10 ms·

Besides the humor of how Lyft's filter flagged traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" – in addition to the usual issues with non-Western names, e.g. Pimp

by danso 7y ago

Besides the humor of how Lyft's filter flagged traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" – in addition to the usual issues with non-Western names, e.g. Pimpong and Poon – I'm fascinated/confused how this made it into production? The user database already exists and was currently being used by the live application. Before deploying this new filter onto the production database, wouldn't you do a dry run to get not only the count of users who will be flagged and notified, but a listing of frequently flagged names? Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives? With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.

qwerty456127 7y ago
This is all bullshit anyway. A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. I would rather change my actual name to Fuck if I wasn't too lazy to deal with problems like that. I once read a story of a Vietnamese man named Hui. He had to go to the court to protect his right to be named this way in Ukraine where the word is used widely and has only one meaning - a dick.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. There was a study linked to on HN a couple of years ago that found that babies recognize swear words even before they have language skills, and that people can sometimes recognize swear words in languages they don't speak. It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    Does this mean a baby, whose father's name is Dick would feel bad and/or get mentally traumatized?
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      > It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
    - afandian 7y ago
      Precisely the opposite.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Babies are recognizing the act of swearing at someone rather than the particular word being spoken. The baby wouldn't experience the father's name as a swear word unless the conversation was for example about the dicks new girlfriend and his wife's assessment of the matter. Dick vs DIIIIIIICK
- cortesoft 7y ago
  This is a nonsensical argument. A word has meaning, which is why it is a word and not a sound. If I yell insults at you, you are saying that doesn't mean anything? And if you get insulted, it is your own fault? No, words have meaning based on a common understanding between the person saying the word and the person hearing the word. If I insult you and you understand it, it is me who did the insulting, it is not 'your problem' You should try this argument out in court: "No, your honor... I can't be guilty of threatening to kill someone.. sure I said, 'I am going to kill you tomorrow at 5pm', but those were just words! If the person felt threatened, that is on them!"
  - manigandham 7y ago
    > "And if you get insulted, it is your own fault" Yes. It's just sounds that you hear, then your brain recognizes and turns them into words with meaning. How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness. This is how you might pick up words from languages you don't know if the sounds are similar, yet you wouldn't claim to be insulted by them. > "If the person felt threatened, that is on them"" Yes, your feelings are your own, nobody else controls them. That's one of the fundamentals of free speech. There are some very limited situations (like threats) where it's overruled, not because of your feelings but because of the intentions being forecast. Even then, there's a very high bar to prove any criminal intent there.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness. Considering that it is often very easy to guess how people will “react to the meaning” of the sounds you make, it’s often considered polite to refrain from making them when they would probably offend.
      - manigandham 7y ago
        Sure, but politeness is besides the point. It doesn't change the fact that your reaction is still your responsibility.
  - 7y ago
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. That's what you think the world should be like, not the way it is. If your name is Adolfhitler Smith, a perfectly legal name in the US, then you will have trouble getting hired. That's a made up example, but there's evidence[1] that unusual (not necessarily obscene) names will lead to less success in job applications. If you have a "bad" name, it's your problem well before anyone else's. [1] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
- gdy 7y ago
  "A word is just a word" Good luck using the N-word in the US.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Dave Chapelle's Mark Twain prize show on PBS was littered with N and F bombs. Only Fuck was censored.
    - rjeli 7y ago
      Not sure if you are aware but Chapelle is black
      - homonculus1 7y ago
        Does the skin color of the person vibrating the air impart some intrinsic quality to it? The point of the comment above is that the meaning is informed by the listener, you can import all the traumas and neuroses of those around you or you can listen mindfully and limit the impact to whatever is the speaker's intent and capacity to harm you.
        gdy 7y ago
        In the historical context, where in the US people with white skin had people with black skin as slaves, yes, it obviously does.
reaperducer 7y ago
Since a credit card is required to use Lyft, why not just validate the name on the card with the card company and make it the issuer's problem?
