8 ms·

You Win, Broken Database Schemas

43 points by ggoo 5y ago

oogetyboogety 5y ago
"As with many falsehoods that programmers believe, names have surprising complexity. Although Americans often assume users will have a single “first” and “last” name separated by a space character, this is by no means true around the world. Some last names (“van Hardenberg”) include spaces, as do some first names (“Sher Minn”). Some people have a single name (“Madonna”). In Japan, family names are written first, then given names. For an in-depth treatment of how to correctly handle names, we recommend this enjoyably written W3C guide, but our brief recommendation is that you ask your users how they like to be addressed, and what to call them in a formal context." https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria/
mulmen 5y ago
What's the proper solution here? Just a "name" field? Maybe formal_name and informal_name so you can do things like "Howdy ${informal_name}" without awkwardly using a last name? meta: What is the purpose of the M01 10 2022 date format? Is that intended to reduce ambiguity between the month and day? Why not an ISO 8601? Why isn't it M01 D10 Y2022?
- xena 5y ago
  Author here, yes it's intended to reduce month/day ambiguity.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Cool, thanks. It worked but I have never seen the format before. Any reason for not using a standard format? Just creative license?
    - xena 5y ago
      Creative license mostly. No real reason otherwise!
      - noizejoy 5y ago
        I’m using yyyy-mm-dd for pretty much everything, since it also conveniently sorts by time when used in file names and other alphabetic sorting systems :-)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- adoxyz 5y ago
  I think full_name or just name would be sufficient. And optionally allow given_name, middle_name, family_name if you really need it/want it for some purpose. But for a lot of common use cases, there's really no need to separate first and last name in a database imo.
  - oogetyboogety 5y ago
    These names follow with schema.org attributes. https://schema.org/givenName https://schema.org/givenName ( first ) https://schema.org/additionalName https://schema.org/additionalName ( middle or alias ) https://schema.org/familyName https://schema.org/familyName ( last )
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I’ve had to have a name field and a sortable name field before: Name: The Who, Sort_Name: Who
- davidw 5y ago
  Just use a 'name' field if possible, yes. Otherwise, add a whole bundle of fields and make none of them mandatory. That's what Google Contacts does, and that seems to work ok.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Contacts is an interesting use case. I prefer to have my parents full names in the contact but also have a display name set so texts from my mom say "Mom". So even in the case of "traditional" names there's still a use case for more than just first and last.
- jdougan 5y ago
  There isn't a "proper" solution that handles everything because just when you have text nailed down, someone decides their name is a novel pictogram (Prince) or an odor (no one yet, but if the iSmell was still being manufactured...). It is an instance of a general problem that policy can be anything, even stuff that is inconsistent. Closest I've ever got was in an object DB where I could define various subclasses of a Name class that were related to the Person instances (along with titles and whatnot). There were obvious efficiency and UI issues. Harder to do with relational.
- pjscott 5y ago
  As far as I know, almost all practical cases can be dealt with by storing family name (which must be optional), given name, and locale. Or just store a name as arbitrary Unicode text, if you don’t need to do anything fancy.
- noizejoy 5y ago
  Nickname is another related mechanism that allows for a single name field.
- Mawr 5y ago
  > meta: What is the purpose of the M01 10 2022 date format? Is that intended to reduce ambiguity between the month and day? Why not an ISO 8601? Why isn't it M01 D10 Y2022? I've never seen that before, it's hilarious. As to why, imagine you're from a country that uses a subpar date formatting like MM DD YYYY, and while you're conscious enough to notice its badness and improve on it slightly by adding an "M", you're not conscious enough to search for a fundamentally different approach - a sane date format. A local maxima of sorts.
  - xena 5y ago
    The dark truth is that it was inspired from the iOS Lojban locale date format. I'm not sure where they got that from, Lojban doesn't define a date format.
- chmod600 5y ago
  My name is the SHA1 hash of the UTF-8 representation of the next 30 unicode code points that follow it. If you don't have 30 more code points worth of stuff to say, you can feed fewer bytes into the hash. But then you can never speak about me again. What's the database schema for that?
  - mulmen 5y ago
    How do you respond without knowing the following content?
    - jdougan 5y ago
      Drop in a future/promise and backfill. Or just generate 30 nulls.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I think the proper solution is probably going to vary a lot depending on use case. Just full_name is probably a good default. Reconsidering whether you actually need to store a name, or whether you need more than an “informal” name is another good default. I’ve scare quoted “informal” because what you probably mean is somewhere between “preferred conversational” and “legally identifying”, and people may prefer to use a name they’ve chosen in formal settings (my understanding of Xe’s article suggests xer do [and sorry if I’m misrepresenting that, or misusing xer]). I have used a chosen name (originally chosen by a friend) for almost 20 years, both in formal and informal contexts. And many many people do, even from childhood (eg choosing to go by a middle name or a specific variant of the name on, say, their birth certificate). If for whatever reason you need or have a good reason to ask for/store a “formal” name and a “preferred conversational” name, those are probably reasonable default names, though you may want to also allow for multiple “conversational” names, and without qualification that can get ambiguous very quickly (which loops back to “reconsider” IMO).
