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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
- Exuma 7y ago> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points How is this not true? Edit: it's a joke lol, as I get farther in the list
- jrimbault 7y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/36742226/example-of-a-name-that-is-not-mapped-in-unicode-code-points https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36742226/example-of-a-na... As far as I can tell, all of those are not jokes.
- vharuck 7y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but the Kanji example in the accepted answer isn't an alternate so much as a "cursive" form. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_(East_Asia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_(East_Asia)
- oftenwrong 7y agoFor example: names in languages that have no written form.
- Jasper_ 7y agoChina has a long tradition of naming people with rare symbols that might not be in Unicode, and it's causing real grief for some [0]. [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/world/asia/21china.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/world...
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoI'm not sure it's reasonable to expect support for characters not in unicode. It would be more reasonable to get the character mapped.
- Jasper_ 7y agoI mean, it worked for 3000 years without support for those characters in Unicode.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoMany of the counterexamples show up as "???????" seen from here - perhaps a related assumption is "Unicode is always available at its latest version everywhere."
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agohttps://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
- neonsunset 7y agoAlright, this one got me at Unicode and people having names at all.
- tingletech 7y agowhat about Prince when he was in the trademark dispute about his name and he went by that symbol -- or maybe someone in a remote tribe where their script is not in unicode yet? What about an infant before they are named?
- Exuma 7y agoApparently it's real: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36742226/example-of-a-name-that-is-not-mapped-in-unicode-code-points https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36742226/example-of-a-na...
- samatman 7y agoThere are cultures in which it is considered unlucky to name a child before, say, their second birthday, so it's never done. In this case, it would be quite normal to have an 18 month old with no name at all. I mean, you could call them "Baby Surname" or something. But they don't have a name.
- pimmen 7y agoWhat if you have twins in that case? Or triplets? ”Baby 1 Surname”, ”Baby 2 Surname”, ”Baby 3 Surname”...
- leovander 7y agoTypically entered as “Baby Surname”, “Baby Boy Surname”, “Baby Girl Surname”. For twins, yeah I don’t think I’ve seen and index appended to their name. I feel like even if the EHR system had the birth time, I would normally get their birthdate starting at midnight. Let’s hope the EHR system keeps a unique MRN for those twins, because down stream systems are totally going to commingle their records. Same applies to Jrs living in the same house as the parent, since their demographics match the parent’s other than birthdate.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- WilliamEdward 7y agoLinkedin is extremely upset at this post.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoHas been for a decade now ;)
- jackschultz 7y agoOh my god names are so, so, difficult to deal with. I'm doing something where I get information / stats about players from different sites, and it's like all of them have different names. For example: Joseph Smith // nice and generic Joseph Smith Jr. // gotta make sure we tell people he's the son of another Joseph Smith Joseph Smith Jr // psh, we don't use periods! Jose Smith // if from a different country, some sites keep their native name José Smith // yup, sometimes accents are kept Joe Smith // nicknames, all about those. Joey Smith // kid nickname, sure Jos� Smith // literally even had to deal with a site that had unknown unicode letters Juan Jose Smith // sometimes, people go by their middle names, but some sites like to use their full name instead Juan Smith // remember how some people go by their middle names? Maybe a site only gives you their first and last How, how in the world is someone supposed to go through and match all those names with each other in a somewhat quick manner? I can't imagine it's fully solved because there'll always be other cases. I've tried a couple ways, like removing periods and accents, removing "Jr", "Sr", "III", removing all vowels even. And then went further and tried some of the string matching libraries that return a number with how close words are to each other. That would help cases where Joe, Joey, Joseph would come back quite close, but then I'd run into the issue of a "Darren Smith" and "Darek Smith" would come back so similar the computer thought they were the same person. In cases like names, that Patrick writes about here, yeah, they're almost impossible to get right and it ends up being mostly by hand, which is fine since I can get it correct, but eats up so much time.
- Jasper_ 7y agoManual data entry. There is no such algorithm that can do it.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThere is also no such algorithm that can try so hard to be "clever": most fuzzy matches will present their uncertainty, human input is assumed to be certain. The umpteen times some clerk "identified" me as someone who used a similar name (of different location, different position and ACLs, even different gender) were decidedly not entertaining.