- andrewbarba 7y ago
  A credit card is not required to use Lyft. You can use credit from gift cards or promo codes, as well as 1 time payment methods like Apple Pay which are completed at time of ride booking and do not expose names
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    To use Lyft, or to sign up? Using alternate payment methods makes sense once you sign up. I do it, too. But can you start a new account without a credit card?
  - JaRail 7y ago
    Are you sure about that? I don't have Lyft where I live. But, about a year back, I was given a Lyft code for an interview. When I got the code, the instructions made it clear that I needed to register a credit card for liability. I had my account created with my personal credit card and redeemed the code. I thought I was good to go. When I got to the destination city and tried to order a ride at the airport, it said I needed to enter a SECOND credit card for verification. Unfortunately I traveled light and didn't a second card on me.
- danso 7y ago
  I just tried to create a driver's account on Lyft's website. There's an initial page where you give them your name. And then, deeper into the process, a form for supplying your name as it officially appears on your driver's license. Which makes sense. There's likely a lot of drivers who want to go by "Tom" instead of "Thomas" or whatever their full official name is – which is even more important for drivers with very uncommon names who want to go by something more familiar/pronounceable. There's probably a decent safety argument for not requiring drivers to have their full real names be accessible to the user, especially in cases where a driver has an uncommon (i.e. easy to doxx) name.
userbinator 7y ago
positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). This guy would disagree: http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm Along the same lines, https://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/chew-shit-fun https://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/chew-shit-fun
- danso 7y ago
  Yeah, no name filter is going to be perfect for all edge cases. But presumably, it's a lot cheaper to have the Lyft support team handle email tickets from the relatively few Professor Fucks, than to have them also deal with every Cummings and Dick.
  - xxxtentachyon 7y ago
    Or just not filter names on an app like Lyft. You can't even see other users' names. Who is potentially being harmed by even a malicious Professor Fuck?
    - zulln 7y ago
      Drivers? Cannot imagine it being a big problem people having really offensive names though, after all you are actually meeting the driver irl and expect them to.. well, drive you.
      - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
        Drivers have to go the in-personal approval thing first though, and they'd present their driver's license that would have their name on it - so the Lyft/Uber/etc employee who approves their driver status would presumably also verify that their name is real.
        Thorrez 7y ago
        zulln isn't saying drivers are spoofing their names. zulln is saying drivers are being harmed by riders spoofing their names.
jorblumesea 7y ago
> Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives? Implying devs test their code thoroughly. lol. After working at numerous companies (some with high bars of entry) I've noticed many devs push changes without testing properly. Or, if they test, they rarely consider edge cases or implications of what they're doing and only test the obvious base cases.
freepor 7y ago
https://deadspin.com/life-aint-easy-for-a-basketball-player-named-fuck-1692405122 https://deadspin.com/life-aint-easy-for-a-basketball-player-...
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
I had a friend named Hung Wang who was pissed Microsoft wouldn't let him make that his gamertag. "I'm so sorry my name is offensive!"
- somebodythere 7y ago
  I have a friend named Aryan who was not allowed to sign up for a Microsoft account with that name. Support even refused to make the exception when asked, suggesting that he sign up with the name "Ryan" instead. To this day, emails from that account have "Ryan <lastname>" in the header.
  - winrid 7y ago
    How do people find that offensive?
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      It is probably best known as part of nazi ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan This is no the only use, of course, but that doesn't matter. Good luck being a Hindu and displaying a swastika.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Or being ethnically Aryan :/
        wizzwizz4 7y ago
        > Scholars point out that, even in ancient times, the idea of being an "Aryan" was religious, cultural and linguistic, not racial. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
        saagarjha 7y ago
jdavis703 7y ago
I’m guessing test and prod are highly-segregated to prevent improper data access. Remember when one of the app-based taxi companies had employees who spied on their exes via their system? I’m guessing they beefed up security to mitigate the insider threat risk. Regardless, your point still stands. The product manager should have gone through whatever process was needed to pull down a limited set of production data to test against. Or the engineers could have logged exceptions in prod before making the filter active.
- bequestry 7y ago
  That end of year rush to finish projects in order to get them on your yearly review... :rolls eyes: Lots of corner cutting happens in december.
travbrack 7y ago