- mjevans 5y ago
  Ask rather than trying to be 'smart' and out-think the end user. Most of the other replys talk about 'Legal' names vs various levels of friendly name. How about Mailing Address fields for snail mail? Don't decompose it, just have a full text area and store EXACTLY what the user provides. POSSIBLY toss it at a an address validation routine your postal services. Be prepared to handle an 'International' printed label where you might print a blob of text you don't understand, targeted to a country you do, and require manual processing for country, payment, and customs forms validations outside of the typical flow. Try to show the end user examples of where and how the information will be typically used. Never, ever, break down components of user provided input; at least not without letting them confirm if they're correct and allowing them to skip it if it isn't.
  - Orou 5y ago
    Anyone who's had to parse free-text international addresses can tell you that this is terrible advice. People type things into computers incorrectly all day long. We prompt users to select things like country from dropdowns with good reason. Imagine having to delete user data for GDPR compliance and needing to determine which of your 1,000,000 users are in the EU from a free-text field. Oh, this user wrote "Czechia" instead of "Czech Republic"? What do you mean they wrote the name with accents? Oh they wrote the name in their native language and not English? Have fun parsing all this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_names_in_various_languages_(A%E2%80%93C) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_names_in_vario...
    - wolfgang42 5y ago
      The parent did say “targeted to a country you do [understand]”. The impression I get is that for most address handling the only thing that’s critical to have structured is the country; probably everything else should be free-text until you have a reason not to[1], at which point you should find someone who deals with them for a living (probably a third-party provider), and even then it's probably best to provide a fallback for the weird edge cases. [1]: One good reason is that, as you say, people get things wrong—even their own address—on a regular basis, and you may be charged more money if you’re e.g. shipping things with the wrong postal code for the rest of the address. But even then it’s good to provide a workaround if necessary; post office databases can be wrong too!
Zababa 5y ago
> Anyone who claims to have their identity figured out is either in denial or stopped digging into it for the time being. The rabbit hole truly never ends. I agree with that part, but I also think that often giving a name isn't really about identity, but about having a shared space to communicate. For example, when I want to order something online, I have to give a delivery address. I may live here. I may not. It might be just a PO box, or the address of a friend. But, by giving this address, I'm saying "put what I want in a box, I'll handle it from here". I feel the same for names. It's not about expressing who I am deeply, it's about giving something to people that they can use. Now, as usual, the correct answer here might be to not even ask for a name in the first place. Usually websites have my email address, and that's enough. They can put the information that they want to transmit to me in a box, and I'll take a look.
- dleslie 5y ago
  > > Anyone who claims to have their identity figured out is either in denial or stopped digging into it for the time being. The rabbit hole truly never ends. Like you stated, it's a bit of a leap to conflate self identity and one's name. It's just an identifier, not the full self. And the false dichotomy seems a tad presumptuous. Some folks truly do have a firm understanding of themselves and lack self-doubt. Or for some their identity isn't the focus of their activities, and acts as a simple tool to achieve other things. Or perhaps what they've figured out is to accept that their identity is fluid and will forever be hard to define. Or...
- mulmen 5y ago
  I'm not sure the name/address analogy fits. Names are deeply personal, at least for some people. An address is not open to interpretation and doesn't convey any personal meaning. On the other hand, if the pizza place asks for a "home" address that makes me uncomfortable (conceptually offensive/technically incorrect) when I order to a friends house. I know what it means so I fill in the correct value to get the result I want but the form should say "delivery address".
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > An address is not open to interpretation and doesn't convey any personal meaning. I've heard plenty of time to not put my address in my CV if I'm not currently living in a nice place. Especially for students looking for job, a foreign-sounding name and an address in a relatively bad neighborhood (where prices are cheaper) can be enough for people to reject your application. > On the other hand, if the pizza place asks for a "home" address that makes me uncomfortable (conceptually offensive/technically incorrect) when I order to a friends house. I know what it means so I fill in the correct value to get the result I want but the form should say "delivery address". I think we agree in that forms shouldn't ask for a "personal" information when they need a "practical" informations ("where do you live?" vs "where should we deliver your pizza?"). Names are like that, I think. 95% of the time, when websites ask for a name, they want something to put in marketing emails or when you're connected. I can understand that most people don't mind, but adding an option to opt out shouldn't be too hard.
