has a set of requirements, and a target market. It should be built to meet those requirements and anticipate strange situations, but within reason. This is very context sensitive. There is no one ruleset. At the same time, it should be possible to address edge cases in some reasonable way. For example, if your software does not support pasting images in as names (and therefore cannot represent the prince symbol), it should allow transliterations into a script that it can support. We can't support all cases perfectly, but being aware o them and finding some way to fit them in makes for a better experience.
- thomasfedb 8y ago
  Sometimes the answer to item 29: > And will your software only be dealing with people named by your society? Is: "yep"
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Which is "it compiles? Ship it!" in a different cloak. And like the original, it will probably come to bite you.
    - thomasfedb 8y ago
      Often the schema is already enforced - e.g. in healthcare you'll find that somebody else has already normalized the wonderful world of names down to two Unicode strings called last and first. Names that don't fit that schema will be coerced by this wonderful technology called "an admissions clerk".
      - thfuran 8y ago
        The DICOM standard has rather more to say about names than that: A character string encoded using a 5 component convention. The character code 5CH (the BACKSLASH "\" in ISO-IR 6) shall not be present, as it is used as the delimiter between values in multiple valued data elements. The string may be padded with trailing spaces. For human use, the five components in their order of occurrence are: family name complex, given name complex, middle name, name prefix, name suffix. Any of the five components may be an empty string. The component delimiter shall be the caret "^" character (5EH). Delimiters are required for interior null components. Trailing null components and their delimiters may be omitted. Multiple entries are permitted in each component and are encoded as natural text strings, in the format preferred by the named person. For veterinary use, the first two of the five components in their order of occurrence are: responsible party family name or responsible organization name, patient name. The remaining components are not used and shall not be present. This group of five components is referred to as a Person Name component group. For the purpose of writing names in ideographic characters and in phonetic characters, up to 3 groups of components (see Annexes H, I and J) may be used. The delimiter for component groups shall be the equals character "=" (3DH). The three component groups of components in their order of occurrence are: an alphabetic representation, an ideographic representation, and a phonetic representation. Any component group may be absent, including the first component group. In this case, the person name may start with one or more "=" delimiters. Delimiters are required for interior null component groups. Trailing null component groups and their delimiters may be omitted. Precise semantics are defined for each component group. See Section 6.2.1.2. For examples and notes, see Section 6.2.1.1.
purplethinking 8y ago
Can't we just refer to people as a hash of their DNA.. And forget about identical twins.
- andrelaszlo 8y ago
  "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA"
  - db48x 8y ago
    Yea, there's at least two in there already.
    - eesmith 8y ago
      "Lydia Fairchild is an American woman who exhibits chimerism, in having two distinct populations of DNA among the cells of her body." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        Microchemerism more common than previously believed: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/a-pregnancy-souvenir-cells-that-are-not-your-own.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/a-pregnancy-souve... TLDR: Having a baby tends to leave you with DNA from the baby distributed throughout your body.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  And entry errors, and matching errors, and misassigned records, and yeah, let's just have [Jedi handwave] a perfect identification system. Hey look, no more problems!
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Some percentage of people have a different dad than they or the world thinks. Some are adopted and don't know it. Some have genetic disorders they don't wish to publicly disclose. Methinks this goes from frying pan to fire.
fredley 8y ago
Also somewhat related: Computerphile's video on dates and timezones. Programmers might be tempted to make similar assumptions about dates, times and timezones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
LordHeini 8y ago
So what is the solution now? Have a single full Unicode 'name' field which is over 200 characters long? What is even the longest possible name? The ex german minister of defence has 108 characters in his ridiculous name.
- mauricioc 8y ago
  Portuguese-origin names can be a bit ridiculous in this sense as well. Famously around here, the first emperor of Brazil was named "Pedro de Alcântara Francisco António João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Cipriano Serafim" [1]. That's 128 characters, beating Picasso's example! The tradition of long names persists to this day, although not to this extreme. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_I_of_Brazil#Birth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_I_of_Brazil#Birth
- posterboy 8y ago
  Relevant stackexchange answer [1]: > one second-century consul was named Quintus Pompeius Senecio Roscius Murena Coelius Sextus Iulius Frontinus Silius Decianus Gaius Iulius Eurycles Herculaneus Lucius Vibullius Pius Augustanus Alpinus Bellicius Sollers Iulius Aper Ducenius Proculus Rutilianus Rufinus Silius Valens Valerius Niger Claudius Fuscus Saxa Amyntianus Sosius Priscus. > The ex german minister of defence That would be "Dr. Copy Paste" a.k.a. Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg [2]. [1] What linguistic impact, if any, has the the Roman three name naming system left on modern Romance and European languages? https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29277 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29277 [2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
- JetSetWilly 8y ago
  That still violates point 11: "People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points." It seems like it is impossible to address all these points. Obviously there's no way for me to allow people to enter their names which don't have any known code point. So at some point you're always going to be saying "tough luck, you must adapt your name - or come up with something - that confirms to these constraints." And I am sure people are clever enough to do so.
ThorinJacobs 8y ago
I enjoyed the list and examples but I feel the hypothesis in the introduction is flawed. All anecdata, but I expect those of us who read these sorts of lists will likely understand them quickly without needing examples. There's a large number of developers that are not reading software blogs and lists and are not applying much thought to their programs beyond "how do I meet the minimum requirements put forth in this user story". As long as those sorts of developer continue to be prevalent it's partly on the business to specify these requirements explicitly. Tragically I don't see this changing any time soon.
caf 8y ago
An Australian businessman and politician called Benjamin Benjamin died in 1905. There's a current Australian politician called Grace Grace.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Yeah, this is actually quite common. This is the man who rediscovered how to move the moai using simple tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Pavel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Pavel In this case, neither the first name nor the surname are rare, when used separately.
glitchc 8y ago
I knew names were hard but now am convinced they are diabolical. The only safe solution seems to be to store every name as an alphanumeric blob and forget about parsing altogether.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Bingo.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > I knew names were hard but now am convinced they are diabolical. That's a pretty common theme of more or less any datapoint evolved through human cultural history, because you're dealing with divergent cultures and cultural mores. > The only safe solution seems to be to store every name as an alphanumeric blob and forget about parsing altogether. That is absolutely the recommendation. Depending on your use case you may e.g. ask for a name and a "name of address" (possibly defaulting to the regular name) so you don't display "Hello, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso" on every screen or use that in every notification email or whatever.
- contravariant 8y ago
  If only there was a unique aplhanumeric blob representing a name.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    A name, or a person? The first one is a bit easier; person:name is, at the easiest, 1:n. But yeah, a name can have multiple representations, even before multiple languages come in (Peter/Cephas/Petros). (Pedantry: Jean-Claude van Damme doesn't fit into the alphanumeric requirement on two separate counts)
- macintux 8y ago
  As was pointed out elsewhere, it’s rare to have a system which doesn’t need to interact with other systems. If you’re running a travel agency, those names have to be sent to airlines, hotels, etc...and they won’t be expecting a blob of data.
cgoecknerwald 8y ago