Or just let people use any name they want.
dilap 7y ago
Why even try to catch “naughty” names. Why do I even need to give Lyft a name in the first place? It just seems like such a made-up problem.
- jrockway 7y ago
  I think you and the driver are supposed to exchange names. This is probably awkward when you name yourself "suck my balls" or something, which people undoubtedly do because people are terrible. The Simpsons figured this out decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EjcWU6sEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EjcWU6sEk
  - pferde 7y ago
    No, you and the driver are supposed to exchange a keyword to make sure you got into the right car. That keyword happens to be a name by default because it's very... human, I guess, but it does not have to be your name. For taxis, I frequently use two or three random names common in my country.
    - isoskeles 7y ago
      > No, you and the driver are supposed to exchange a keyword to make sure you got into the right car. I've never heard of this. Where did you learn this? I'm not saying you're wrong either, as it makes sense. I've just never heard of it.
      - pferde 7y ago
        OK, not _supposed_, but it is a common practice, going back to traditional taxi services where you'd call a number and order a taxi to an address where you are. They'd ask you for your name which they'd also tell the driver they send you. On arrival, the driver would then ask the name when you're entering the car. It's useful for busier locations, where more people would call for a taxi at the same time.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
Stratoscope 7y ago
Oh gosh, I grew up on The New Bob Cummings Show. He had his own flying car, in 1961! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Bob_Cummings_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Bob_Cummings_Show
Haga 7y ago
This seems something pushed upon engineering by the social engineering department. Somebody got it in writing they should go life for a beta World and decided to hang the deciding party out to dry. Not very nice but a good way to reverse power dynamics and get emotional driven individuals to think.
tiemand 7y ago
In my team we called it the "Scunthorpe problem". Scunthorpe is a town in northern England.
- daeken 7y ago
  Tom Scott did a video on exactly that problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE
jfoster 7y ago
What's the upside of deploying this anyway? It's not as though it's similar to Facebook where these names are very publicly visible. It's just the drivers who would see the names. They could just generate the list of questionable names and get support to give them a call about it or institute a rider identity verification programme.
- dannyw 7y ago
  Wouldn’t be surprised if this was a 20% project by an employee group of some sorts. The intentions can be noble, such as a Lyft employee seeing an user named “F* N*” and thinking, hey that shouldn’t be okay. The actual consequences can be meh.
ginko 7y ago
As far as I can tell, the name "Cummings" is Gaelic, not Caucasian. http://www.comins.org/cummingsname.htm http://www.comins.org/cummingsname.htm
spacechild1 7y ago
> traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" It always amazes me when US Americans talk in terms of human races like it's the most normal thing in the world. And no, “Cummings“ is not a “Caucasian name“ (whatever that is supposed to mean), it's an English name. I don't want sound too harsh, it's just that as a Central European with all our recent history, things like this really rub me the wrong way.
- coldcode 7y ago
  Caucasian is a funny word to apply to Europeans since its a part of the area around present day Georgia and is a highly diverse ethnic mix of people which most people would classify as Central Asian (like Turks and Armenians for instance). Not exactly what you would think would be "white" which is what many Americans assume it means.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    > Not exactly what you would think would be "white" which is what many Americans assume it means. Because that's exactly how some people teach the definition to mean.[0] I've always been told that to the people in Persia, the people that came across the Caucasus were much more pale skinned. Teachings also say those same people helped populate Europe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people
  - isquared23 7y ago
    It does mean white/of European origin in American English. Just like entree means main dish. Both don’t correspond to the original meaning of the words. You can find similar shifts in meaning in other languages too (e.g., German calls a mobile/cell phone “Handy” which makes no sense to a native English speaker). I question the wisdom of telling native speakers that their language uses a word wrong/that doesn’t mean what “they assume it means”. Stuff in AE (and other language) means exactly what AE speakers (and speakers of other languages) assume it means. Cau·ca·sian /kôˈkāZHən/ NORTH AMERICAN white-skinned; of European origin.
    - 7y ago
bigtunacan 7y ago
As someone already pointed out here, Fuck is a real last name. Fucker is also a real last name. You need a credit card to pay for Lyft; I don't quite follow why they can't just match people up with their credit card data.
clouddrover 7y ago
> anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly How very dare you. I'll have you know I come from a long line of Fuckers.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by danso 7y ago