geraldyo 5y ago
We're currently making an effort to restructure our databases so that we can accommodate mononyms. Nice to see at least one person might find that cool lol
msla 5y ago
Sadly, it isn't always up to the people who design the schemas. For example, Iceland has very restrictive naming laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law > Parents are limited to choosing children's names from the Personal Names Register, which as of 2013 approved 1800 names for each gender.[20] Since 2019 given names are no longer restricted by gender.[21] The Icelandic Naming Committee maintains the list and hears requests for exceptions. Israel apparently demands first and last names: > According to a law from 1956, a person should have a first name (more than one is permitted) and surname (a double-barrelled name is permitted). Finland is, apparently, worse than Iceland: > The Names Act of 1985 requires that all Finnish citizens and residents have at least one and at the most four first names. Persons who do not have a first name are obligated to adopt one when they are entered into the Finnish national population database. Parents of new-born children must name their child and inform the population registry within two months of the child's birth. The name may be chosen freely, but it must not be > a name used primarily by persons of the other sex > a name foreign to the naming tradition in Finland > a surname, except a patronymic as last given name > a name already used by a sibling, if this is to be the only given name.
- half-kh-hacker 5y ago
  So systems in these countries should just be built without any regard for foreign names? There isn't really a working excuse for a broken schema. Just have a blanket 'name' field. The name someone wants to be called and their legal name isn't necessarily the same, either. If you're writing normal software, you shouldn't really care about these legal provisions. I guess you'd want a 'Billing Name' too in most cases.
  - msla 5y ago
    > So systems in these countries should just be built without any regard for foreign names? I never said anything about "should" and I think this conflation of "what this person knows the world is" with "what this person thinks the world should be" is detrimental to discourse. I've seen it in multiple places, especially online, and it leads to arguments where both people actually agree on what should be, but one of them is talking about what is and the other person can't or won't tell the difference between the two.
noizejoy 5y ago
Language is incredibly contextual. Database schemas are mostly rough approximations, generally driven by the principle “close enough to be useful” rather than “a one-to-one model of reality”. That being said, I’ve gone though a similar caving-to-the-reality-of-database-schemas a few years ago, when I changed my music making artist name from a single word to a first name, last name schema.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paiute 5y ago
oh please, shouldn't it xe. website not Christine. I have 4 names and it doesn't always work out. It's not a big deal to not accommodate xe and Socrates perfectly either.
deleted 5y ago
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shoo 5y ago
> The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identity, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual's identity and linking him or her to a kingroup. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state's exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. -- James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
kibwen 5y ago
Software makes processes more efficient. But it does so at the cost of hardcoding assumptions. These days, effecting social change requires not just convincing people (already quite a tall order), but also changing the software that automatically encodes the assumptions made under the previous societal context. As an example, consider abolishing daylight savings time: nowadays you not only have to convince people that it's a good idea, but you also either need to convince them that all the broken software that assumes DST is either worth fixing or worth putting up with forever. Or consider spelling: in the past spelling reform was a thing that actually ever happened, but these days any attempt at spelling reform would be crushed by the inertia of automatic spellcheck (on the flip side, it might be easier to convince Google and Apple to change their spellcheck dictionaries than to convince people to change their spelling on their own); sadly, English will be stuck with the tragedy of "ough" forever.
Edman274 5y ago
A riddle that stumps 3rd graders: Q: "What belongs to you but others use it more than you do?" A: "Your name." Given that your name is going to be used by other people a lot more frequently than you're going to use it yourself, it would make sense to make sure that your name is convenient for others to use. Another thing - any person defining their own name could technically have a valid caveat that breaks some schema. I could decide that I can never have the same name after it's been uttered once. I could decide that my name is the last ten thousand numbers of pi. I could decide that my name is only allowed to be said by a person, and not rendered by a computer, because my name belongs to only the heavenly language of humans. I could decide that my name is the same as my social security number, which would make any system that doesn't have PCI-DSS control on my name out of compliance. There is no limit to the ways that a name can be restricted in a database, because there's no limit to the ways that a name can be defined. We decided collectively in the western English speaking world to assume that mononyms are more of a novelty than a real identifier. There will be other restrictions. There always are. An example: the restriction that people using a website are literate. I think you'll find that there are far more illiterate computer users than there are people with mononyms, and yet no one designs websites to cater to those who are not able to read.