> "It seems some people believe that you get a name and it never changes. Not so, even in Western countries, where a person may change their name when they marry." Since it is traditionally /women/ who change their names when married, this blind spot does not surprise me.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  In common-law countries, you could also change your name just by using the new name. You could stand in the town square and announce, "I'm Max Power now, everybody. Stop calling me Doug Putz. New name: Max Power." And that would be it. Or you go up on stage and say "I'm not just 'Gordon' any more. Call me 'Sting'." And everybody rolls with it, because no one cares about a bass player named Gordon, but a guy named Sting has to be cool. And then he actually has two completely separate names, that both refer to the same person. In modern times, governments make you fill out a form and pay a fee, because now people need to know people that don't all live inside an hour-long trip radius by horse. And publishing a name change to hundreds of millions of people that may want to know about it cannot be done by soapbox and megaphone. And those forms cause all kinds of problems. All the information on it has to fit inside the boxes, you see.
- repolfx 8y ago
  I don't think you need to reach for sexism as an explanation there. Name changes are sufficiently rare that building the flows to support it will usually only become an issue in mature production software where accurate names are extremely important, and where preserving long term records is equally important. That's not most systems. And that's before you get into cases where names are primary keys like usernames. The business case for supporting such changes can be pretty weak relative to other features.
  - watwut 8y ago
    It is not rare. Overwhelming majority of married women changed surname and remember "fun" that came with it. Women are half population and while marriages go down, they are not rare at all.
  - 8y ago
Insanity 8y ago
This was an interesting read! Being from Belgium, I wouldn't have expected the difference between how we index "Vincent Van Gogh". We always (or I do) thought that using the same software in Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands would be easy - i18n wise. (There are issues with different laws though depending on the domain of your software)
WillKirkby 8y ago
Another one for "People’s names do not change." - transgender people will almost always change their name during their transition.
- OskarS 8y ago
  The other obvious example is changing names when you get married.
  - WillKirkby 8y ago
    yes, which is mentioned in the article..
dharmab 8y ago
One for "people have names"- in the context of an emergency room or criminal investigation, a person's name may not be initially known. ERs work around this by assigning a code name to every trauma patient... meaning those patients have an additional name in the context of the hospital system.
thomasfoster96 8y ago
I know people see No. 29 on this list and decide that their product or service will only be used by English speakers of European descent, but from experience even with these extraordinarily low requirements for testing most services fail. I’ve got three short (<8 letters) entirely ASCII names, and even then I still have trouble: * I regularly get letters addressed to my first name and my middle name, missing my surname. * Banks and airlines always seem to try a different way of dealing my middle name, from only using an initial to abbreviating it to anywhere from three to six characters. * A friend once got issued travel documents where all of their given names were concatenated together (no spaces) and printed after their last name. * Many websites still require you to pick an honourific from a drop down menu, but the options vary considerably (and usage is different in every country, even with a common language). Just make it a text field and be done with it. I really don’t think it’s too difficult nowadays, especially if you’re writing something from scratch, to just accept really long Unicode strings and store given names and surnames separately. And it’s not like testing this is difficult - you can find datasets of a few hundred names in different languages and scripts fairly easily.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  I'm sure it's not easy. Even if you're writing from scratch. Imagine you're making a new travel site. You add the any size name field. But, you have to send that name to airlines, hotels, car rentals, credit card companies, all of which will have different limits.
  - thomasfoster96 8y ago
    There are a number of websites now which ask me for my “name as it appears on your card” when doing transactions/bookings, which seems like a decent solution. I’ve also had had hotels ask for a card number or some form of ID, which also seems more sensible than asking for a name.
- stevula 8y ago
  To your second and third point, recently traveled internationally and the airline concatenated my first and middle name on my ticket and boarding passes. My passport has a space between my first name and middle initial My driver’s license has a space between my first name and middle name. Needless to say, I was unable to check in online or with one of the machines at the airport.
jyriand 8y ago
Small example with ny own name: In my home country im called Jüri, in Finland probably Jyri, in Russia Juri, and in the passport it’s also written as Jueri. Some people write it mistakenly as Yuri.
cabalamat 8y ago
> 9. People’s names are written in ASCII. This is apparently true in the UK, although they use the terms "special characters" and "normal letters". https://passportapplication.service.gov.uk/help/html/pages/10.05_01_name-to-appear_en.html https://passportapplication.service.gov.uk/help/html/pages/1... : >We cannot show full stops, hyphens, accents or other special characters in your passport. Full stops and hyphens in a name will be replaced with spaces. > >If your name has a special character or accent mark please enter your name using a normal letter eg e instead of é or a instead of ä etc.
- wwosik 8y ago
  "normal" letter sounds rather judging, doesn't it? Altough I suspect it is probably a product of an undereducated person.
  - soundwave106 8y ago
    Agreed, simply "please use the unaccented letter" would have been fine instructions. Accented letters are pretty "normal" in many languages.
    - occamrazor 8y ago
      Accented letters are not the only issue. Apart from the already mentioned apostrophes and hyphens, there are consonants with diacritics such as ç, č and ñ, or cases where substituting an “accented” letter with the corresponding unaccented one is not appropriate (e.g. ä in German is transcribed as ae in ASCII).
  - cabalamat 8y ago
    > "normal" letter sounds rather judging, doesn't it? it is a bit. > Altough I suspect it is probably a product of an undereducated person. Or an attempt to use non-technical English. I doubt if most people know what an ASCII character is.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
A few random thoughts: They chickened out on giving an actual example of a "bad word" name, though there's a not very dirty and really common example: Dick, which can be short for Richard. My ex is a Junior. When I get phone calls asking for "Doreen Traylor Junior" I know it's a telemarketer. I used to try to crack jokes, but they never got it. As far as I know, Junior and Senior are masculine. Even if they weren't, it's my married name. Doreen Traylor didn't exist until I married. I couldn't have inherited it from my mother, even if culturally we did that kind of thing. (I mean even if it was common to give daughters the same name as their mother and call them Junior.) I'm not sure where that falls on this list, but it seems like a glaringly obvious error if you know my gender. (And, as far as I know, Doreen is a female name. Though Michele can be male in some places, like Italy, they usually don't seem to know my middle name.)
- naravara 8y ago
  In a lot of Latin American countries people named Enrique are nicknamed Kiké, sometimes with the accent mark and sometimes without. (And many online services and forms don't accept accent marks anyway so it's kind of moot). This can, understandably lead to some confusion. It's kind of like when people visit India or Japan and see swastikas everywhere. The word "Kiki," in France, is sort of a juvenile way to refer to a penis (like "wee-wee" or "pee-pee"). So all the Kristines and Annikas and just plain Kikis of the world can be met with a lot of giggles when they travel.
- andrelaszlo 8y ago
  Jerk is a Swedish name that once was common in the region I grew up in. Now there are only 88 Swedes with the name left. It's short for Jerker (1522 people)... https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/namnsok/Search/?nameSearchInput=jerk https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/namnsok...
- jaredwiener 8y ago
  I've gone through life with a surname that euphemistically refers to an intimate part of male anatomy. While I've never had problems with it (well, technological problems, at least) -- this writer with a slightly different spelling, has: https://twitter.com/natalieweiner/status/1034533630071193602?lang=en https://twitter.com/natalieweiner/status/1034533630071193602...
Upvoter33 8y ago
This was a fun read. However, at least one point is wrong. "People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space" This is actually true.
- GuB-42 8y ago
  And how do you define the amount of space people's names fit within? ;) Tautologies are cheating. "People’s names fit within a certain amount of space" is definitely true though.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Technically. Alas, I have seen too many cases where this meant "20 bytes of ASCII is this amount."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JohnWilcox 8y ago
