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> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for D

• m4lvin 6y ago
  I am still surprised that the two-character icons which Zoom uses for accounts without profile pictures become "A�" for anyone called "Alice Ørland" or similar. It is even more surprising that Ö, Š, etc. become �, but 文军 shows up fine.
  • capableweb 6y ago
    Not so weird when you consider the context. Zoom is an North American company with most (if not all) of it's product/engineering development happening in China. Just reading public information, it seems they have no development teams in the North of Europe nor Eastern Europe, so it's only natural that some character sets ends up better supported than others.
    • _-___________-_ 6y ago
      It's likely that all the characters are being transferred and stored in the same charset (probably a Unicode one) regardless of what character is entered. The replacement glyph (the question mark) might be caused by their use of a font with incomplete Unicode coverage, or (more likely) by a buggy "take the first character of each word in their name" algorithm, for example using the first byte and then special-casing Chinese under the mistaken impression that nothing else needs more than one byte.
      • raverbashing 6y ago
        I agree, probably mishandling of combining characters
      • capableweb 6y ago
        From someone who doesn't know a lot in that area of software, thanks for the (possible) correction, learned something new today!
    • Xelbair 6y ago
      Yeah, that would work as an excuse back in ANSI days. we have UTF8 as a standard nowadays.
      • jdmichal 6y ago
        Unicode doesn't magically make this stuff go away, much less any specific encoding of it. A glyph can consist of multiple codepoints, and then those can sometimes be standardized to other codepoints. For instance, Unicode has codepoint U+00C4 for an A with a diaeresis (aka umlaut). But it also has codepoints U+0041 U+0308 for an A with a combining diaeresis, which should then map to the combined U+00C4 for font rendering.
        • Xelbair 6y ago
          and both cases should be handled properly, as it is in Unicode standard.
  • microcolonel 6y ago
    Specifically for that example, Zoom is written and maintained in China, so I would expect the developers made special code for segmenting chinese names but not non-English latin ones.
    • rusk 6y ago
      Are these characters strictly speaking "Latin"? Would they be categorised as "Nordic" or "Cyrillic"? Standard "Latin" characters to me are those that are supported on a Latin keyboard, and provided for by the latin codepage.
      • pedrosorio 6y ago
        They are all Latin according to Unicode 1.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script_in_Unicode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script_in_Unicode
      • Bayart 6y ago
        They're Latin characters with diacritics. They're not usually treated as separate letters.
• fantod 6y ago
  I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.
  • rusticpenn 6y ago
    Why do you need a library. Name is an open input field. As long as the inputs are sanitized, you should just accept whatever is typed there.
    • kace91 6y ago
      Depends on the language and what you'll use the name for. Some names change capitalisation when the last name is used by itself vs full name for example. In some languages a name affect the words around it in a sentence (for a random example, an "o" in Spanish (or) becomes "u" when the next word starts by the "o" sound -> "Carlos o Maria", but "Carlos u Oscar". In general, for a sufficiently large and well-localised application you will need to modify or parse the name at some point. Not sure that a library can do that properly though.
      • rusticpenn 6y ago
        I agree with you, however these are small issues compared to having arbitrary requirements for names which create real life problems.
  • enriquto 6y ago
    Do you really need a library for that? Why can't you leave the name as it was entered by the user, without making further assumptions?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• rusticpenn 6y ago
  I got this problem with several payment processors as the allowed name and name on my credit/debit cards never match. After a few years, I changed(modified) my name.
• scott31 6y ago
  People already started having emojis in their name, having hyphen is just a minor annoyance, and I'm willing to bet it being dropped does not change anything for you
• input_sh 6y ago
  One example I remember from high school is a person whose first name is Admin. Granted, it's an uncommon name, but he's unable to use his real name in many, many online services (Facebook being one of them of course).