- te_platt 7y agoThe one I would add is: Names are a reasonable indicator of the person's sex. Go ahead and prefix a Mr. / Ms.
- nabilhat 7y agoJohnny Cash recorded a song that's relevant. Wikipedia has a lengthy entry full of unisex names from around the world. Surely, someone, somewhere in the world makes up a new name every day. Based on a person's name alone, there's no way to assign a salutation with unattended automation without substantial and sustained effort and still not eventually fail in a potentially easily embarassing way. Much easier and safer to provide a field for users to fill in their own desired salutation. Bonus points if it's a text entry field instead of a dropdown list, for the same reasons that #24 through #29 are listed in the parent article.
- Zekio 7y agoIt is even better when the assumed sex changes depending on what country you are in
- Piskvorrr 7y ago...and what decade. https://www.scarymommy.com/girl-names-formerly-boy-names/ https://www.scarymommy.com/girl-names-formerly-boy-names/
- cprecioso 7y agoI think GP was rather referring to names such as Andrea (which is a traditionally female name in Spain, but traditionally male in Italy).
- Piskvorrr 7y agoI'm aware of this, having such name myself. Border control agencies eye me with various degrees of suspicion for this, depending on what gender my name is supposed to signify to them. (Yes, that's in the passport as well, but...well, bureaucracy)
- irrational 7y agohttps://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-causes-an-issue-with-any-booking-names-end-with-mr-and-mrs https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...
- pkaye 7y agoI worked at a place where the convention was to give employee emails being first initial and last name. Well this guy had a last name just the letter "I" and his first name started with "H". So his email became hi@company.com.
- staticassertion 7y agoI've stopped using my real name. My last name has an apostraphe, and at this point I'm just sick of websites rejecting it and then forcing me to refill in all of my information. So, now I drop the apostraphe. In high school my school ID was completely broken. It printed <first half of last name> <first letter of last name> <middle name> <first name>. They ended up putting a quotation mark instead of the apostraphe - somehow the machine handled that fine. That was the workaround. Hotel wifi systems tend to break if they ask for a last name to connect. Again, training me to reserve the hotel under a 'fake' last name. I actually notice it every time I write my last name. I'm like "is this a system that will break" and now I'm inclined to just never use the "real" spelling because then I'll get a mismatch later on. This is something I've really noticed over the last decade. The older I get, and the more systems become a part of my life, the more systems I have to give a fake name. Paper records will show my true name, but I wonder if at this point, given digital records, what it would appear to be.
- sneak 7y agoHow many systems truly need to identify you uniquely, and not just uniquely amongst their customers? My identity is private. I use placeholder names for virtually everything I do.
- stochastastic 7y agoFinancial services? Edit to be more substantive: There are a lot of places where Know Your Customer rules apply. Further, there are places where identity really does matter, such as insurance. The approach you outlined sounds like a headache when it comes to those things. Not sure who the headache is for... :)
- sneak 7y agoWhy do you think identity matters for insurance?
- stochastastic 7y ago
- ben509 7y agoHopefully, "names correspond to pronouncable words" is only false in a Fry and Laurie sketch[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LopIroSjsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LopIroSjsU
- jfk13 7y agoWell, for a while there was the artist known as an unpronounceable symbol that was sometimes explained as "the artist formerly known as Prince".
- Piskvorrr 7y agoAnything can be pronounced, obvs.; but especially English names are hard to pronounce correctly, as the rules are mostly embedded in the names' ancestry, not in the way they're written. (And then of course you get The Knights Who...Until Recently Used To Say Ni)
- chris_wot 7y agoElaine Yellow Horse was banned from Google+: http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-names-policy.html http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-name...
- tyxmq 7y agoIs anything genetic that makes native Americans get so fat? Reminds me of the case of native Australians
- Mindless2112 7y agoWell, she didn't miss out on much.
- behnamoh 7y ago> 40. People have names. Any examples where people don't have names?
- lowercased 7y agoIs that perhaps distinct from people who has 1 'name'?