Here we have an example of how all the deconstruction of society is resulting in ever cascading and mushrooming abstraction and complexity. Ok, so let's assume it is valuable to have caused and produced the majority of those "falsehoods" that were largely the result of only the last couple decades, outside of regional/language complexities. Why stop there though? Why is it not a "falsehood" that names must be written in text? Where is the support for names that are only phonetic? Where is the support for names that change every n microseconds? Where is the support for names that are only images? Where is the support for hames that are mathematical equations? Where is the support for names that are JS injections? Where is the support for names that are graphed in a dot plot? Are you discriminating against those who graph in bars, you bigot? Of course you would not want to prove you are a Nasi for discriminating against those who's name is expressed in video and only in 5k form that rotates between 50,000 clips every 5 minutes, would you? Where is your support for that? ... and the list of deranged deconstruction and destruction can continue ad infinitum. Of course that is all ridiculous in a somewhat exaggerated manner, but I can assure you that the vast majority of the subject "falsehoods" we are being lectured about would have been equally as ridiculous in a far more efficient and effective and cohesive time just a few years ago. Wait, where is your support for that symbol that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince used? Darn, is "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" title capitalized or just regular capitalized or at all??? BTW, if I were more offended, I would protest that my name ... that is written in neolithic stone age hieroglyphics ... is not supported and would call everyone that does not know how to pronounce my name a bigot. Is this satire, or humor, or am I serious? We have lost out collective ability to tell as we descended into madness.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  I know that was just a rant, but really, supporting names in non-western cultural formats isn't that unreasonable.
  - CathyWest 8y ago
    But can you find a culture that sincerely uses one of those exact naming conventions? I agree with the base premise of the linked article, but I think such hyperbole just detracts from the point.
aquamo 8y ago
One option might be to use a hash of one's DNA sequence and be done with it. The name identifier can then just be an image with any markings made by the person. This would then move name / id search from a character set problem to an image recognition problem. Works for me :-)
- deathanatos 8y ago
  Chimeras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) Essentially, people can (sometimes) not have a single set of DNA. And this has already caused issues: > In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance in Washington state when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defense, who were able to show that Fairchild, too, was a chimera with two sets of DNA, and that one of those sets could have been the mother of the children.
rfgjheljfrsd 8y ago
He (Patrick) missed out "People in the same family have unique names" as a general concept. He pointed out "Jr." and "I/II/III", but how about Maria <middle name> <last name>? Both my sisters' first names are Maria, as is my daughter and my upcoming one. My new daughter will have the same initials as one of my sisters (My mother, her sisters and my cousin also are all Marias, but luckily many of them have different last names). So, if your form only has an initial for middle name, you could have a situation where a person living in the same household (i.e. same address) is indistinguishable for another. So neglecting the middle name, as if often done, is terrible.
- lmkg 8y ago
  And let's not forget George Foreman, who named all five of his sons George Edward Foreman. So a middle name wouldn't have helped you there.
_jgdh 8y ago
41. You share a surname with your father. This is not true of many people from South India. My last name is my father's first name. So my sibling, mother and I share a last name, but my father has a different one (his father's first name). Shoutout to the consultant who was helping me fill a visa application and helpfully "fixed" my typo.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Nitpick. I don't think most developers "believe" most of these things. I think most developers would rather wire up some simple code to handle names and move on to (what they feel is) more interesting logic so they end up using 40 chars of ascii for names and leave it at that.
macintux 8y ago
It’s worth noting that mistakes here have enfranchisement implications as well: officials with one U.S. political party have been eager to combat voter fraud, including by refusing to allow people to vote whose names don’t perfectly match in all relevant databases.
nradov 8y ago
For those who have to design systems to properly accommodate most of these "falsehoods", don't reinvent the wheel. Take a look at how the HL7 CDA R2 format handles names for healthcare data interchange. http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=7 http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?pro... Each person can have multiple different names tagged by use (legal, maiden, alias, etc). Names can be composed of multiple different parts (prefix, suffix, given, family, or just free text). All of Unicode is supported. And names can also be NULL in various different ways (which is distinct from just blank or missing).
salutonmundo 8y ago
"e e cummings preferred his name written in all lower case." - this is not exactly true. He signed with capital letters, most of the time. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capita...) A good example of such a name, though, would be eden ahbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eden_ahbez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eden_ahbez (he's also a good example of someone with more than one name.)
isotropy 8y ago
Despite being a middle-class white guy from the US, I've experienced three of these on the same day. When I met my future wife, my last name ("Coon") happened to be a (somewhat rare) slur on her ethnic background. At that time, a man couldn't automatically change names on his wedding day in California, so we had to go to court ahead of time to fill out a legal name change form. The paper form had only one blank for the entire new name. A Hispanic family ahead of us in line had a son whose last name was supposed to be [father's surname] [mother's surname], but his birth certificate had accidentally recorded his father's surname in the middle-name field instead. So the family wanted to move his "middle" name to the front of his surname. With only one blank for the whole name, the kid's current legal name had the same exact sequence of characters as the new legal name, and there was no place on the form to make a note. The judge asked if they were OK with adding a hyphen, and they were. Epilogue: each of my daughters has two middle names.
jvanderbot 8y ago
The worst offense is two-world last names. If you give me one field that says "Full name" I may as well roll the dice to determine if the three strings I input in there are First Middle Last, First Last1 Last2, First1 First2 Last, etc.
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
>People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎. >No, your system is badly designed. >People have names. >This one is perhaps the most difficult for which to give solid examples. There was an isolated culture in which no one had names – they referred to everyone in relative terms, such as “my mother’s eldest sister”. So taking the last two statements together, any system that assumes a name exist is thus poorly designed? Some of these examples are things people need to take into account, but that doesn't mean bad design. A well designed system takes into account that there is a business need and a business budget. To ignore the constraints of real world situation makes less sense than ignoring the one culture where people don't have names at all.
CathyWest 8y ago
If someone can read this and finds it to be an interesting question, please repost it so that it could be answered to: I'm curious about naming conventions in different languages and cultures, so I naturally want to be accommodating, but how do I handle the UX problem of collecting all the metadata about names in order for the program to correctly reason about them? I can imagine that while users probably want their name to be rendered correctly, they would have little patience with complicated forms to do what would be just a simple text field when dealing with any local office where they know how to interpret it. Not to mention when you have to deal with different scripts being understandable by different people, and when adaption is needed, whether you want a cognate, a standard transliteration or an ad-hoc transliteration as a stand-in. And then on the receiving end, you might be using an application in English because it hasn't been translated into your language, but do you want to see the names of your countrymen in your native script, or do you want to see it rendered with Latin characters? And what if you don't understand the script?
draw_down 8y ago
God, I find this "falsehoods programmers believe about x" concept so irksome. Give people guidelines and tools to do the right thing, writing shit like this is just lazy sniping.
implying 8y ago
I have a hyphenated last name and I'd say 1/4 of online forms do not validate when I enter my name. When a system had an account created for me and doesn't accept logging in with my name, it is always a guessing game to see if they normalized it with a space, am underscore, removing the first or second name etc.