• skocznymroczny 6y ago
  I always worry with plane tickets because I have a middle name on my passport but many buying services don't take middle names into account. Also the name of my town has a "Ą" letter in it, which also is problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead just to be on the safe side.
  • doikor 6y ago
    By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the passport too. Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work. Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2 names "Jukka" and "Pekka")
    • detaro 6y ago
      > "Jukka Pekka" [...] also you could have 2 names "Jukka" and "Pekka" How is that distinguished in legal documents/while registering the name/...?
      • doikor 6y ago
        In most important official documents name is not the only identifier as you also add the national identification number. I guess in most other use cases you just trust humans to get it right. As for how to register such a name correctly for a baby I have no clue. Also you don't have to give the baby a name at birth (you have 60 days) but the national identification number is given to the baby at birth (it is just date of birth, sequence number and a checksum character). All I know is that I have a colleague which such a name and have seen people before with space instead of - on a 2 part name edit: How we usually do forms for this stuff is just 2 fields. One for all of your first names and the second for your family name(s) (you can have multiple for example both of your parents or some foreign with de/von/etc). Validation is mostly "check that they are not empty"
    • mcv 6y ago
• thiagocsf 6y ago
  It’s incredibly ironic that the author also misspelled Hans de Zwart’s name as De Zwart, just like Facebook did.
  • Ballas 6y ago
    It is capitalized when used without a first name. (and the author is Hans de Zwart)
    • robertlagrant 6y ago
      According to Medium. At the top of the article another name is given.
      • barrkel 6y ago
        The Dutch language version of the article was written by Reinier Kist but the English version was translated by Hans de Zwart.
      • eythian 6y ago
        At the bottom it says: > This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was translated into English by Hans de Zwart. In the original source: https://archive.is/g6H0F https://archive.is/g6H0F it is also "De Zwart" when without the first name, and I would reasonably trust NRC to get it right.
        • naniwaduni 6y ago
          I would hope it would be even more reasonable to expect Hans de Zwart to get it right!
    • mcv 6y ago
      More precisely: the first letter of a name is always capitalised. So in "Hans de Zwart", the 'H' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised. But in "De Zwart", the 'D' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised, even if it normally wouldn't be. There might be an exception to that if that letter is not part of a whole word. "De" is a word, but I once knew a guy whose last name was 't Zet. The "'t" is not a word (it's short for "het", the neutral version of "the", whereas "de" is gendered[0]), so probably wouldn't be capitalised[1]. Now imagine 200 countries and languages with exceptions like that and imagine having to write software to handle all of that correctly. This stuff was never a problem before the internet, but I expect the next century is going to see a lot of simplifications in language. [0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way. Wrap your head around that. [1] This is also true at the start of a sentence: always capitalised, except when it's not a complete word. If you start a sentence with 's avonds ("in the evening), you capitalise the 'A', not the 's', which is actually the last letter of the archaic possessive 'des'.
• Uberphallus 6y ago
  > which is especially ironic as you are usually explicitly requested to provide the name as stated in the passport. Mine either doesn't go through, or goes through and is silently trimmed down to whatever amount of chars they support.
• namdnay 6y ago
  There are actually a whole series of algorithms used to help match the name on your passport with the name in the airline reservation system, due to absolute mayhem when dealing with asian names for example
• teekert 6y ago
  Yeah, in the Netherlands we also don't use the "de" and "van" for sorting so it was confusing to find my badge under the "v" at American conferences the first time. Ah well, what can you do? A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun"), ironically after he gave FB a false name they did accept it.
  • hnarn 6y ago
    > A friend of mine had his FB acount blocked for failing to provide a real name (his last name is "Fun") Don't they have a process where you can submit a government ID and have your name accepted? Honestly I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening for flagging a name that is both uncommon and one of the most common adjectives in the English language, if the policy is that fake names aren't allowed.
    • dwighttk 6y ago
      >minimum wage person You mean algorithm?