qwerty456127 7y ago

This is all bullshit anyway. A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. I would rather change my actual name to Fuck if I wasn't too lazy to deal with problems like that. I once read a story of a Vietnamese man named Hui. He had to go to the court to protect his right to be named this way in Ukraine where the word is used widely and has only one meaning - a dick.

reaperducer 7y ago
A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. There was a study linked to on HN a couple of years ago that found that babies recognize swear words even before they have language skills, and that people can sometimes recognize swear words in languages they don't speak. It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Does this mean a baby, whose father's name is Dick would feel bad and/or get mentally traumatized?
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    > It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
  - afandian 7y ago
    Precisely the opposite.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Babies are recognizing the act of swearing at someone rather than the particular word being spoken. The baby wouldn't experience the father's name as a swear word unless the conversation was for example about the dicks new girlfriend and his wife's assessment of the matter. Dick vs DIIIIIIICK
cortesoft 7y ago
This is a nonsensical argument. A word has meaning, which is why it is a word and not a sound. If I yell insults at you, you are saying that doesn't mean anything? And if you get insulted, it is your own fault? No, words have meaning based on a common understanding between the person saying the word and the person hearing the word. If I insult you and you understand it, it is me who did the insulting, it is not 'your problem' You should try this argument out in court: "No, your honor... I can't be guilty of threatening to kill someone.. sure I said, 'I am going to kill you tomorrow at 5pm', but those were just words! If the person felt threatened, that is on them!"
- manigandham 7y ago
  > "And if you get insulted, it is your own fault" Yes. It's just sounds that you hear, then your brain recognizes and turns them into words with meaning. How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness. This is how you might pick up words from languages you don't know if the sounds are similar, yet you wouldn't claim to be insulted by them. > "If the person felt threatened, that is on them"" Yes, your feelings are your own, nobody else controls them. That's one of the fundamentals of free speech. There are some very limited situations (like threats) where it's overruled, not because of your feelings but because of the intentions being forecast. Even then, there's a very high bar to prove any criminal intent there.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness. Considering that it is often very easy to guess how people will “react to the meaning” of the sounds you make, it’s often considered polite to refrain from making them when they would probably offend.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Sure, but politeness is besides the point. It doesn't change the fact that your reaction is still your responsibility.
- 7y ago
gridlockd 7y ago
> A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. That's what you think the world should be like, not the way it is. If your name is Adolfhitler Smith, a perfectly legal name in the US, then you will have trouble getting hired. That's a made up example, but there's evidence[1] that unusual (not necessarily obscene) names will lead to less success in job applications. If you have a "bad" name, it's your problem well before anyone else's. [1] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
gdy 7y ago
"A word is just a word" Good luck using the N-word in the US.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Dave Chapelle's Mark Twain prize show on PBS was littered with N and F bombs. Only Fuck was censored.
  - rjeli 7y ago
    Not sure if you are aware but Chapelle is black
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      Does the skin color of the person vibrating the air impart some intrinsic quality to it? The point of the comment above is that the meaning is informed by the listener, you can import all the traumas and neuroses of those around you or you can listen mindfully and limit the impact to whatever is the speaker's intent and capacity to harm you.
      - gdy 7y ago
        In the historical context, where in the US people with white skin had people with black skin as slaves, yes, it obviously does.

reaperducer 7y ago

Since a credit card is required to use Lyft, why not just validate the name on the card with the card company and make it the issuer's problem?