159 points by andrelaszlo 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

This article points out lots of false or at least weak assumptions that programmers make about names. But it doesn't really address the root of the problem: why programmers make these assumptions in the first place. There are two main reasons: 1. UI/vanity: it's nice to see your name in your app/email somewhere, and to display your name, the software often must make assumptions about your name. 2. Disambiguation: Software often has to determine if "Jon Livingston" is the same as "Jonathan M. Livingston". That is by it's nature pretty error prone, but over a finite and well understood dataset, can be made to be relatively accurate. At it's worst, this article says that the two pieces of functionality above are impossible. At it's best, it says that they are possible, but there are a number of things you need to consider. I'm an optimist, but I'd like to see more that points to the latter.

Sharlin 8y ago
If you want to refer to a user by a "friendly" name, the registration form should have a "I prefer to be addressed as" field instead of ass-uming anything.
- speedplane 8y ago
  Okay, so now your signup form has "first name", "last name" , plus "preferred name". Seems pretty minor, doesn't it, yet adding that next question drops signups say 4%. Is it really worth asking the question if you're going to scare away 4% of your customers? Or do you try to make due with what you have?
jcelerier 8y ago
> Software often has to determine if "Jon Livingston" is the same as "Jonathan M. Livingston" wat ? what kind of software does that ? that's dumb as hell. You have one name and that's the one on your id card.
- matt4077 8y ago
  This article might be of interest to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548
- pjc50 8y ago
  a) I don't have an ID card b) I rarely use my middle name or initial, except on "official" documents c) People abbreviate their names a lot d) Sometimes it's helpful to match people with the same name at the same address as being the same person .. and sometimes it's adversarial.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Ad d: an acquaintance of mine named his son after himself. We don't do suffixes here, so no "II." or "Junior" - they're both Mr. Foo Bar, at Baz Drive, Quuxtown. The age differs, of course, but rarely does anyone collect it, much less use it for disambiguation. As you say, it's a mixed bag - either you get to impersonate the other, or the police gets all confused when looking for a rowdy adolescent and finding a middle-aged man, or you just can't get booked ("we already have you here" "no you don't, that's my son" "that's impossible, there can't be two of you, computer says so!").
  - speedplane 8y ago
    "Correcting" names is more than just a data-scientist-cleanup procedure, it's a political one too. Some states now require names on voter registrations to exactly match the names on IDs. I run a law firm analytics company across a few continents, I wishit was easy as saying "stop working with that team", "start working with thos team".. For our handul of big accounts, the want more than just our "service" at this bra, they want our love. So now the little bug that failed to match Michael Sander with Michael Sanders, Esg., leads to under or overcounting in a general election, and we've seen that an extra 200 votes in any county could swing it Democrat. Regardless of how racist you guilt trip your self into, if you go out with Migos, and they promise you a fun time, it's probably in your interest to go with them and do what you want.