- krallja 5y ago
  PCI: payments card industry They don’t care about your SSN. They only care about credit card numbers (“PANs”).
  - Edman274 5y ago
    Okay. Let's change the example. I make my full, legal name the same as my credit card number.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > Given that your name is going to be used by other people a lot more frequently than you're going to use it yourself, it would make sense to make sure that your name is convenient for others to use. I’m not sure a riddle that stumps young children is a good basis for how people should define their own identity. I certainly don’t think it should defer to the convenience of others. Especially when identity, or conflict thereof, can be a source of trauma and/or expose people to serious risk.
Orou 5y ago
This makes me really curious about how people with legal mononyms (Ye, Cher, etc.) have their taxes filed or medical forms filled out.
- jdougan 5y ago
  On paper forms you usef to just draw a line theough the field to make clear that you didn't just forget. I've seen electronic forms that require you enter "N/A" for the same. Would be amusing if someone chamged their name to "N/A".
- lmm 5y ago
  In some countries it's not legal. If it is legal then you complain, you muddle through, you accept compromises like an extra space in a few cases.
lmm 5y ago
We live in a society and names are tools for relating to other people with. I think it's fine to expect people to either conform to local cultural conventions or accept responsibility for any consequences themselves. I changed the name I go by when I immigrated to one that fits better with the people around me (and would have changed it more thoroughly if I'd known before the current form of it got entrenched in this country's bureaucracy). Expecting the world to bend to your arbitrary naming whims (and it is explicitly a personal whim in this case) instead feels pretty entitled.
- totesraunch 5y ago
  The assumption here is that the entire world uses western naming conventions, there are many cultures where people are given one or five names or whatever number, and western society (or our idea of what a name is) is forcing them to conform. These are not always 'arbitrary naming whims'.
  - lmm 5y ago
    > there are many cultures where people are given one or five names or whatever number, and western society (or our idea of what a name is) is forcing them to conform. And yet somehow those aren't the people we see complaining (and I'm speaking as someone whose name currently gets mangled because I have the "wrong" number of names).
l0b0 5y ago
The solution really is simple: `preferred_name TEXT NOT NULL` If it must match your given name, feel free to add `legal_name TEXT NOT NULL`, at the cost of some really awkward form filling for your users.
njkleiner 5y ago
While on the topic of names, could we discuss the difference between given name(s) and middle names and the implications this has on anglocentric software/database design? While middle names might be common in the anglosphere, in other countries (e.g. Germany) it is common to have multiple given names, which is not the same as having a single given (first) name followed by zero or more middle names. Here is a simplified version of how it works in Germany: Informally, people usually go by exactly one of the given names, but notably, this can be any one of the multiple given names, since these have equal status by law (this is different from going by your middle name, which have other legal implications, depending on the jurisdiction). Using all given names is usually only required for official purposes (e.g. on a passport). Note that using a combination of more than one (but not all) of the given names or changing the order (without doing an official name change) is not allowed. A person can, of course, choose to use all given names in day to day life too. This means that a person with the given names Foo Bar and the family name FizzBuzz may use any of the following names: - Foo FizzBuzz - Bar FizzBuzz - Foo Bar FizzBuzz Note that it is perfectly legal for this person to go by Bar FizzBuzz even though "Bar" is not their first name (of the given names). Also note that changing your given names (other than their order) is not easily possible for most people (according to current law), so if you require someone to give you their full name (here Foo Bar FizzBuzz) for legal reasons, please also give the user the option to at least state a simplified version of their legal name for display purposes (such as any single one of their given names which may not be the first). TL;DR Do: - Allow people to enter multiple given names, even if you also ask for middle names separately - Consider that the same person may use a different single given name for different purposes (e.g. basic account details vs. name details in the shipping address) Don't: - Prompt for the full name (including all given/middle name, or the family name) unless you have to for legal reasons; if you do have to, at least let the user pick another name for display purposes, which may be derived from their full legal name in unexpected ways - Omit any of the multiple given names because "middle names are optional" or "not part of the legal name" - Forcibly abbreviate the remaining given names after the first given name - Drop any part of a given or family name if the name consists of multiple components separated by a dash