- throwaway2048 7y agoStillborn babies, unknown murder victims (who likely have names, but still need records kept about them). Some tribes also don't assign names until children are nearing adulthood, calling them what basically amounts to child/boy/girl.
- progval 7y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-7635,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-7635,0...
- CapitalistCartr 7y agoIn the USA, "John Doe" is used for an unknown name. God help someone with that actual name. But hospitals commonly encounter the problem of a patient with unknown name that must still be entered into the database. Presumably the patient has a name, it's merely unknown. Except babies with no or unknown parents. Really no name.
- Scoundreller 7y agoWhile someone could have the name John Doe, their real date of birth won’t be some random day and month in 1867.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoUnless you have a system which also references dead people. ("Oh! Those exist?") There are administrative databases spanning centuries..."just use a random year in the 19th century" is just a y2k bug in a new suit.
- stevoski 7y ago> People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives. My fav example of this is U Thant, who was Secretary General of the United Nations. His name was actually just “Thant”. The U is something akin to “Mr” in Burmese.
- adamnemecek 7y ago(2010)
- rdiddly 7y agoHa! This has to be in response to this from several hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490850 Wherein someone named Amr keeps having his first name split into Mr. A by the airline booking system. Which would be bad enough, even if they didn't also insist that a name must be at least 2 characters. Good times.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoIt's almost a decade old...but still brings out the Followers Of Holy ASCII ;) See also the article about Christopher Null.
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoOnce I was working in a piece of software that handled people's names. The client wanted exactly a first name and a last name for every person in the database. I tried to explain why that could be a problem, but they weren't interested. It isn't necessarily the programmer's fault.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoTBH, I disagree with most of the points in this article, or least the implied idea that a particular piece of software needs to handle every permutation of how someone wants to be addressed. I'm pretty sure most US legal documents required some form of given name and some form of family name. If you're trying to interface with as US government system, and that's your primary use case, a single first and last name will probably suffice (assuming it's not too arbitrarily short, people can change their name, etc.)
- rovr138 7y agoI’m from the US. My legal name since birth is not 1 word nor my last name. My first name also includes an é. My birth certificate has all of these as well as my passport. My drivers license doesn’t have the é. Truncating my name is how I get mail from people states away who have never lived here. One of them being my dad. He’s never lived in this state so it’s not due to an old address. That’s also how I commit felonies by opening those letters thinking their for me.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoSpaces and é can easily be represented in a single DB column, and none of what you wrote precludes having a single "first name" and "last name" field to represent your name in a DB.
- jajaioxjeyo 7y agoThat's actually a great and informative article
- gtirloni 7y ago> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. Well, what hope is there then?
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThere's hope in functional literacy. The list clearly states that this is not a bunch of checkboxes your app needs to tick, and that some of the requirements are irresolvably contradictory.
- anonymfus 7y agoInclude some ways to record how name is written by attaching image and 3D scan files or directly writing it by scribing with mouse/touchscreen/stylus, and how it's pronounced by attaching sound files and providing record button (video too: don't forget about sign languages; but it is still not a solution for tactile sign languages which are used by deaf blind communities).
- kuharich 7y agoPrior discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472
- meristem 7y agoProgramming decisions around names get encoded operationally as well: within the last decade I missed a flight when a major airline's system did not accept my hyphenated last name at the check-in kiosk. I was then told by customer service I did not need the hyphen in my name -- their system was correct, and my view of my name was not.
- Hitton 7y agoAs far as I'm concerned people who violate "3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name." can go fuck themselves. How is that even supposed to work? Same with names that can't be represented by Unicode code points. How is my system supposed to handle them if they can't even input it?
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's exactly the attitude the article addresses. Let's just say you missed the point.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoHow very USian. For example, what about "people outside Latin-1"? There's the original, canonical name (e.g. in Cyrillic), a Latin transliteration (also canonical, but depends on the country, IIRC Bulgarian transliteration is slightly different from Russian), and both are canonical. As far as string matching, these are completely different; yet they represent the same person. Not to mention the Irish name duality, if Cyrillic is too exotic for you: those are two equivalent names, both canonical, both official...and saying "use the English version then" gets political right at that point.