pmoriarty 8y ago

Also see the curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

danso 8y ago

This was an interesting list, but I’d be more interested in reading examples of how these assumptions are manifested as erroneous design decisions. For example, many of the flawed assumptions are a variation of “Names don’t change/vary, ever”. I think most U.S. programmers are very aware of this — especially the many who have some variation of a name like “Mike/Michael”, “Dan/Daniel”, “Kate/Katlyn/Katherine”. But it took me a bit to figure out where a programmer would most likely forget that fact, in a way that’s a disservice to users — making a database system that assumes the first name/surname fields should never be updated.

pjc50 8y ago
There's a lot of systems which seem to assume that name changes are of fraudulent intent, rather than being fairly routine when women get married. Let alone the long list of other reasons to change one's name.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Men change their name on marriage too, not that often in my culture, but it happens. Children also change their name when their parents marry, and sometimes change it back (my father did that).
Piskvorrr 8y ago
Updated? That's a design error right there. "Nope, can't give you the records of Jane Doe from 2005, you are in our system as Jane Smith. You had a different name then? Doesn't compute!" In other words, the old name needs to be kept, the new one is not a fix from an erroneous state: it used to be correct then, the new one is correct now, and you still need to match on both. Why? Because changes never propagate instantly, if they propagate at all: I still get mail addressed to my mother (who hasn't lived here for decades), addressed to her previous name (another decade on top of that), into my mailbox, even though no trace of any of those names remains. As far as the post office goes, "XY Street 123, box 45" is still the residence of Mrs Foo. (That's actually a counterexample, yeah)
- 8y ago

masonic 8y ago

The original McKenzie list was posted to HN many times from 2010 on. Original, 170+ points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472

kebman 8y ago

I always wanted an exhaustive list of name falsehoods. The worst part is probably that I read it with interest... I have no life!

Piskvorrr 8y ago
Exhaustive? Ha, this doesn't even scratch the surface! How about "There is a set of strings that never refers to a real person, so treat 'Christopher Null' as test data." https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ (Also, talk about timing: "'Abcde' is not a real name, either" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46393501 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46393501 )
- steve_gh 8y ago
  Let alone "Little Bobby Tables" :-)
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Some years ago, a certain Mr. O'Neil had something to do on a site of ours, which made certain assumptions. He couldn't get through to our contact form - in the e-mail, he was...outspoken.
- richrichardsson 8y ago
  Also Jennifer Null. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-brea...
- wolfgang42 8y ago
  I recall reading a story somewhere about a company whose very first customer was one Henry Test. Apparently well-meaning new employees would occasionally try to delete his account, thinking that it was left over from when they were first setting up the billing system.

koliber 8y ago

I like reading these lists and find them very interesting. At the same time, I would caution anyone from building software that blindly tries to accommodate every point in these lists. Every software has a set of requirements, and a target market. It should be built to meet those requirements and anticipate strange situations, but within reason. This is very context sensitive. There is no one ruleset. At the same time, it should be possible to address edge cases in some reasonable way. For example, if your software does not support pasting images in as names (and therefore cannot represent the prince symbol), it should allow transliterations into a script that it can support. We can't support all cases perfectly, but being aware o them and finding some way to fit them in makes for a better experience.

thomasfedb 8y ago
Sometimes the answer to item 29: > And will your software only be dealing with people named by your society? Is: "yep"
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Which is "it compiles? Ship it!" in a different cloak. And like the original, it will probably come to bite you.
  - thomasfedb 8y ago
    Often the schema is already enforced - e.g. in healthcare you'll find that somebody else has already normalized the wonderful world of names down to two Unicode strings called last and first. Names that don't fit that schema will be coerced by this wonderful technology called "an admissions clerk".
    - thfuran 8y ago
      The DICOM standard has rather more to say about names than that: A character string encoded using a 5 component convention. The character code 5CH (the BACKSLASH "\" in ISO-IR 6) shall not be present, as it is used as the delimiter between values in multiple valued data elements. The string may be padded with trailing spaces. For human use, the five components in their order of occurrence are: family name complex, given name complex, middle name, name prefix, name suffix. Any of the five components may be an empty string. The component delimiter shall be the caret "^" character (5EH). Delimiters are required for interior null components. Trailing null components and their delimiters may be omitted. Multiple entries are permitted in each component and are encoded as natural text strings, in the format preferred by the named person. For veterinary use, the first two of the five components in their order of occurrence are: responsible party family name or responsible organization name, patient name. The remaining components are not used and shall not be present. This group of five components is referred to as a Person Name component group. For the purpose of writing names in ideographic characters and in phonetic characters, up to 3 groups of components (see Annexes H, I and J) may be used. The delimiter for component groups shall be the equals character "=" (3DH). The three component groups of components in their order of occurrence are: an alphabetic representation, an ideographic representation, and a phonetic representation. Any component group may be absent, including the first component group. In this case, the person name may start with one or more "=" delimiters. Delimiters are required for interior null component groups. Trailing null component groups and their delimiters may be omitted. Precise semantics are defined for each component group. See Section 6.2.1.2. For examples and notes, see Section 6.2.1.1.

purplethinking 8y ago

Can't we just refer to people as a hash of their DNA.. And forget about identical twins.

andrelaszlo 8y ago
"Falsehoods Programmers Believe About DNA"
- db48x 8y ago
  Yea, there's at least two in there already.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    "Lydia Fairchild is an American woman who exhibits chimerism, in having two distinct populations of DNA among the cells of her body." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Microchemerism more common than previously believed: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/a-pregnancy-souvenir-cells-that-are-not-your-own.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/a-pregnancy-souve... TLDR: Having a baby tends to leave you with DNA from the baby distributed throughout your body.
Piskvorrr 8y ago
And entry errors, and matching errors, and misassigned records, and yeah, let's just have [Jedi handwave] a perfect identification system. Hey look, no more problems!
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Some percentage of people have a different dad than they or the world thinks. Some are adopted and don't know it. Some have genetic disorders they don't wish to publicly disclose. Methinks this goes from frying pan to fire.

fredley 8y ago

Also somewhat related: Computerphile's video on dates and timezones. Programmers might be tempted to make similar assumptions about dates, times and timezones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