43 points by ggoo 5y ago

"As with many falsehoods that programmers believe, names have surprising complexity. Although Americans often assume users will have a single “first” and “last” name separated by a space character, this is by no means true around the world. Some last names (“van Hardenberg”) include spaces, as do some first names (“Sher Minn”). Some people have a single name (“Madonna”). In Japan, family names are written first, then given names. For an in-depth treatment of how to correctly handle names, we recommend this enjoyably written W3C guide, but our brief recommendation is that you ask your users how they like to be addressed, and what to call them in a formal context." https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/cambria/

mulmen 5y ago

What's the proper solution here? Just a "name" field? Maybe formal_name and informal_name so you can do things like "Howdy ${informal_name}" without awkwardly using a last name? meta: What is the purpose of the M01 10 2022 date format? Is that intended to reduce ambiguity between the month and day? Why not an ISO 8601? Why isn't it M01 D10 Y2022?

xena 5y ago
Author here, yes it's intended to reduce month/day ambiguity.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Cool, thanks. It worked but I have never seen the format before. Any reason for not using a standard format? Just creative license?
  - xena 5y ago
    Creative license mostly. No real reason otherwise!
    - noizejoy 5y ago
      I’m using yyyy-mm-dd for pretty much everything, since it also conveniently sorts by time when used in file names and other alphabetic sorting systems :-)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
adoxyz 5y ago
I think full_name or just name would be sufficient. And optionally allow given_name, middle_name, family_name if you really need it/want it for some purpose. But for a lot of common use cases, there's really no need to separate first and last name in a database imo.
- oogetyboogety 5y ago
  These names follow with schema.org attributes. https://schema.org/givenName https://schema.org/givenName ( first ) https://schema.org/additionalName https://schema.org/additionalName ( middle or alias ) https://schema.org/familyName https://schema.org/familyName ( last )
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I’ve had to have a name field and a sortable name field before: Name: The Who, Sort_Name: Who
davidw 5y ago
Just use a 'name' field if possible, yes. Otherwise, add a whole bundle of fields and make none of them mandatory. That's what Google Contacts does, and that seems to work ok.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Contacts is an interesting use case. I prefer to have my parents full names in the contact but also have a display name set so texts from my mom say "Mom". So even in the case of "traditional" names there's still a use case for more than just first and last.
jdougan 5y ago
There isn't a "proper" solution that handles everything because just when you have text nailed down, someone decides their name is a novel pictogram (Prince) or an odor (no one yet, but if the iSmell was still being manufactured...). It is an instance of a general problem that policy can be anything, even stuff that is inconsistent. Closest I've ever got was in an object DB where I could define various subclasses of a Name class that were related to the Person instances (along with titles and whatnot). There were obvious efficiency and UI issues. Harder to do with relational.
pjscott 5y ago
As far as I know, almost all practical cases can be dealt with by storing family name (which must be optional), given name, and locale. Or just store a name as arbitrary Unicode text, if you don’t need to do anything fancy.
noizejoy 5y ago
Nickname is another related mechanism that allows for a single name field.
Mawr 5y ago
> meta: What is the purpose of the M01 10 2022 date format? Is that intended to reduce ambiguity between the month and day? Why not an ISO 8601? Why isn't it M01 D10 Y2022? I've never seen that before, it's hilarious. As to why, imagine you're from a country that uses a subpar date formatting like MM DD YYYY, and while you're conscious enough to notice its badness and improve on it slightly by adding an "M", you're not conscious enough to search for a fundamentally different approach - a sane date format. A local maxima of sorts.
- xena 5y ago
  The dark truth is that it was inspired from the iOS Lojban locale date format. I'm not sure where they got that from, Lojban doesn't define a date format.
chmod600 5y ago
My name is the SHA1 hash of the UTF-8 representation of the next 30 unicode code points that follow it. If you don't have 30 more code points worth of stuff to say, you can feed fewer bytes into the hash. But then you can never speak about me again. What's the database schema for that?
- mulmen 5y ago
  How do you respond without knowing the following content?
  - jdougan 5y ago
    Drop in a future/promise and backfill. Or just generate 30 nulls.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
I think the proper solution is probably going to vary a lot depending on use case. Just full_name is probably a good default. Reconsidering whether you actually need to store a name, or whether you need more than an “informal” name is another good default. I’ve scare quoted “informal” because what you probably mean is somewhere between “preferred conversational” and “legally identifying”, and people may prefer to use a name they’ve chosen in formal settings (my understanding of Xe’s article suggests xer do [and sorry if I’m misrepresenting that, or misusing xer]). I have used a chosen name (originally chosen by a friend) for almost 20 years, both in formal and informal contexts. And many many people do, even from childhood (eg choosing to go by a middle name or a specific variant of the name on, say, their birth certificate). If for whatever reason you need or have a good reason to ask for/store a “formal” name and a “preferred conversational” name, those are probably reasonable default names, though you may want to also allow for multiple “conversational” names, and without qualification that can get ambiguous very quickly (which loops back to “reconsider” IMO).
mjevans 5y ago
Ask rather than trying to be 'smart' and out-think the end user. Most of the other replys talk about 'Legal' names vs various levels of friendly name. How about Mailing Address fields for snail mail? Don't decompose it, just have a full text area and store EXACTLY what the user provides. POSSIBLY toss it at a an address validation routine your postal services. Be prepared to handle an 'International' printed label where you might print a blob of text you don't understand, targeted to a country you do, and require manual processing for country, payment, and customs forms validations outside of the typical flow. Try to show the end user examples of where and how the information will be typically used. Never, ever, break down components of user provided input; at least not without letting them confirm if they're correct and allowing them to skip it if it isn't.
- Orou 5y ago
  Anyone who's had to parse free-text international addresses can tell you that this is terrible advice. People type things into computers incorrectly all day long. We prompt users to select things like country from dropdowns with good reason. Imagine having to delete user data for GDPR compliance and needing to determine which of your 1,000,000 users are in the EU from a free-text field. Oh, this user wrote "Czechia" instead of "Czech Republic"? What do you mean they wrote the name with accents? Oh they wrote the name in their native language and not English? Have fun parsing all this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_names_in_various_languages_(A%E2%80%93C) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_names_in_vario...
  - wolfgang42 5y ago
    The parent did say “targeted to a country you do [understand]”. The impression I get is that for most address handling the only thing that’s critical to have structured is the country; probably everything else should be free-text until you have a reason not to[1], at which point you should find someone who deals with them for a living (probably a third-party provider), and even then it's probably best to provide a fallback for the weird edge cases. [1]: One good reason is that, as you say, people get things wrong—even their own address—on a regular basis, and you may be charged more money if you’re e.g. shipping things with the wrong postal code for the rest of the address. But even then it’s good to provide a workaround if necessary; post office databases can be wrong too!