- Hitton 7y ago>How very USian. How very smart of you to make such assumptions. I'm Eastern European and no stranger to different encodings and alphabets, and your argument is bollocks. Transliteration is by definition canonical form of the name, otherwise it would not be transliteration. There might be more ways to write a name, using different alphabets or using all or only some parts of the name, but only one is canonical.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoNope. And you failed to read the second example, too: both the Gaelic and English versions of the Irish names are canonical: they are not string-equal, even though both fit into Latin-1.
- jacquesm 7y agoIf you think names are hard, try email addresses. Most complex validator I ever wrote, and then had to switch off lots of it because email addresses in the wild don't actually follow the RFC... In school we had a guy whose last name was 'Van', a fairly common prefix for names in NL, which tends to be used like this 'van den Broek' or 'van der Berg'. Teachers would ask for his name, he'd say 'Jan Van' and they'd invariably ask 'Jan van Wat?'. So he eventually gave up and answered 'Jan van Wat' right of the bat, which would leave the teachers even more confused because there was no such person on their lists of students... Given that we know at least one guy whose first name is Van (Morrison) it is theoretically possible there is a person called Van Van somewhere.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoNope. Email validation is easy: contains an "@", and gets delivered somewhere. Everything else is too clever by half. Names lack this interactive verification...and oh my goodness, the tussenvoegsel thing you mention: the horror...the horror!!! (Oh, you wanted to sort the names? That's a Lovecraftian nightmare of its own.)
- sethhochberg 7y agoDuring registration flows, I'm also a fan of validating that the domain has MX records published - DNS queries are a pretty cheap option for detecting whether its at least plausible that your validation email will arrive later. At scale, its an easy option for helping users detect typos in their email domain (or for helping guide less technical users, like those who might provide address@gmail or similar instead of address@gmail.com)
- cblum 7y agoTell me about it. I'm Brazilian, a country where the vast majority of people will have at least two last names (typically one maternal, one paternal, but not uncommonly multiple from either or both parents), separated by spaces. I've immigrated to the US, where the standard is for people to have a single last name, or if they have multiple, they're separated by hyphens. To make my situation a little worse, legally I have two first names i.e. the second one is not registered as a middle name in any official document I have. I've dealt with systems that wouldn't accept my last names. I either had to join them together, or separate them by a hyphen. Some systems don't accept my legal double first name. When I got my driver's license in WA, the system accepted it but later had trouble generating the license identifier, so they had to manually apply the system's logic and enter it by hand. Some systems just ask you to enter your full legal name, and then try to be smart about figuring out what your first, middle, and last names are. So I end up with the first of my last names being registered as a middle name, and I can't edit it. Fortunately I'm close to being able to apply for naturalization, and that'll give me the opportunity to change my name. I'll just drop part of my first name and one of my last names and finally make it simple. Edit: another thing that's funny wrt names in my life is my family situation. My wife has her own two last names (it's not super common in Brazil for women to take their husband's last name), and she has a daughter from her first marriage. So we all have totally different last names, with only my wife and my stepdaughter sharing one of their last names. That caused us a little bit of trouble crossing the border to Canada once.
- avip 7y agoI have personally encountered a system that used name + birthdate to uniquely identify its "users" (large % of citizens of a country of non negligible size). That was absolutely insane. Try applying such logic in China or a big Arab state.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoWouldn't even work for a largish city. I have like 10 namesakes that I know of (none of them related to me), and my full name is not even that common. With birthdate, this is just the birthday effect waiting to bite someone.
- noneeeed 7y agoThat's terrible :/ The "birthday paradox" means you need just 23 people before you have a 50% chance of a collision, and 70 gets you 99.9%...
- Merrill 7y ago23 people born in the same year with the same name.
- beerandt 7y agoWe didn't name our baby until about two weeks after birth, which probably wouldn't have been a problem, except for the required daily jaundice checkups and blood work, all outpatient. While delivery and the nursery apparently are set up to deal with this, (by barcoding the babies patient bracelet) computers in other departments were not, at least without navigating multiple menus and screens. Every computer that required patient name and birthdate to be entered was a 10 minute process, to the point that we were famous by the third day of visits. At some point, a higher up was able to log in and "fix" the name to be discoverable by just last name and birthday, or via mothers patient info. I'm not exactly sure how, but I was impressed with it being "fixable" so easily (for us at least), especially network wide. I also understand now why the vital records people were so persistent in trying to get us to finish the birth certificate before discharge. We obviously didn't.