andrewbarba 7y ago
A credit card is not required to use Lyft. You can use credit from gift cards or promo codes, as well as 1 time payment methods like Apple Pay which are completed at time of ride booking and do not expose names
- reaperducer 7y ago
  To use Lyft, or to sign up? Using alternate payment methods makes sense once you sign up. I do it, too. But can you start a new account without a credit card?
- JaRail 7y ago
  Are you sure about that? I don't have Lyft where I live. But, about a year back, I was given a Lyft code for an interview. When I got the code, the instructions made it clear that I needed to register a credit card for liability. I had my account created with my personal credit card and redeemed the code. I thought I was good to go. When I got to the destination city and tried to order a ride at the airport, it said I needed to enter a SECOND credit card for verification. Unfortunately I traveled light and didn't a second card on me.
danso 7y ago
I just tried to create a driver's account on Lyft's website. There's an initial page where you give them your name. And then, deeper into the process, a form for supplying your name as it officially appears on your driver's license. Which makes sense. There's likely a lot of drivers who want to go by "Tom" instead of "Thomas" or whatever their full official name is – which is even more important for drivers with very uncommon names who want to go by something more familiar/pronounceable. There's probably a decent safety argument for not requiring drivers to have their full real names be accessible to the user, especially in cases where a driver has an uncommon (i.e. easy to doxx) name.

userbinator 7y ago

positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). This guy would disagree: http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm http://mw.eco.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm Along the same lines, https://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/chew-shit-fun https://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/chew-shit-fun

danso 7y ago
Yeah, no name filter is going to be perfect for all edge cases. But presumably, it's a lot cheaper to have the Lyft support team handle email tickets from the relatively few Professor Fucks, than to have them also deal with every Cummings and Dick.
- xxxtentachyon 7y ago
  Or just not filter names on an app like Lyft. You can't even see other users' names. Who is potentially being harmed by even a malicious Professor Fuck?
  - zulln 7y ago
    Drivers? Cannot imagine it being a big problem people having really offensive names though, after all you are actually meeting the driver irl and expect them to.. well, drive you.
    - DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      Drivers have to go the in-personal approval thing first though, and they'd present their driver's license that would have their name on it - so the Lyft/Uber/etc employee who approves their driver status would presumably also verify that their name is real.
      - Thorrez 7y ago
        zulln isn't saying drivers are spoofing their names. zulln is saying drivers are being harmed by riders spoofing their names.

jorblumesea 7y ago

> Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives? Implying devs test their code thoroughly. lol. After working at numerous companies (some with high bars of entry) I've noticed many devs push changes without testing properly. Or, if they test, they rarely consider edge cases or implications of what they're doing and only test the obvious base cases.

freepor 7y ago

https://deadspin.com/life-aint-easy-for-a-basketball-player-named-fuck-1692405122 https://deadspin.com/life-aint-easy-for-a-basketball-player-...

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

I had a friend named Hung Wang who was pissed Microsoft wouldn't let him make that his gamertag. "I'm so sorry my name is offensive!"

somebodythere 7y ago
I have a friend named Aryan who was not allowed to sign up for a Microsoft account with that name. Support even refused to make the exception when asked, suggesting that he sign up with the name "Ryan" instead. To this day, emails from that account have "Ryan <lastname>" in the header.
- winrid 7y ago
  How do people find that offensive?
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    It is probably best known as part of nazi ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan This is no the only use, of course, but that doesn't matter. Good luck being a Hindu and displaying a swastika.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Or being ethnically Aryan :/
      - wizzwizz4 7y ago
        > Scholars point out that, even in ancient times, the idea of being an "Aryan" was religious, cultural and linguistic, not racial. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
        saagarjha 7y ago

jdavis703 7y ago

I’m guessing test and prod are highly-segregated to prevent improper data access. Remember when one of the app-based taxi companies had employees who spied on their exes via their system? I’m guessing they beefed up security to mitigate the insider threat risk. Regardless, your point still stands. The product manager should have gone through whatever process was needed to pull down a limited set of production data to test against. Or the engineers could have logged exceptions in prod before making the filter active.

bequestry 7y ago
That end of year rush to finish projects in order to get them on your yearly review... :rolls eyes: Lots of corner cutting happens in december.

travbrack 7y ago

Or just let people use any name they want.

dilap 7y ago

Why even try to catch “naughty” names. Why do I even need to give Lyft a name in the first place? It just seems like such a made-up problem.