LordHeini 8y ago

So what is the solution now? Have a single full Unicode 'name' field which is over 200 characters long? What is even the longest possible name? The ex german minister of defence has 108 characters in his ridiculous name.

mauricioc 8y ago
Portuguese-origin names can be a bit ridiculous in this sense as well. Famously around here, the first emperor of Brazil was named "Pedro de Alcântara Francisco António João Carlos Xavier de Paula Miguel Rafael Joaquim José Gonzaga Pascoal Cipriano Serafim" [1]. That's 128 characters, beating Picasso's example! The tradition of long names persists to this day, although not to this extreme. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_I_of_Brazil#Birth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_I_of_Brazil#Birth
posterboy 8y ago
Relevant stackexchange answer [1]: > one second-century consul was named Quintus Pompeius Senecio Roscius Murena Coelius Sextus Iulius Frontinus Silius Decianus Gaius Iulius Eurycles Herculaneus Lucius Vibullius Pius Augustanus Alpinus Bellicius Sollers Iulius Aper Ducenius Proculus Rutilianus Rufinus Silius Valens Valerius Niger Claudius Fuscus Saxa Amyntianus Sosius Priscus. > The ex german minister of defence That would be "Dr. Copy Paste" a.k.a. Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg [2]. [1] What linguistic impact, if any, has the the Roman three name naming system left on modern Romance and European languages? https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29277 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/29277 [2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
JetSetWilly 8y ago
That still violates point 11: "People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points." It seems like it is impossible to address all these points. Obviously there's no way for me to allow people to enter their names which don't have any known code point. So at some point you're always going to be saying "tough luck, you must adapt your name - or come up with something - that confirms to these constraints." And I am sure people are clever enough to do so.

ThorinJacobs 8y ago

I enjoyed the list and examples but I feel the hypothesis in the introduction is flawed. All anecdata, but I expect those of us who read these sorts of lists will likely understand them quickly without needing examples. There's a large number of developers that are not reading software blogs and lists and are not applying much thought to their programs beyond "how do I meet the minimum requirements put forth in this user story". As long as those sorts of developer continue to be prevalent it's partly on the business to specify these requirements explicitly. Tragically I don't see this changing any time soon.

caf 8y ago

An Australian businessman and politician called Benjamin Benjamin died in 1905. There's a current Australian politician called Grace Grace.

Piskvorrr 8y ago
Yeah, this is actually quite common. This is the man who rediscovered how to move the moai using simple tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Pavel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Pavel In this case, neither the first name nor the surname are rare, when used separately.

glitchc 8y ago

I knew names were hard but now am convinced they are diabolical. The only safe solution seems to be to store every name as an alphanumeric blob and forget about parsing altogether.

blattimwind 8y ago
Bingo.
masklinn 8y ago
> I knew names were hard but now am convinced they are diabolical. That's a pretty common theme of more or less any datapoint evolved through human cultural history, because you're dealing with divergent cultures and cultural mores. > The only safe solution seems to be to store every name as an alphanumeric blob and forget about parsing altogether. That is absolutely the recommendation. Depending on your use case you may e.g. ask for a name and a "name of address" (possibly defaulting to the regular name) so you don't display "Hello, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso" on every screen or use that in every notification email or whatever.
contravariant 8y ago
If only there was a unique aplhanumeric blob representing a name.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  A name, or a person? The first one is a bit easier; person:name is, at the easiest, 1:n. But yeah, a name can have multiple representations, even before multiple languages come in (Peter/Cephas/Petros). (Pedantry: Jean-Claude van Damme doesn't fit into the alphanumeric requirement on two separate counts)
macintux 8y ago
As was pointed out elsewhere, it’s rare to have a system which doesn’t need to interact with other systems. If you’re running a travel agency, those names have to be sent to airlines, hotels, etc...and they won’t be expecting a blob of data.

cgoecknerwald 8y ago

> "It seems some people believe that you get a name and it never changes. Not so, even in Western countries, where a person may change their name when they marry." Since it is traditionally /women/ who change their names when married, this blind spot does not surprise me.

logfromblammo 8y ago
In common-law countries, you could also change your name just by using the new name. You could stand in the town square and announce, "I'm Max Power now, everybody. Stop calling me Doug Putz. New name: Max Power." And that would be it. Or you go up on stage and say "I'm not just 'Gordon' any more. Call me 'Sting'." And everybody rolls with it, because no one cares about a bass player named Gordon, but a guy named Sting has to be cool. And then he actually has two completely separate names, that both refer to the same person. In modern times, governments make you fill out a form and pay a fee, because now people need to know people that don't all live inside an hour-long trip radius by horse. And publishing a name change to hundreds of millions of people that may want to know about it cannot be done by soapbox and megaphone. And those forms cause all kinds of problems. All the information on it has to fit inside the boxes, you see.
repolfx 8y ago
I don't think you need to reach for sexism as an explanation there. Name changes are sufficiently rare that building the flows to support it will usually only become an issue in mature production software where accurate names are extremely important, and where preserving long term records is equally important. That's not most systems. And that's before you get into cases where names are primary keys like usernames. The business case for supporting such changes can be pretty weak relative to other features.
- watwut 8y ago
  It is not rare. Overwhelming majority of married women changed surname and remember "fun" that came with it. Women are half population and while marriages go down, they are not rare at all.
- 8y ago

Insanity 8y ago

This was an interesting read! Being from Belgium, I wouldn't have expected the difference between how we index "Vincent Van Gogh". We always (or I do) thought that using the same software in Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands would be easy - i18n wise. (There are issues with different laws though depending on the domain of your software)

WillKirkby 8y ago

Another one for "People’s names do not change." - transgender people will almost always change their name during their transition.