Zababa 5y ago

> Anyone who claims to have their identity figured out is either in denial or stopped digging into it for the time being. The rabbit hole truly never ends. I agree with that part, but I also think that often giving a name isn't really about identity, but about having a shared space to communicate. For example, when I want to order something online, I have to give a delivery address. I may live here. I may not. It might be just a PO box, or the address of a friend. But, by giving this address, I'm saying "put what I want in a box, I'll handle it from here". I feel the same for names. It's not about expressing who I am deeply, it's about giving something to people that they can use. Now, as usual, the correct answer here might be to not even ask for a name in the first place. Usually websites have my email address, and that's enough. They can put the information that they want to transmit to me in a box, and I'll take a look.

dleslie 5y ago
> > Anyone who claims to have their identity figured out is either in denial or stopped digging into it for the time being. The rabbit hole truly never ends. Like you stated, it's a bit of a leap to conflate self identity and one's name. It's just an identifier, not the full self. And the false dichotomy seems a tad presumptuous. Some folks truly do have a firm understanding of themselves and lack self-doubt. Or for some their identity isn't the focus of their activities, and acts as a simple tool to achieve other things. Or perhaps what they've figured out is to accept that their identity is fluid and will forever be hard to define. Or...
mulmen 5y ago
I'm not sure the name/address analogy fits. Names are deeply personal, at least for some people. An address is not open to interpretation and doesn't convey any personal meaning. On the other hand, if the pizza place asks for a "home" address that makes me uncomfortable (conceptually offensive/technically incorrect) when I order to a friends house. I know what it means so I fill in the correct value to get the result I want but the form should say "delivery address".
- Zababa 5y ago
  > An address is not open to interpretation and doesn't convey any personal meaning. I've heard plenty of time to not put my address in my CV if I'm not currently living in a nice place. Especially for students looking for job, a foreign-sounding name and an address in a relatively bad neighborhood (where prices are cheaper) can be enough for people to reject your application. > On the other hand, if the pizza place asks for a "home" address that makes me uncomfortable (conceptually offensive/technically incorrect) when I order to a friends house. I know what it means so I fill in the correct value to get the result I want but the form should say "delivery address". I think we agree in that forms shouldn't ask for a "personal" information when they need a "practical" informations ("where do you live?" vs "where should we deliver your pizza?"). Names are like that, I think. 95% of the time, when websites ask for a name, they want something to put in marketing emails or when you're connected. I can understand that most people don't mind, but adding an option to opt out shouldn't be too hard.