jrockway 7y ago
I think you and the driver are supposed to exchange names. This is probably awkward when you name yourself "suck my balls" or something, which people undoubtedly do because people are terrible. The Simpsons figured this out decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EjcWU6sEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1EjcWU6sEk
- pferde 7y ago
  No, you and the driver are supposed to exchange a keyword to make sure you got into the right car. That keyword happens to be a name by default because it's very... human, I guess, but it does not have to be your name. For taxis, I frequently use two or three random names common in my country.
  - isoskeles 7y ago
    > No, you and the driver are supposed to exchange a keyword to make sure you got into the right car. I've never heard of this. Where did you learn this? I'm not saying you're wrong either, as it makes sense. I've just never heard of it.
    - pferde 7y ago
      OK, not _supposed_, but it is a common practice, going back to traditional taxi services where you'd call a number and order a taxi to an address where you are. They'd ask you for your name which they'd also tell the driver they send you. On arrival, the driver would then ask the name when you're entering the car. It's useful for busier locations, where more people would call for a taxi at the same time.
- chrisseaton 7y ago

Stratoscope 7y ago

Oh gosh, I grew up on The New Bob Cummings Show. He had his own flying car, in 1961! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Bob_Cummings_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Bob_Cummings_Show

Haga 7y ago

This seems something pushed upon engineering by the social engineering department. Somebody got it in writing they should go life for a beta World and decided to hang the deciding party out to dry. Not very nice but a good way to reverse power dynamics and get emotional driven individuals to think.

tiemand 7y ago

In my team we called it the "Scunthorpe problem". Scunthorpe is a town in northern England.

daeken 7y ago
Tom Scott did a video on exactly that problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE

jfoster 7y ago

What's the upside of deploying this anyway? It's not as though it's similar to Facebook where these names are very publicly visible. It's just the drivers who would see the names. They could just generate the list of questionable names and get support to give them a call about it or institute a rider identity verification programme.

dannyw 7y ago
Wouldn’t be surprised if this was a 20% project by an employee group of some sorts. The intentions can be noble, such as a Lyft employee seeing an user named “F* N*” and thinking, hey that shouldn’t be okay. The actual consequences can be meh.

ginko 7y ago

As far as I can tell, the name "Cummings" is Gaelic, not Caucasian. http://www.comins.org/cummingsname.htm http://www.comins.org/cummingsname.htm

spacechild1 7y ago

> traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" It always amazes me when US Americans talk in terms of human races like it's the most normal thing in the world. And no, “Cummings“ is not a “Caucasian name“ (whatever that is supposed to mean), it's an English name. I don't want sound too harsh, it's just that as a Central European with all our recent history, things like this really rub me the wrong way.

coldcode 7y ago
Caucasian is a funny word to apply to Europeans since its a part of the area around present day Georgia and is a highly diverse ethnic mix of people which most people would classify as Central Asian (like Turks and Armenians for instance). Not exactly what you would think would be "white" which is what many Americans assume it means.
- dylan604 7y ago
  > Not exactly what you would think would be "white" which is what many Americans assume it means. Because that's exactly how some people teach the definition to mean.[0] I've always been told that to the people in Persia, the people that came across the Caucasus were much more pale skinned. Teachings also say those same people helped populate Europe. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people
- isquared23 7y ago
  It does mean white/of European origin in American English. Just like entree means main dish. Both don’t correspond to the original meaning of the words. You can find similar shifts in meaning in other languages too (e.g., German calls a mobile/cell phone “Handy” which makes no sense to a native English speaker). I question the wisdom of telling native speakers that their language uses a word wrong/that doesn’t mean what “they assume it means”. Stuff in AE (and other language) means exactly what AE speakers (and speakers of other languages) assume it means. Cau·ca·sian /kôˈkāZHən/ NORTH AMERICAN white-skinned; of European origin.
  - 7y ago

bigtunacan 7y ago

As someone already pointed out here, Fuck is a real last name. Fucker is also a real last name. You need a credit card to pay for Lyft; I don't quite follow why they can't just match people up with their credit card data.

clouddrover 7y ago

> anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly How very dare you. I'll have you know I come from a long line of Fuckers.

deleted 7y ago

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