OskarS 8y ago
The other obvious example is changing names when you get married.
- WillKirkby 8y ago
  yes, which is mentioned in the article..

dharmab 8y ago

One for "people have names"- in the context of an emergency room or criminal investigation, a person's name may not be initially known. ERs work around this by assigning a code name to every trauma patient... meaning those patients have an additional name in the context of the hospital system.

thomasfoster96 8y ago

I know people see No. 29 on this list and decide that their product or service will only be used by English speakers of European descent, but from experience even with these extraordinarily low requirements for testing most services fail. I’ve got three short (<8 letters) entirely ASCII names, and even then I still have trouble: * I regularly get letters addressed to my first name and my middle name, missing my surname. * Banks and airlines always seem to try a different way of dealing my middle name, from only using an initial to abbreviating it to anywhere from three to six characters. * A friend once got issued travel documents where all of their given names were concatenated together (no spaces) and printed after their last name. * Many websites still require you to pick an honourific from a drop down menu, but the options vary considerably (and usage is different in every country, even with a common language). Just make it a text field and be done with it. I really don’t think it’s too difficult nowadays, especially if you’re writing something from scratch, to just accept really long Unicode strings and store given names and surnames separately. And it’s not like testing this is difficult - you can find datasets of a few hundred names in different languages and scripts fairly easily.

tokyodude 8y ago
I'm sure it's not easy. Even if you're writing from scratch. Imagine you're making a new travel site. You add the any size name field. But, you have to send that name to airlines, hotels, car rentals, credit card companies, all of which will have different limits.
- thomasfoster96 8y ago
  There are a number of websites now which ask me for my “name as it appears on your card” when doing transactions/bookings, which seems like a decent solution. I’ve also had had hotels ask for a card number or some form of ID, which also seems more sensible than asking for a name.
stevula 8y ago
To your second and third point, recently traveled internationally and the airline concatenated my first and middle name on my ticket and boarding passes. My passport has a space between my first name and middle initial My driver’s license has a space between my first name and middle name. Needless to say, I was unable to check in online or with one of the machines at the airport.

jyriand 8y ago

Small example with ny own name: In my home country im called Jüri, in Finland probably Jyri, in Russia Juri, and in the passport it’s also written as Jueri. Some people write it mistakenly as Yuri.

cabalamat 8y ago

> 9. People’s names are written in ASCII. This is apparently true in the UK, although they use the terms "special characters" and "normal letters". https://passportapplication.service.gov.uk/help/html/pages/10.05_01_name-to-appear_en.html https://passportapplication.service.gov.uk/help/html/pages/1... : >We cannot show full stops, hyphens, accents or other special characters in your passport. Full stops and hyphens in a name will be replaced with spaces. > >If your name has a special character or accent mark please enter your name using a normal letter eg e instead of é or a instead of ä etc.

wwosik 8y ago
"normal" letter sounds rather judging, doesn't it? Altough I suspect it is probably a product of an undereducated person.
- soundwave106 8y ago
  Agreed, simply "please use the unaccented letter" would have been fine instructions. Accented letters are pretty "normal" in many languages.
  - occamrazor 8y ago
    Accented letters are not the only issue. Apart from the already mentioned apostrophes and hyphens, there are consonants with diacritics such as ç, č and ñ, or cases where substituting an “accented” letter with the corresponding unaccented one is not appropriate (e.g. ä in German is transcribed as ae in ASCII).
- cabalamat 8y ago
  > "normal" letter sounds rather judging, doesn't it? it is a bit. > Altough I suspect it is probably a product of an undereducated person. Or an attempt to use non-technical English. I doubt if most people know what an ASCII character is.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

A few random thoughts: They chickened out on giving an actual example of a "bad word" name, though there's a not very dirty and really common example: Dick, which can be short for Richard. My ex is a Junior. When I get phone calls asking for "Doreen Traylor Junior" I know it's a telemarketer. I used to try to crack jokes, but they never got it. As far as I know, Junior and Senior are masculine. Even if they weren't, it's my married name. Doreen Traylor didn't exist until I married. I couldn't have inherited it from my mother, even if culturally we did that kind of thing. (I mean even if it was common to give daughters the same name as their mother and call them Junior.) I'm not sure where that falls on this list, but it seems like a glaringly obvious error if you know my gender. (And, as far as I know, Doreen is a female name. Though Michele can be male in some places, like Italy, they usually don't seem to know my middle name.)

naravara 8y ago
In a lot of Latin American countries people named Enrique are nicknamed Kiké, sometimes with the accent mark and sometimes without. (And many online services and forms don't accept accent marks anyway so it's kind of moot). This can, understandably lead to some confusion. It's kind of like when people visit India or Japan and see swastikas everywhere. The word "Kiki," in France, is sort of a juvenile way to refer to a penis (like "wee-wee" or "pee-pee"). So all the Kristines and Annikas and just plain Kikis of the world can be met with a lot of giggles when they travel.
andrelaszlo 8y ago
Jerk is a Swedish name that once was common in the region I grew up in. Now there are only 88 Swedes with the name left. It's short for Jerker (1522 people)... https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/namnsok/Search/?nameSearchInput=jerk https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/namnsok...
jaredwiener 8y ago
I've gone through life with a surname that euphemistically refers to an intimate part of male anatomy. While I've never had problems with it (well, technological problems, at least) -- this writer with a slightly different spelling, has: https://twitter.com/natalieweiner/status/1034533630071193602?lang=en https://twitter.com/natalieweiner/status/1034533630071193602...

Upvoter33 8y ago

This was a fun read. However, at least one point is wrong. "People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space" This is actually true.

GuB-42 8y ago
And how do you define the amount of space people's names fit within? ;) Tautologies are cheating. "People’s names fit within a certain amount of space" is definitely true though.
Piskvorrr 8y ago
Technically. Alas, I have seen too many cases where this meant "20 bytes of ASCII is this amount."

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

JohnWilcox 8y ago

Here we have an example of how all the deconstruction of society is resulting in ever cascading and mushrooming abstraction and complexity. Ok, so let's assume it is valuable to have caused and produced the majority of those "falsehoods" that were largely the result of only the last couple decades, outside of regional/language complexities. Why stop there though? Why is it not a "falsehood" that names must be written in text? Where is the support for names that are only phonetic? Where is the support for names that change every n microseconds? Where is the support for names that are only images? Where is the support for hames that are mathematical equations? Where is the support for names that are JS injections? Where is the support for names that are graphed in a dot plot? Are you discriminating against those who graph in bars, you bigot? Of course you would not want to prove you are a Nasi for discriminating against those who's name is expressed in video and only in 5k form that rotates between 50,000 clips every 5 minutes, would you? Where is your support for that? ... and the list of deranged deconstruction and destruction can continue ad infinitum. Of course that is all ridiculous in a somewhat exaggerated manner, but I can assure you that the vast majority of the subject "falsehoods" we are being lectured about would have been equally as ridiculous in a far more efficient and effective and cohesive time just a few years ago. Wait, where is your support for that symbol that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince used? Darn, is "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" title capitalized or just regular capitalized or at all??? BTW, if I were more offended, I would protest that my name ... that is written in neolithic stone age hieroglyphics ... is not supported and would call everyone that does not know how to pronounce my name a bigot. Is this satire, or humor, or am I serious? We have lost out collective ability to tell as we descended into madness.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
I know that was just a rant, but really, supporting names in non-western cultural formats isn't that unreasonable.
- CathyWest 8y ago
  But can you find a culture that sincerely uses one of those exact naming conventions? I agree with the base premise of the linked article, but I think such hyperbole just detracts from the point.