- partyboat1586 7y agoThe last sign-up system I built you get a single max length utf8 field called 'Name'. This field is not used at all in the UI except on the profile screen where it appears in full and in email templates where it also appears in full. It might not be perfect but it's as good as you are going to get without having to become an expert in names. I'll leave full localisation to companies that can afford to dedicate a team to it.
- cprecioso 7y agoIn my university (TU Delft), there are people from all kinds of countries, so they have a (I suppose legally-mandated) first name / last name entry, but also a "How should we call you" entry, in which you can write anything you want, and that's what will appear in the UI and class lists.
- Merrill 7y agoMachine-readable Passport Name Standards https://egov.ice.gov/sevishelp/schooluser/machine-readable_passport_name_standards.htm https://egov.ice.gov/sevishelp/schooluser/machine-readable_p... Actually, names should be considered to be descriptor data that can be searched on, not as identifiers.
- anonymfus 7y agoThe few commonly believed falsehoods which are missing in this list at the moment of me loading the page with it: n. Names can be included in any sentence in the same form as user entered them. For example any language like Russian where names decline breaks it. n+1. Names are grammatically nouns In Russian last names and patronimic/matronimic names are usually adjectives n+2. Any person's name can be disclosed to people who know them by their other name. For example if some LGBTQIA person has homo/bi/trans+-phobic relatives they financially depend on then such disclosure can be a catastrophic outing.
- Merrill 7y agoNames are associated with roles, not with persons. This is particularly true for prefix and suffixes. Mayor Lyndon Smersh and Lyndon Smersh, Esq. are different roles as politician and lawyer of the underlying person Lyndon Smersh. Many women also have multiple names, e.g. a married name used socially and their original name used professionally. When dealing with persons, it's necessary not to confuse their roles.
- razzimatazz 7y agoI propose we introduce a clever new concept we can call your "Fizz". You get a first fizz, and a last fizz. You can change it whenever, but you need to have one. But a fizz can only be ascii characters without case and no spaces. We just need a way to map (with some but not perfect reliability) your fizz to your identity as proven by some authorative third party.. The point being that 'name' is a term interpreted in culturally varied ways... which when I design most systems I dont care about. so to make it clear, lets not use that any more.
- doubleunplussed 7y agoMy first fizz is the ascii bell character. My second fizz is an ascii backspace.
- l0b0 7y ago"Preferred name," a UTF-8 string with absolutely no implied formatting, is a great way to deal with a bunch of these. Simply ask people what they want to be called and use that verbatim, always. Unfortunately the absolutely most common misconception about names is that they are easy, so almost every system tries to implement something more "clever," inevitably failing in stupid ways.
- burtonator 7y ago> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. Uh.. can't help you with that one!
- teekert 7y agoA friend's last name is Fun. A normal last name in the Netherlands. Facebook doesn't accept it so now he has a fake name.
- AllegedAlec 7y ago> Fun. A normal last name in the Netherlands No it's not.
- jancsika 7y ago> People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space. Ok I'll bite: A defined amount of space: 250 Terabytes. Please give me an example of an extant name which does not fit into that amount of space. Bulletproof edit: or the physical space that is the facade of the empire state building.
- Ayesh 7y agoSpeaking of names, my full name has 6 parts, and I share 4 of them with my brother. We never use the first three, and I stead, use 4th and 6th names to make the full name that satisfies the falsehoods. In the web sites I work on, I have decided to have one field that asks "How would you like to be called", and allow full Unicode range in it. If you want to use Emoji, fine, go for it. I have fewer data to store (privacy and data protection concerns), and users feel better not typing the last name either.
- FabHK 7y agoIt's always annoyed me that this blog post above didn't contain examples, and I'm grateful that someone here on HN in another thread posted a later post that does contain examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/ https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...