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What Are “Unusual Characters”?
- peanut_worm 5y agoWas calling the creator of the form a racist bigot necessary? edit: removed quotation marks
- bumbledraven 5y ago> Was calling the creator of the form a “racist bigot” necessary? Don’t put paraphrases in quotes. The quoted text doesn’t occur in the article.
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- edent 5y agoIt wasn't. That's why I didn't use those words.
- peanut_worm 5y agoI apologize for adding quotation marks but you did call them a racist and say they were bigoted.
- snakeboy 5y agoTo be fair, the article is tagged "racism", and you explicitly refer to the design as "bigotry". > They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary. I understand that this is an accepted definition for racism these days. But bigotry still implies intent, doesn't it? 'Rude', as you put it later on, seems like a reasonable description, but I'm not really seeing any 'bigotry'.
- edent 5y agoThe dictionary definition of bigotry is the "obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group." I think it is unreasonable to believe that no one has "unusual" characters in their name. And I also think that pre-judging people for belonging to a group with accented names, is discriminatory. I'm not saying the people who designed this form go out at night shouting racist abuse at people. I'm saying that - through action or inaction - they are displaying their their bigotry.
- snakeboy 5y agoSo if in your opinion the designer is both racist and a bigot, why do you hold back from calling them a "racist bigot" ?
- pseudalopex 5y agoYou're turning a discussion about what someone did into a discussion about who they are.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/b0Ti-gkJiXc https://youtu.be/b0Ti-gkJiXc
- snakeboy 5y agoGood video, and you have a fair point. Thanks for sharing. I guess my real issue with the OP's language is that "bigotry" is a pretty charged term that necessarily crosses into a "who they are" conversation.
- pseudalopex 5y agoThanks for keeping your mind open. I think racism is just as charged. Don't you?
- snakeboy 5y agoPersonally, I do - but I accept that the commonly-held definition has shifted to diverge from mine in the last few years. I don't think "bigotry" has had that shift. For example, I think "naive" is a similar word in that it necessarily implies a characterization of the person beyond the action itself.
- danmur 5y agoThey could just be lazy/uncaring/incompetent. At least as many of them as racists.
- episode0x01 5y agoI don't think the author was implying active hostility on the part of the EE programmers. > It's the banality of bigotry which gets to me. Usual. Normal. Standard. They’re just dull ways for dull people with limited imaginations to dehumanise other people. The people who designed this form probably didn’t think of themselves as racist. They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary. Laziness, carelessness, incompetence lead to poorly designed systems, including systems which exclude groups of people.
- D13Fd 5y agoBigotry means intent. I think the author was just misusing that word.
- dmichulke 5y agoI understand the author's intentions, yet it's funny how he himself makes discriminatory assumptions: > We’re a decade on from “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names“ What if the programmer is 20 years old? EDIT & Clarification: People here assume the person should have read HN and should have read the article in question. I know quite a few programmers who don't know what HN is. And what if the programmer doesn't speak English well enough to feel comfortable reading stuff in English?
- bumbledraven 5y agopatio11 published “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” ~10 years ago. That doesn’t depend on how old you are. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- edent 5y agoWhile it may be possible that the designers for a large telco are all tweenagers - I think that's unlikely. And, most of the young people I know have far more empathy and a broader outlook than many "industry veterans".
- JasonFruit 5y agoThen ideally their education should have been based on modern assumptions about which people they could expect to be dealing with.
- ryukafalz 5y agoYou never come across posts from 10 years ago? I regularly happen across articles that I would not have been old enough to meaningfully use when they were first posted. The internet is a wonderful thing. That one in particular has shown up several times on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Falsehoods%20Programmers%20Believe%20About%20Names&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Falsehoods%20Programmers%20Bel...
- hibbelig 5y agoThe Peano axioms are much older. We teach them in school. Let's hope that those falsehoods will also be taught in school. (In a different school, of course -- where people learn software development.)
- gherkinnn 5y agoShallow rant about an interesting and important topic.
- harperlee 5y agoCome on. There is a huge stretch in jumping from only supporting ANSI due to legacy, laziness, whatever to being inadvertently “racist”. It is clumsy to say “usual” instead of “a-zA-Z”. It is not an exclusionary system. No one gets left out due to lack of unicode.
- nerdponx 5y agoIt's not just that the system is exclusionary (and definitionally it is, even if only for technical reasons). It's that the phrase "unusual characters" is inherently exclusionary - if your name isn't spelled a certain way, it and you are unusual. Moreover "unusual" is never actually defined. So it's doubly insulting because the definition of "unusual" itself is something like special knowledge held only by the in-group. Not to mention it's just bad UX, and clearly bad design if your name can just be two apostrophes.
- D13Fd 5y agoAgreed, for the most part. The biggest problem is the word “unusual” in my view. I think all systems should be designed to support full Unicode text at this point, but it’s hard to fault someone for failing to do so without more information. It may be due to Unicode text restrictions in back-end apps or related systems that were outside the scope of the project. Or it could just be laziness.
- ryukafalz 5y ago> No one gets left out due to lack of unicode. Except people with names that don't fit into the ASCII character set, I guess? What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important?
- harperlee 5y agoYou use a romanized version instead of e.g. kanji. Or you lose apostrophes. My name does not typically fit english forms and i personally would blush if I had to say I’m being left out. Sure, it would be better if I did not have to do this, but bucketing this into the “the system is racist” argument together with other real issues, imho, its compeltely tone deaf.
- zajio1am 5y agoAs a person with non-ASCII characters in name, i much prefer this approach than letting such characters pass but somehow fail on them later (which is not uncommon e.g. in airplane tickets or hotel reservations). Unless a system is vetted to handle Unicode properly, it should just be upfront about that.
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