aquamo 8y ago

One option might be to use a hash of one's DNA sequence and be done with it. The name identifier can then just be an image with any markings made by the person. This would then move name / id search from a character set problem to an image recognition problem. Works for me :-)

deathanatos 8y ago
Chimeras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics) Essentially, people can (sometimes) not have a single set of DNA. And this has already caused issues: > In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance in Washington state when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defense, who were able to show that Fairchild, too, was a chimera with two sets of DNA, and that one of those sets could have been the mother of the children.

rfgjheljfrsd 8y ago

He (Patrick) missed out "People in the same family have unique names" as a general concept. He pointed out "Jr." and "I/II/III", but how about Maria <middle name> <last name>? Both my sisters' first names are Maria, as is my daughter and my upcoming one. My new daughter will have the same initials as one of my sisters (My mother, her sisters and my cousin also are all Marias, but luckily many of them have different last names). So, if your form only has an initial for middle name, you could have a situation where a person living in the same household (i.e. same address) is indistinguishable for another. So neglecting the middle name, as if often done, is terrible.

lmkg 8y ago
And let's not forget George Foreman, who named all five of his sons George Edward Foreman. So a middle name wouldn't have helped you there.

_jgdh 8y ago

41. You share a surname with your father. This is not true of many people from South India. My last name is my father's first name. So my sibling, mother and I share a last name, but my father has a different one (his father's first name). Shoutout to the consultant who was helping me fill a visa application and helpfully "fixed" my typo.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Nitpick. I don't think most developers "believe" most of these things. I think most developers would rather wire up some simple code to handle names and move on to (what they feel is) more interesting logic so they end up using 40 chars of ascii for names and leave it at that.

macintux 8y ago

It’s worth noting that mistakes here have enfranchisement implications as well: officials with one U.S. political party have been eager to combat voter fraud, including by refusing to allow people to vote whose names don’t perfectly match in all relevant databases.

nradov 8y ago

For those who have to design systems to properly accommodate most of these "falsehoods", don't reinvent the wheel. Take a look at how the HL7 CDA R2 format handles names for healthcare data interchange. http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=7 http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?pro... Each person can have multiple different names tagged by use (legal, maiden, alias, etc). Names can be composed of multiple different parts (prefix, suffix, given, family, or just free text). All of Unicode is supported. And names can also be NULL in various different ways (which is distinct from just blank or missing).

salutonmundo 8y ago

"e e cummings preferred his name written in all lower case." - this is not exactly true. He signed with capital letters, most of the time. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_capita...) A good example of such a name, though, would be eden ahbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eden_ahbez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eden_ahbez (he's also a good example of someone with more than one name.)

isotropy 8y ago

Despite being a middle-class white guy from the US, I've experienced three of these on the same day. When I met my future wife, my last name ("Coon") happened to be a (somewhat rare) slur on her ethnic background. At that time, a man couldn't automatically change names on his wedding day in California, so we had to go to court ahead of time to fill out a legal name change form. The paper form had only one blank for the entire new name. A Hispanic family ahead of us in line had a son whose last name was supposed to be [father's surname] [mother's surname], but his birth certificate had accidentally recorded his father's surname in the middle-name field instead. So the family wanted to move his "middle" name to the front of his surname. With only one blank for the whole name, the kid's current legal name had the same exact sequence of characters as the new legal name, and there was no place on the form to make a note. The judge asked if they were OK with adding a hyphen, and they were. Epilogue: each of my daughters has two middle names.

jvanderbot 8y ago

The worst offense is two-world last names. If you give me one field that says "Full name" I may as well roll the dice to determine if the three strings I input in there are First Middle Last, First Last1 Last2, First1 First2 Last, etc.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

>People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎. >No, your system is badly designed. >People have names. >This one is perhaps the most difficult for which to give solid examples. There was an isolated culture in which no one had names – they referred to everyone in relative terms, such as “my mother’s eldest sister”. So taking the last two statements together, any system that assumes a name exist is thus poorly designed? Some of these examples are things people need to take into account, but that doesn't mean bad design. A well designed system takes into account that there is a business need and a business budget. To ignore the constraints of real world situation makes less sense than ignoring the one culture where people don't have names at all.

CathyWest 8y ago

If someone can read this and finds it to be an interesting question, please repost it so that it could be answered to: I'm curious about naming conventions in different languages and cultures, so I naturally want to be accommodating, but how do I handle the UX problem of collecting all the metadata about names in order for the program to correctly reason about them? I can imagine that while users probably want their name to be rendered correctly, they would have little patience with complicated forms to do what would be just a simple text field when dealing with any local office where they know how to interpret it. Not to mention when you have to deal with different scripts being understandable by different people, and when adaption is needed, whether you want a cognate, a standard transliteration or an ad-hoc transliteration as a stand-in. And then on the receiving end, you might be using an application in English because it hasn't been translated into your language, but do you want to see the names of your countrymen in your native script, or do you want to see it rendered with Latin characters? And what if you don't understand the script?

draw_down 8y ago

God, I find this "falsehoods programmers believe about x" concept so irksome. Give people guidelines and tools to do the right thing, writing shit like this is just lazy sniping.

implying 8y ago

I have a hyphenated last name and I'd say 1/4 of online forms do not validate when I enter my name. When a system had an account created for me and doesn't accept logging in with my name, it is always a guessing game to see if they normalized it with a space, am underscore, removing the first or second name etc.