geraldyo 5y ago

We're currently making an effort to restructure our databases so that we can accommodate mononyms. Nice to see at least one person might find that cool lol

msla 5y ago

Sadly, it isn't always up to the people who design the schemas. For example, Iceland has very restrictive naming laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law > Parents are limited to choosing children's names from the Personal Names Register, which as of 2013 approved 1800 names for each gender.[20] Since 2019 given names are no longer restricted by gender.[21] The Icelandic Naming Committee maintains the list and hears requests for exceptions. Israel apparently demands first and last names: > According to a law from 1956, a person should have a first name (more than one is permitted) and surname (a double-barrelled name is permitted). Finland is, apparently, worse than Iceland: > The Names Act of 1985 requires that all Finnish citizens and residents have at least one and at the most four first names. Persons who do not have a first name are obligated to adopt one when they are entered into the Finnish national population database. Parents of new-born children must name their child and inform the population registry within two months of the child's birth. The name may be chosen freely, but it must not be > a name used primarily by persons of the other sex > a name foreign to the naming tradition in Finland > a surname, except a patronymic as last given name > a name already used by a sibling, if this is to be the only given name.

half-kh-hacker 5y ago
So systems in these countries should just be built without any regard for foreign names? There isn't really a working excuse for a broken schema. Just have a blanket 'name' field. The name someone wants to be called and their legal name isn't necessarily the same, either. If you're writing normal software, you shouldn't really care about these legal provisions. I guess you'd want a 'Billing Name' too in most cases.
- msla 5y ago
  > So systems in these countries should just be built without any regard for foreign names? I never said anything about "should" and I think this conflation of "what this person knows the world is" with "what this person thinks the world should be" is detrimental to discourse. I've seen it in multiple places, especially online, and it leads to arguments where both people actually agree on what should be, but one of them is talking about what is and the other person can't or won't tell the difference between the two.

noizejoy 5y ago

Language is incredibly contextual. Database schemas are mostly rough approximations, generally driven by the principle “close enough to be useful” rather than “a one-to-one model of reality”. That being said, I’ve gone though a similar caving-to-the-reality-of-database-schemas a few years ago, when I changed my music making artist name from a single word to a first name, last name schema.

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paiute 5y ago

oh please, shouldn't it xe. website not Christine. I have 4 names and it doesn't always work out. It's not a big deal to not accommodate xe and Socrates perfectly either.

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shoo 5y ago

> The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identity, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual's identity and linking him or her to a kingroup. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state's exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. -- James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

kibwen 5y ago

Software makes processes more efficient. But it does so at the cost of hardcoding assumptions. These days, effecting social change requires not just convincing people (already quite a tall order), but also changing the software that automatically encodes the assumptions made under the previous societal context. As an example, consider abolishing daylight savings time: nowadays you not only have to convince people that it's a good idea, but you also either need to convince them that all the broken software that assumes DST is either worth fixing or worth putting up with forever. Or consider spelling: in the past spelling reform was a thing that actually ever happened, but these days any attempt at spelling reform would be crushed by the inertia of automatic spellcheck (on the flip side, it might be easier to convince Google and Apple to change their spellcheck dictionaries than to convince people to change their spelling on their own); sadly, English will be stuck with the tragedy of "ough" forever.

Edman274 5y ago

A riddle that stumps 3rd graders: Q: "What belongs to you but others use it more than you do?" A: "Your name." Given that your name is going to be used by other people a lot more frequently than you're going to use it yourself, it would make sense to make sure that your name is convenient for others to use. Another thing - any person defining their own name could technically have a valid caveat that breaks some schema. I could decide that I can never have the same name after it's been uttered once. I could decide that my name is the last ten thousand numbers of pi. I could decide that my name is only allowed to be said by a person, and not rendered by a computer, because my name belongs to only the heavenly language of humans. I could decide that my name is the same as my social security number, which would make any system that doesn't have PCI-DSS control on my name out of compliance. There is no limit to the ways that a name can be restricted in a database, because there's no limit to the ways that a name can be defined. We decided collectively in the western English speaking world to assume that mononyms are more of a novelty than a real identifier. There will be other restrictions. There always are. An example: the restriction that people using a website are literate. I think you'll find that there are far more illiterate computer users than there are people with mononyms, and yet no one designs websites to cater to those who are not able to read.