    • teekert 6y ago
      I don't blame them, but I would prefer to provide an accepted fake name myself over sending a document.
    • randallsquared 6y ago
      > I don't blame the minimum wage person responsible for name screening My expectation is that the person who wrote the code responsible for rejecting my name in the mid-to-late 2000s was paid somewhat more than minimum wage.
      • oh_sigh 6y ago
        I think OP was talking about the support staff using the system that the highly paid engineers wrote.
        • 6y ago
• dontchooseanick 6y ago
  And of course don't forget Pablo Picasso :) Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso)
  • pteraspidomorph 6y ago
    ...of Ulm ;) Name forms really should just be: Your full legal name: [accepts anything, modifies nothing] Shortened name of your choice for our UI: [can have restrictions, esp. length]
    • iudqnolq 6y ago
      I feel like the pattern of names in the UI comes from wanting to justify collecting the name in the first place. What is it actually good for?
      • will4274 6y ago
        Phone, email, messenger, basically any collaboration software? My university assigned email addresses by initials - e.g. if you name was John Anderson Smith and you were the 167th person with the initials JAS, you'd be jas167@example.edu. Which is easier to find, search, and read in a contact list - John Smith or jas167?
      • toast0 6y ago
        Hello X near the content you're looking for is a confirmation that you're logged in; without having to look at the header (which is usually more explicit). Having a friendly name there is an attempt to use less space.
      • tomp 6y ago
        Indeed. I consider "gender" even sillier - e.g. Facebook adding 100s of different genders to their website - how about just removing the field altogether? Same about "legal sex" - why would the government care in the first place?! (Doctors might, but the rest of the government, not really.)
• brnt 6y ago
  Another thing is overlooked, which is strange since these companies hire so many statisticians and much about their work is about understanding populations and individual preferences. When you have huge populations (2B) you're outliers are going to be similarly huge. The meaning and usefulness of means and medians over large and/or disparate populations loses its meaning. There are tons of distinguishable subpopulations (Dutch) which are pointless to lump in with Americans. Etc etc etc. You'd think someone would be familiar with subpopulations and the limitations of treating 2B users as a normal distribution, but yet that seems yet to be discovered. Ridiculous.
• eznit 6y ago
  If black people used "de" in their names I'm sure the bug would've been fixed in hours.
• ClikeX 6y ago
  Sites used to refuse the "van der " in my last name all the time. Had to remove the whitespaces to get it to work. Also, sites out my last name under v, which isn't how names are sorted here. "van der Name" is usually written as "Name, van der" in printed lists to make checking for names easier. And many dutch IT systems have a separate field for this. We call it a "tussenvoegsel". Which would roughly translate to a "middle addition". It's not a middle/second name either. Cause those are processed separately here as well.
• barkingcat 6y ago
  Note that this sentence (and the whole article) contains the same mis-capitalization the articles complains Facebook is doing. It is most likely an aggressive final pass of spellcheck or auto-correct that wasn't re-incorrected before publishing, but really ironic all the same.
  • prof-dr-ir 6y ago
    Hah, I guess that would be falsehood number 7 in the above link ("People’s names do not change.") Are you a programmer by any chance? In Dutch one capitalizes 'De' if it is the first word of the name. So the article is correct (for example in ".. says De Zwart."), as is writing "Hans de Zwart" or even "Mr. de Zwart". Bonus points: figure out the correct capitalization (in different context) of Nobel prize winning physicist gerard 't hooft.
  • superjan 6y ago
    No, if you only write the last name in isolation then you should capitalize the ‘D’. So it’s Mr De Zwart, but Hans de Zwart.
    • a1369209993 6y ago
      Honestly, this sounds less like "falsehoods programmers believe about names", and more like "natural language processing is terrible". A real name policy is unconscionable, of course, but "Found 1 sheeps."-isms on the display side are only a serious problem (rather than a nuisance) to the extent that they trigger (possibly latent) serious problems in something else.