krallja 5y ago
PCI: payments card industry They don’t care about your SSN. They only care about credit card numbers (“PANs”).
- Edman274 5y ago
  Okay. Let's change the example. I make my full, legal name the same as my credit card number.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
> Given that your name is going to be used by other people a lot more frequently than you're going to use it yourself, it would make sense to make sure that your name is convenient for others to use. I’m not sure a riddle that stumps young children is a good basis for how people should define their own identity. I certainly don’t think it should defer to the convenience of others. Especially when identity, or conflict thereof, can be a source of trauma and/or expose people to serious risk.

Orou 5y ago

This makes me really curious about how people with legal mononyms (Ye, Cher, etc.) have their taxes filed or medical forms filled out.

jdougan 5y ago
On paper forms you usef to just draw a line theough the field to make clear that you didn't just forget. I've seen electronic forms that require you enter "N/A" for the same. Would be amusing if someone chamged their name to "N/A".
lmm 5y ago
In some countries it's not legal. If it is legal then you complain, you muddle through, you accept compromises like an extra space in a few cases.

lmm 5y ago

We live in a society and names are tools for relating to other people with. I think it's fine to expect people to either conform to local cultural conventions or accept responsibility for any consequences themselves. I changed the name I go by when I immigrated to one that fits better with the people around me (and would have changed it more thoroughly if I'd known before the current form of it got entrenched in this country's bureaucracy). Expecting the world to bend to your arbitrary naming whims (and it is explicitly a personal whim in this case) instead feels pretty entitled.

totesraunch 5y ago
The assumption here is that the entire world uses western naming conventions, there are many cultures where people are given one or five names or whatever number, and western society (or our idea of what a name is) is forcing them to conform. These are not always 'arbitrary naming whims'.
- lmm 5y ago
  > there are many cultures where people are given one or five names or whatever number, and western society (or our idea of what a name is) is forcing them to conform. And yet somehow those aren't the people we see complaining (and I'm speaking as someone whose name currently gets mangled because I have the "wrong" number of names).

l0b0 5y ago

The solution really is simple: `preferred_name TEXT NOT NULL` If it must match your given name, feel free to add `legal_name TEXT NOT NULL`, at the cost of some really awkward form filling for your users.

njkleiner 5y ago

While on the topic of names, could we discuss the difference between given name(s) and middle names and the implications this has on anglocentric software/database design? While middle names might be common in the anglosphere, in other countries (e.g. Germany) it is common to have multiple given names, which is not the same as having a single given (first) name followed by zero or more middle names. Here is a simplified version of how it works in Germany: Informally, people usually go by exactly one of the given names, but notably, this can be any one of the multiple given names, since these have equal status by law (this is different from going by your middle name, which have other legal implications, depending on the jurisdiction). Using all given names is usually only required for official purposes (e.g. on a passport). Note that using a combination of more than one (but not all) of the given names or changing the order (without doing an official name change) is not allowed. A person can, of course, choose to use all given names in day to day life too. This means that a person with the given names Foo Bar and the family name FizzBuzz may use any of the following names: - Foo FizzBuzz - Bar FizzBuzz - Foo Bar FizzBuzz Note that it is perfectly legal for this person to go by Bar FizzBuzz even though "Bar" is not their first name (of the given names). Also note that changing your given names (other than their order) is not easily possible for most people (according to current law), so if you require someone to give you their full name (here Foo Bar FizzBuzz) for legal reasons, please also give the user the option to at least state a simplified version of their legal name for display purposes (such as any single one of their given names which may not be the first). TL;DR Do: - Allow people to enter multiple given names, even if you also ask for middle names separately - Consider that the same person may use a different single given name for different purposes (e.g. basic account details vs. name details in the shipping address) Don't: - Prompt for the full name (including all given/middle name, or the family name) unless you have to for legal reasons; if you do have to, at least let the user pick another name for display purposes, which may be derived from their full legal name in unexpected ways - Omit any of the multiple given names because "middle names are optional" or "not part of the legal name" - Forcibly abbreviate the remaining given names after the first given name - Drop any part of a given or family name if the name consists of multiple components separated by a dash